“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media.
Today’s column is written by Katie Klumper, CEO and founder of Black Glass.
Marketers are hard at work gearing up for the next frontier of AI, IoT and Web3, while navigating the headwinds of cookie and mobile ID deprecation.
In this environment, technology has become a marketer’s best friend. Brands are funneling enormous resources into an ever-expanding universe of capabilities like customer data and CRM platforms to segment audiences, and then deliver marketing automation and personalized communications at scale, ever improving and deepening the connection between brand and customer.
Indeed, it’s the single biggest component of marketing budgets at 26%.
Yet only about half of marketers are utilizing the full breadth of capabilities of their marketing tech stack. What’s more, more than 60% of marketers reportedly lack the ability to measure marketing impact, track customer engagement or create a unified data foundation.
How then can marketers get back on track toward more effective technology usage, and ultimately better ROI?
Give technology a clear role
Technology mentor and advisor Nadjia Yousif asks, “What if we treated technology like a team member?”
Try this approach and think of technology as having its own identity – as if it were a “member” of your organizational chart. This will incentivize leaders to evaluate its performance and give decision makers a better sense of how tools contribute not only to marketing performance, but also to broader enterprise goals.
Marketers will instinctively reduce decisions that don’t support the larger organization’s goals. They will therefore stave off an array of unwanted outcomes including duplicative spending across similar platforms that don’t address a business need.
Build a more strategic tech brief
Consider how you might craft a job description for a new hire and apply this to your technology brief. You wouldn’t, for example, focus solely on a candidate’s hard skills. You’re looking for candidates that possess the qualitative skills that will make them successful in the role.
Your marketing technology should do the same. And to make sure it does, you need to rethink your brief. Make sure your tech investments deliver customer outcomes and enterprise impact rather than focusing exclusively on capabilities.
Use existing tech more effectively
If your organization requires a new skill or capability in its workforce, do you immediately look to hire a new employee? Chances are your first step is to train and upskill your existing team. Similarly, before you commit more of your budget to marketing technology, make sure you’re using the resources you already have to the fullest extent.
Rather than design use cases around existing implementation or configurations, focus on creative approaches that best meet the demands of the business. Then determine how to activate this through existing technology and data.
Invest in a better measurement system
Employee performance assessments are essential for measuring the effectiveness of your team. Extend this approach to how you assess your technology spend.
A purposeful measurement system will help determine whether marketing platforms are actually driving outcomes for the business and give marketers a more objective view of how their investment is performing against their goals.
The bottom line
It’s clear that marketers have yet to unlock the full potential of marketing technology. And with the economy in flux and concerns of a recession mounting, CMOs and marketing teams are feeling the squeeze on multiple fronts.
This accelerates the imperative to make better use of tools and data to make sure they deliver the impact required by their organizations. Marketers can maximize their ROI by treating technology as a member of the team, focusing on using the resources they have and taking a more strategic look at performance.
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