Your Digital Marketing Campaign Depends on Marketing Technology

May 2, 2015

by Hanna Huffman

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Marketing is evolving into a technical discipline. Virtually anyone involved with digital marketing is dealing with martech, since digital by its very nature is technologically-based. But even though martech is a hot commodity, it seems as if actually adopting these tech items can be intimidating. Research has shown that only 9% of marketers have a complete, fully utilized martech stack. And 59% of the marketers that say they are currently using martech tools say they don’t fully utilize them.

What’s up with that?

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I bet you’ve seen this very overwhelming infographic (word cloud?) around the internet before. I’m convinced it wasn’t created to be a helpful tool; but instead to illustrate the current prediction that, in 2016 alone, marketing departments will spend over $25 billion boosting their technology stacks. It’s accomplishing it for me. What about you?

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Anyways, the landscape is only getting bigger from here:

64% of businesses report that the budget for marketing technology is increasing at their company. This is another point on the curve to support Gerry Murray’s growth estimates for over $25 billion in worldwide marketing software spending in 2016.
70% believe that more companies will begin hiring chief marketing technologists (CMTs) or other tech-focused marketers in the next five years. 53% of whom believe most organizations should have both a CMO and a CMT/tech-focused marketer.

So, if you’ve been putting off leveraging martech tools in your campaigns, here are just a couple of reasons why you should rip that Band-Aid off and get going.

However, if you need to take a step back and assess your digital marketing as a whole before finalizing what martech you should use for your campaigns, you should take advantage of this free digital marketing assessment and report.

It’ll give you the info you need to refine your digital marketing campaigns and give you a good starting point for adding in martech capabilities.

It’ll help you better compete with huge competitors.

Marketing technology equips the little guys with the weapons necessary to compete with their larger rivals.

Eliminates the need for huge marketing departments in order to effectively engage with potential customers.
Subscription services for cloud-based software equal fewer upfront costs and a smaller barrier to entry.
Allows businesses of any size to deliver a super consistent marketing performance by enabling marketers to track individual consumers more easily, retaining a detailed record of the kinds of marketing approaches that are most likely to prove effective.

You need more horsepower to properly advertise through the whole sales funnel, versus just the top.

Marketers used to be in charge of generating awareness and traffic for salespeople to close. Now, with Google reporting that buyers are 57% through their decision process before engaging with a salesperson, marketers are more responsible for buyer education than ever before. We must not only generate awareness but also move the buyer along towards a sales conversation.

Nurturing leads through the whole funnel versus only at the beginning requires more time and budget than most marketers currently have. Lead scoring models can help define sales ready leads and send them on to salespeople at the right times.

Customers expect personal, customized digital experiences and outdated content serving methods won’t work. You’ll need martech to serve personalized, programmatic targeting.

Customers’ expectations of digital experiences are rising, and providing appropriate content targeted towards the right person at the right time is challenging without an abundance of manpower and disposable time to customize. In this new world of digital advertising, agencies need to start focusing on technology platforms that can deliver unique, personalized content to users no matter what device they’re on or what kind of content they’re enjoying.

Martech tools can help you auto-segment incoming contacts into appropriate categories, serve different versions of your ads to different segments based on their persona, and remember their actions and information to better personalize their interactions with your brand.

More than ⅓ of companies rated marketing automation “very successful” at achieving important goals like increasing lead generation and improving lead nurturing.

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Startups like TubeMogul are already leading the charge, offering programmatic media buying across channels with a unified view of performance. MagnaGlobal and TubeMogul research predicts that digital-video-advertising marketing will grow to $50B by 2020. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We believe that at least half of all TV advertising will shift to digital because of the changes we are experiencing in consumer behavior. The combined opportunity will be an addressable market of at least $175B per year.

You can’t make good decisions without good data. And ain’t nobody got time to go through all of it.

Customer data means better marketing, but if you have too much data, you can’t actually do anything with it; and some of it is just not actionable. The CMO Club found that 85% of CMOs say that their lack of access to data is preventing them from implementing a true cross-channel marketing strategy. That’s a huge missed opportunity.

There are technology solutions for this that marketers can use to leverage the right data to communicate with customers and prospects on a one to one basis. What is critical for marketers to understand is that it’s not the quality of data that is vital to your digital marketing campaign’s success, but the insights you can derive from it.

Using the right martech tools to comb through data and serve appropriate insights and content are critical to the success of your digital marketing campaign because:

These early interactions show prospects that your brand really understands their needs and sets the tone for the future relationship.
You can get a more rounded picture of who your customers are, where their interests lie and what products and services they may be interested in.
You can get a better grip on which marketing channels are likely to prove most effective. Should a campaign use social media, TV, digital, radio, or a combination of all these mediums?

A Warning: Martech is not a magic wand.

Superficially, marketing automation looks like an easy and self-maintaining system that can be used in long-term and short-term decision cycles. The reality is that marketing automation is more of a supplement and requires a support person who knows how to operate the tool well; it’s more of a nurturing tool rather than a selling tactic.

A common mistake we have seen among many client teams is assigning the task of managing the system to someone who is unfamiliar with the tool; attempting to change their previous role into that of a digital marketer. Or, they attempt to task a few people with spending a small amount of their time doing superficial maintenance.

The truth is that a marketing automation system is simply too big and too complex – even those used by smaller brands – to be maintained by anyone other than a knowledgeable support person who understands basic, digital marketing strategies. Hiring a support person will ensure that your digital marketing tools are being optimized to their fullest, producing quality marketing strategies and consistent results.

I hope you learned a bit more on how martech can seriously boost the success of your digital marketing campaigns. Here are some additional resources to conduct research on your own:

Adding martech to your digital marketing efforts can be the difference between so-so campaigns and campaigns with amazing performance.

However, if you feel your digital marketing efforts aren’t yet up to par to make introducing martech worthwhile, check out this free digital marketing assessment by clicking here or the button below.

It’ll give you the info you need to get your digital marketing to a point where adding in martech capabilities would make sense.