Why Doesn’t My Marketing Cloud Work?

Marketing clouds have significant inherent complexity. Operating them, deploying them, and maintaining them requires serious investment — and that’s to be expected. However, the current irrational exuberance, hype-driven marketing, and aggressive sales process around these products is creating a lot of buyer’s remorse.

Did you know that every major ESP has a negative NPS score? You probably didn’t need me to tell you that. And what if I said most marketers report having poor access to data, despite significant investments in marketing technology? Would that really be a surprise?

Over 83% of marketers want to expand their use of customer data to drive better marketing campaigns. And while marketers may have an ever-increasing stockpile of data at their disposal, turning those figures into actionable insights is a massive roadblock: only 14% of marketers feel confident that they effectively use their customer data.

Bottom line? It’s hard out there for marketers. We continually hear that the state of marketing technology has never been better, yet the marketer-on-the-ground’s day-to-day realities are often still incredibly frustrating. And while the major marketing clouds (Oracle, Adobe, SF, IBM, etc) have all made significant M&A efforts to enhance their offerings, the lofty promises of those fully integrated solutions have yet to make their way to the end user.

In looking at the landscape of marketing automation in 2016, these are some of the big trends that are defining the marketplace:

• Marketing clouds are still brutally difficult to integrate — Looking to get a fresh start with the next generation of marketing technology? That’s great! Get ready to spend somewhere between 12–24 months completing an initial integration (e.g. running basic campaigns, instrumenting the site, connecting core systems). And much of that work is going to fall on your engineering team, leading to the stillborn or improperly deployed instances that we frequently find in the market. We’ve actually seen a nontrivial number of companies who reach their first multi-year renewal with a major marketing cloud having not sent a single email.
• Most companies aren’t buying the full package — Sure, most of the big guys will sell you the full marketing automation pu pu platter, but what if you want Adobe spare ribs, the Salesforce satay strips, and the Oracle spring rolls? Turns out that becomes a lot more problematic, further elongating deployment timelines, creating unique failure cases, and demanding ever-more investment from engineering teams. Often, these combination plays end up stalling out, with tech teams unwilling or unable to progress integration, and marketing left with significant sunk costs and partially functional systems.
• Migrations are nightmarish — An extension of integration difficulty, most companies that are good candidates for these marketing clouds didn’t just start marketing yesterday. They have pre-existing automations, cadences, and workflows. They have large teams that aren’t familiar with the new products. The have engineering teams that don’t have experience monitoring these systems or troubleshooting associated failure points. The potential costs here are astronomical, and contribute to many companies’ unwillingness to move away from certain core marketing cloud elements that are notoriously difficult to migrate (e.g. ESPs).
• B2B marketing/CRM tools are being sold to B2C companies, and breaking down in the process — We see increasing numbers of B2C companies using classic B2B systems like Marketo for marketing automation and Salesforce for CRM. Why? Having reached near-saturation in the B2B market, these companies are aggressively pushing their tooling on companies that aren’t well-qualified, preying on marketers’ general exasperation at not being able to do their jobs with the tools they currently have. These systems, while great at delivering value against their core use cases (e.g. Salesforce as a supporting system of record for an enterprise sales team), often start to fall apart when stretched beyond their comfort zone (e.g. Salesforce being used as a blended CRM data-warehouse for a large e-commerce company). The result? Teams sink tremendous time, energy, and resources into trying to make these systems do things they simply were never architected to do, and generate operational paralysis in the process. The sunk cost fallacy often takes hold here, and can prevent companies from moving forward for years.
• Home-built systems can give you a more tailored solution, but become expensive, inflexible, and brittle — So, if you can’t make these 3p systems work for you, why not roll your own? We see many companies (particularly venture-backed startups with strong engineering teams) do exactly that. And, not surprisingly, these solutions often work well for a while. As these businesses scale, however, the amount of ongoing investment and maintenance to remain at feature parity with market-leading SaaS solutions is significant (and often underestimated). Additionally, home-baked marketing automation tech is usually only capable of doing exactly what it was designed to do, and struggles to accommodate the new, unusual corner cases that define good marketing. These systems also tend to be very brittle, incurring higher-than-average failure rates (with potentially significant end-business consequences). For example — we know of one e-commerce company that accidentally emailed each member of a large, high-LTV segment dozens of times in 24 hours. Not great for retention.

Coupled with the stickiness and inherent lock-in of these products, marketers and tech teams are more skittish than ever about investing in the marketing cloud “of the future”. For many, it often feels like what’s old is new again. In response, there does seem to be a renewal of excitement among marketers for smaller players offering products often intended to solve many of the issues created by these incumbent behemoths. Focus, simplicity, and talented engineers allow these smaller companies to create more value at a significantly lower price point. It will be interesting to see if these solutions are simply absorbed into the larger clouds, or are allowed to develop sufficiently to be compelling alternatives.