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Man explaining how the new MarTech tool works to the team

When capability keeps you from delivering MarTech promises

Martin Paton, our CTO takes a look at one of the crucial factors when it comes to choosing the right Martech – the capability of your people.

The promised benefits of marketing technology are constantly hitting our LinkedIn feeds, discussed at event seminars, filling our inboxes and written about on tech and business news sites.

When something gets talked about so much then the antenna of experienced business people start to twitch. Is this really the next big thing that will change everything? Or is it the usual guff that will make some people money without ever realising its potential?

But there’s a reason for this torrent of content about the delivering martech. It’s all true.

With the right expertise, the right investment and plenty of time to feed the engine to deliver the results, you can turn those promises into reality.

Realising the potential

So MarTech is the real deal? Yes and no.

Far too often the reality of an exciting new technology is never realised. Not even close. And this will happen with MarTech as well. Some will give it a go and waste money. Others will understand what’s required to make it work and start winning the future.

So what will separate the winners from the losers? There will be three factors that dictate success:

  1. The capability of your teams
  2. The right processes
  3. Your technology infrastructure 

Let’s focus on the first factor – the capability of your marketing team.

The case for marketing

The ability of marketing to generate high value, lifetime customers has always been questioned by sales leaders.

With the evolution of MarTech solutions, marketing leaders now have the chance to fully understand and engage their audience, nurture them into hot sales leads and gain the insight they need to track performance of campaigns. Most importantly, they can prove that they generated the leads that delivered the revenue. Case closed your honour!

However the reality isn’t quite like that. What typically happens when new marketing technology is implemented is that users move existing processes onto the new platform. They add in some level of automation and maybe a few multi-step campaigns. But beyond that, not much changes.

To compound this issue, the approach to marketing design and execution remains very similar. That means missing out on the possibilities of all the new system functions and the slicing and dicing of data that leads to a deeper understanding. This is because the promises of the solution are leading the selection. It needs to be the other way around.

Stepping up

The most effective way to really deliver a big step up in the performance of your marketing function is to focus on the capability of your marketers to innovate and develop campaigns that are beyond your competitors.

This requires using every touch point with the audience to guide each next action, from a creative marketing aspect, and then identifying the technology that will help deliver that. That technology might be a standalone solution or part of a wider Digital Experience Platform (DXP).

So a better way is to work with an independent organisation that can dedicate the time to skill up your users in line with your goals. Doing so will allow them to have a deep understanding of what they need to do to deliver growth. And they’ll know what they need to look for in terms of the technology to deliver success.

This brings full control to you. It takes away the element of guesswork. Above all it means choosing how to invest in Martech becomes a rational decision rather than a lottery based on the promises of shiny new technology.

The promises of Martech can be realised but it requires a lot of thought about what you need it for and how you will use it. By developing a digital strategy first and upskilling your people, the purchase decisions will become a lot clearer and the amazing potential of this new technology will give you a genuine edge over competitors.

Martin Paton - Chief Technology Officer

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