What’s NEXT 2024: Combatting martech bloat should be this year’s resolution for marketers

A while ago, an ex-client approached, seeking assistance with their organisation’s marketing data strategy. What began as a routine data audit turned into a thrilling journey through a labyrinth of data chaos. Each team had a tech solution for practically ‘everything,’ resulting in a heavily siloed data landscape. Despite having an abundance of data, they couldn’t leverage it. They were bloated!

The martech bloat

Gartner research tells us that martech investment takes up 25% of marketing budgets but just 33% of features and capabilities are actually utilised. Now, assessing utilisation objectively and realistically is a challenge but it paints a picture of brands being over-sold to by vendors, making buying decisions without really understanding the customers experience they want to deliver, and propagating siloes and operational inefficiency.

With predictions that CMOs will continue to increase their martech investments in 2024, this problem will likely only get worse.

What causes MarTech bloat at organisations?

Reasons aplenty, but it mostly boils down to 3 things:

1. Strategic goals and martech misalignment a.k.a Did not need this tool:

• Poor martech investment decisions are often driven by “love this cool feature” rather than strategic objectives. The investment decision rarely involves taking a step back and assessing if the feature or capability aligns with their customer experience goals, or with the stated business and marketing objectives. Reality catches up in a few quarters when it’s time to demonstrate ROI from the investment.
• Marketers could perceive martech as a silver bullet that can solve marketing and growth problems. A prevalent example is solving for poor lead conversion rates by onboarding a leads management platform, while the real solution could be fixing the quality of leads generated.

2. Lack of a framework to evaluate, compare and select the right martech:

• The proliferation of martech tools and solutions brings with it the problem of too many choices for marketers. Finding the needle in the haystack is already quite challenging but finding the ‘right’ needle is exponentially more complicated. Without a solid evaluation and governance framework, it can go awry.
• Lack of a framework lets subjectivity creep in. Choosing a martech platform because the person selling it was nicer and amicable sounds trivial, but it happens more often than most people think. There’s a reason why sales and account managers form a majority of the workforce at martech companies.

3. Internal integration and adoption challenges: 

• Lack of an organisation-wide tech governance strategy looping in cross-functional stakeholders – Without cross-functional buy-in or visibility, every team tries to solve their problems their own way leading to redundancy.
• Incompatibility with internal systems and data architecture because the IT team was not in the loop or was brought in too late.
• Lack of enthusiasm from other functions because they had very little say in the choice of platform.
• Lack of expertise to drive adoption and usage or attrition.

How could CMOs leverage their martech for better customer & brand outcomes in 2024?

Simon Spyer, CEO – Data Driven Marketing at Iris says, “We’re now in the Post martech era – brands have made choices on their tech stack and, with the sector increasingly commoditised, now is the time to double down on building audience participation through compelling customer experiences enabled by martech. Setting this as the north star will help brands shorten the path to value on their tech investments and most importantly deliver brand-led experiences that get their customers doing their marketing.”

Here are 5 things CMOs and marketers should do to make the right martech choices:

1. Envision a 3-year marketing roadmap, set high-level goals to be attained by the end of each year, and identify capabilities needed to achieve those goals. Evaluate every martech choice in the context of these identified capabilities. The three-year view forces long-term thinking, helps commit resources, while allowing enough time to measure ROI at scale. Importantly, percolate the process down to your team at different levels.

2. Develop a unified Customer Experience and Marketing data strategy encompassing the views and needs of stakeholders across the organisation. Map out the customer journey, identify internal (Ex: Customer support, Account management) and customer-facing touchpoints where martech is expected to play a role. Having this worked out drastically reduces the time for new platform adoption and utilisation.

3. Devise a framework to measure success and ROI – Create your own heuristic. Share them with the martech vendor to set expectations and understand what it takes to achieve the outcome. Set up a governance process to review progress monthly during the early stages and every quarter once things stabilise. Some key questions you might want to ask yourself:

1. What’s the capability or key decision enabled by this martech solution?
2. Does it work well with current tools and systems? 
3. Do any of the current tools offer the same capability?
4. What are the expected outcomes if this were to be successful?
5. What KPIs are expected to improve? By how much? In what time frame?
6. Projected ROI in terms of money, productivity, and opportunity cost?

4. Engage with key cross-functional stakeholders at every step. Involve them early. These stakeholders could be the ones contributing to the platform (Ex, data team), the ones supporting the implementation and integration of the platform (Ex, IT team), or the team that’s ultimately going to be using the platform and be responsible for outcomes (Ex: Creative team or Customer Support). While a user-friendly interface might be necessary for one stakeholder, performance and latency might be critical factors for the other. The earlier these priorities are identified, the better.

5. And finally, resist the urge to go after the latest in town. Encourage team members to think of What-if scenarios or the next best alternative.

2024 is going to be a year of reckoning for martech. To leverage its full potential and demonstrate value, CMOs and marketing leaders must step back, create a martech framework that works for them and be the person to champion it at their organisation.

This article is written by Sathya Anand, Digital Strategy Director at Iris Singapore.

The insight is published as part of MARKETECH APAC’s thought leadership series under What’s NEXT 2023-2024. What’s NEXT 2023-2024 is a multi-platform industry initiative which features marketing and industry leaders in APAC sharing their marketing insights and predictions for the upcoming year.