How to Avoid MarTech Bloat and Stop Bottlenecking Workflows that Drive Key Business Outcomes
Marketers are only using 33% of their MarTech stack’s full capabilities.
Gartner
When you consider the cost of various marketing technology solutions, from marketing automation and email marketing platforms to analytics and data solutions, utilizing only a third of any technology investment is a massive drain on an organization’s marketing and IT budget.
But it’s not just a budgetary issue. The real question is, why aren’t marketers having more success when it comes to implementing their marketing technology’s full capabilities? Are there just too many useless features that fail to create any real value? Is it a skillset issue—are MarTech users unaware of what their stack can do? Are legacy systems that are difficult to use and too expensive to replace, keeping marketers from taking full advantage of their technology investments?
40% of the marketing leaders surveyed for its report cited “the complexity/sprawl of our current marketing technology ecosystem” as the primary issue.
Gartner
In other words, marketing technology stacks appear to be out of control, leading to ineffective MarTech bloat that is eating up already reduced budgets and creating bottlenecks within the marketing organization and hindering key business outcomes.
Brands Need More Integrative Marketing Technology That Improves CX Efforts
Before we can address the challenges that come with MarTech bloat, it’s important to understand what’s not working and why. Martech.org found that the top three most cited reasons for replacing MarTech tools were cost, integration capabilities, and an improved customer/digital experience.
Download the 2024 Martech Replacement Survey
When asked which MarTech tools had been replaced, marketing automation was at the top of the list with 31% of survey respondents confirming they had replaced a marketing automation solution in the past year.
One key insight here is that aside from costs, marketing leaders need integrative solutions that deliver an improved customer experience—and they are willing to go through the time-consuming and difficult task of introducing a whole new platform, especially if what they need is better marketing automation tools. Thirty-two percent of the survey respondents said MarTech replacements had been under consideration for six months or longer. That is a long time to wait before having an effective solution in place that gets you closer to your goals.
Business Leaders Are Connecting The Dots Between Their Most Critical Goals
In my role as the director of customer solutions for Emplifi, I work directly with brands of all sizes, ensuring they are thinking strategically about their marketing technology investments. In my conversations with CMOs, it’s never about a single tool’s capabilities—it’s about understanding the brand’s primary objectives, the processes they have in place to accomplish these objectives, and ensuring the technology they have implemented aligns with their overall marketing strategies.
Once I have a comprehensive understanding of the brand’s overarching objectives, it’s much easier to determine where the gaps are in a brand’s MarTech stack, as well as which existing tools may not be adequately addressing their primary needs.
In the past few years, there has been a noticeable shift in the conversations I’m having with the businesses I support that underscores marketers need to improve the customer experience. Business leaders are connecting the dots between their marketing, customer care, and ecommerce (particularly social commerce) initiatives.
The business stakeholders I speak to are no longer focused on vanity metrics like follower counts and impressions. CMOs, CX leaders, ecommerce teams and customer success departments are all after the same thing: how do we create a customer journey that drives the most revenue and growth for our brand. What’s most interesting is that the solution may just be the remedy to MarTech bloat—what brands need are comprehensive and consolidated customer engagement platforms that streamline their most important workflows across the full customer experience.
The Answer to MarTech Bloat: More Streamlined, Collaborative Technology Solutions
Unfortunately, many of these departments—marketing, customer care, and ecommerce—continue to be siloed. Instead of implementing full-scale, comprehensive customer engagement platforms, various teams are forced to rely on disparate systems that fail to connect the dots between the brand’s most critical social media marketing, ecommerce, and customer care tactics. Without more collaborative processes and technology in place, MarTech bloat becomes the norm.
It’s no wonder marketing teams are only utilizing 33% of their full MarTech stack. Marketing teams are too busy trying to work cross-functionally—forwarding customer inquiries to their customer care colleagues and sharing social insights with their ecommerce team. The reality is that all too often teams with multiple marketing technology solutions are performing much of this cross-functional work manually because their single-solution tools fail to address the organization’s broader goals.
Today’s modern brands need customer engagement platforms that not only deliver a unified experience for the customer, but also the user. They need technology solutions that can be accessed by multiple departments with admin controls that offer flexibility and convenience for multiple teams, acting as a self-service platform for the entire organization.
Once businesses have access to more collaborative customer engagement platforms that democratize access to key activations and insights, they can create extraordinary customer experiences that drive brand loyalty, forge growth, and significantly increase revenue gains.
