Navigating MarTech: Marketing’s Essential Yet Challenging Ingredient
How to navigate the complex and ever-changing landscape of marketing technology
Marketing organizations are under enormous pressure to meet evolving customer demands while facing resource challenges. So much pressure, in fact, that the average tenure of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is 40 months — shorter than any other C-suite executive.
One factor that makes today’s environment particularly challenging is marketing’s heavy reliance on Marketing Technology (MarTech). The rise of MarTech and its importance to marketers coincides with marketing’s evolution from a discipline akin to an art form that relied on messaging and persuasion into something closer to a science, where conversion rates, cost-per-thousand, and other digital media terminology reign supreme.
Over the past 20 years, countless articles have discussed the shift of the CMO from a creative communicator to a role that embraces process, data, and — of course — technology. The debates are often acrimonious, with traditionalists insisting that marketing is about crafting the right message versus a new generation that wants to turn the creative process on its head, start with multiple variants, test, learn, and repeat.
Lest we forget, it was only in 2012 that Gartner famously predicted that it would be less than five years before the CMO would likely spend more on technology than the Chief Information Officer (CIO). It’s years past Gartner’s 2017 deadline and marketing has evolved to become a ravenous consumer of technology. Believe it or not, MarTech now constitutes a whopping 26% of overall marketing budgets for most brands — slightly more than labor, which accounts for 25%.
The MarTech conundrum
The primary challenge of MarTech is due to its overwhelming complexity. Thousands of MarTech solutions now exist in a rapidly growing marketplace, and the evolution has been dramatic. Scott Brinker, the editor of ChiefMarTec.com, first published a map of the marketing technology landscape in 2011 that contained approximately 150 vendors. From its humble beginnings, this ecosystem gradually expanded, eventually becoming the MarTech 5000 Database.
Today there are more than 8,000 MarTech solutions, and the landscape continues to evolve. In 2020, for example, the number of solutions grew 13.6%, even factoring in 615 vendors from the 2019 landscape that disappeared due to consolidation with another MarTech company or by simply becoming defunct. According to a recent study by Netcel, it’s a complex landscape that continues to confound marketers.
On occasion, MarTech salespeople have taken advantage of this complexity by exaggerating what tools do (or don’t do) to sell licenses. The net effect is brands buy tools they don’t need, that don’t work as advertised, or that overlap with other solutions already in their tech stack. These unnecessary purchases result in inefficiencies and waste — not to mention unhappy marketers.
For example, marketers can select a Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) as a system or record for first-party data instead of a Customer Data Platform (CDP). Can a MAP act as a CDP? In some cases, yes, but certainly not as well. Given the dynamism and complexity of the MarTech landscape, marketers are rightfully confused and often need help navigating the solutions and extracting value from the invested-in tools.
Navigating the MarTech landscape
Slalom defines MarTech as a grouping of technologies and data sets that marketers leverage to execute and optimize marketing activities to engage with customers in the digital space at every stage of the customer journey.
However, MarTech is ultimately about more than just the tools alone. It encompasses the business logic, process automation, and technologies required to effectively deploy digital marketing, align resources, and execute customer-centric strategies. MarTech strategy ensures the alignment of MarTech solutions to the business’ vision, goals, people, and processes. The best way to do this is to begin by focusing on capabilities — not tools.
Slalom’s marketing transformation framework helps rationalize MarTech as a concept and aims to support brands in their quest to mature across core capabilities and strategy.
This approach incorporates an outside-in methodology similar to what’s used in the discipline of Customer Experience (CX). As Steve Jobs stated in his famous 1997 speech, “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it.”
- Step 1: Start with understanding customer behaviors and needs, looking across interactions, touchpoints, and experiences (i.e., “outside”).
- Step 2: Compare against business strategy, operations, organization, and processes used to support marketing.
- Step 3: Understand how your tools, processes, data, and people are meeting the needs of customers and marketers.
Using a capability framework
Looking at the technology, the tools themselves fall into three main layers in Slalom’s framework: data, decision, and delivery (with analytics running across all three). Slalom’s MarTech framework breaks down these three layers with the main solutions called out for each one.
While this is a simplification of an incredibly complex tapestry of connected solutions and platforms, abstracting the MarTech stack has immense value in understanding how systems connect, what purpose they serve, and each tool’s role in supporting the customer journey.
Taking things a step further, the best approach for MarTech starts with defining the overall strategy or experience. This vision translates into capabilities organizations deploy to create the experience, which can then be mapped against the tools themselves. Capabilities, however, go beyond the tools themselves, as systems require a unifying strategy or vision, people to run the tools, and processes to ensure systems are being used efficiently within marketing workflows.
Slalom’s MarTech Analysis Framework has more than 90 unique capabilities across strategy, resources, processes, and marketing technology. This framework is an essential tool for organizations to inventory and organize capabilities, prioritize areas of investment, and identify strengths, weaknesses, and gaps.
Need support navigating the world of MarTech? Slalom is happy to help.
Slalom is a global consulting firm that helps people and organizations dream bigger, move faster, and build better tomorrows for all. Learn more and reach out today.
