There are plenty of complex, highly functional marketing technology platforms available to the CMO today. In fact, the technical complexity of the platforms is adding significant additional responsibility to your role as a marketer. Not only do you need to drive and manage brand awareness, advertising, content development and field events, now you have to manage a seriously challenging technology stack, requiring architects, developers, and data scientists.
The challenge gets more difficult every day as the rate of change in your customers’ expectations from new marketing technology continues to accelerate at a mind-boggling pace. The martech platform companies add new functionality monthly, and you have to deal with it, whether you need it or not.
It’s not rocket science to say that marketing is increasingly technology-driven. While “better” technology can be helpful when used to enable your marketing team to do new things, it is a double-edged sword. Blinded by the bright shiny goal of becoming data-driven, and stories of staggering financial successes from digital disruption, in many instances, the new martech stacks have become the tail wagging the marketing dog, and many marketing teams have lost their way because of it.
The results are predictable. New tech capabilities are tacked onto existing processes and added, as an afterthought, to governance (where it exists). It gets too easy to lose sight of the core requirements of marketing, in the name of digital transformation.
But what does transformation mean for your marketing team? Does it mean throwing out the old systems for a shiny new, and more complex, martech platform? Does it mean that you need to be more mobile and responsive and personalized? How is all of this related to revenue, to the company’s bottom line and earnings per share? And how are you going to show the rest of the C-Suite the ROI from the new technologies?
Every time I see a case study, whether from a platform deployment partner or from a technology vendor, I cringe. They inevitably show, in 3 or 4 bullets, a one-sentence description of the problem, a couple of too-small-to-read screen shots of the work, a list of the tools they used (hopefully at least similar to the tools you’re considering, and 2-3 KPI’s that showed a dramatic increase only days after they finished the work. They don’t talk about how much it cost, if the client is even still using the solution, and rarely, if ever, talk about the longer term results of the work.
Real transformation is a goal, not an event. Quick fix technology patches are not solutions to complex problems.
The answer is not one-size-fits-all. The only correct solution for you is the one that fits your needs, enables you to effectively, efficiently and profitably collaborate with your Sales, Finance and Operations teams, engage with your customers, increase customer satisfaction with your brand, drive increased revenues, all while building a workplace that the best marketing people want to be a part of. We call aligning those objectives and mapping a path to make it happen quickly and effectively the Best Achievable Path, and that’s how we work with all our clients.
So, if you’re thinking about purchasing new martech tools or platform licenses, or changing your go-to-market approach, knowing your Best Achievable Path beforehand will enable you to make a more focused, informed decision on what you really need, get you to market faster, save you money, mitigate the risks of deployment cost overruns and missed launch dates, and help you drive meaningful, long term change.
At TAOS, we empower your marketing team to focus on creativity, insight and innovation, while we enable you with the best marketing tools in the world.