Insight

Trim MarTech bloat and fuel growth

Discover how to optimize the value of your organization's resources to fuel resilient business growth

Marketplace uncertainty has expanded the role of marketing in many businesses. Marketers are now often co-architects of resilience strategy, enabling business growth amidst marketplace headwinds while helping organizations minimize costs. Yet resilience can be costly. It requires a well-equipped team capable of leveraging technology and data to create high-performance strategy. It necessitates ready access to advanced analytics, allowing marketers to draw insights from raw data and quickly adjust front-office strategy in response. In addition, marketers must craft user experiences that accommodate evolving consumer preferences while ensuring that day-to-day decisions are in sync with current revenue imperatives. Lastly, marketing teams must also ensure that MarTech and other sales enablement tools are performing with optimal efficiency and that when new technologies are adopted, they provide tangible and long-lasting benefits that drive revenue.

With marketing budgets at an all-time high and the importance of marketing increasing in more than half of all companies during the pandemic¹, it is critical for marketers to understand how to optimize their investments when facing these challenges. There are three critical components to optimize marketing’s impact in an organization:

Evaluate how marketing’s role is expanding
Assess the effectiveness of the MarTech stack
Align the operating model to support marketing’s new roles and technology

How marketing technology can pay for itself

Underutilized MarTech tools mean productivity drain. When IT and marketing teams collaborate using MarTech and sales enablement technology that is user-friendly, efficient, and simple to integrate within existing workflows, performance (rather than debugging) can become a priority.

As organizations increase their spending on MarTech tools, it is critical for marketing teams to select and integrate technologies that justify their expense with demonstrable value, from providing better sales performance to enhancing the relevance of customer insights. Marketers’ best strategy for highlighting the value of their existing MarTech or justifying new investment is to focus on the areas that are explicitly connected to cost efficiency and revenue growth. Marketers should provide answers to the following questions:

Real-time analytics:
Do our MarTech tools allow us to monitor and action on real-time customer engagement?
Marketing automation:
Does our current system allow us to automate repetitive or time-consuming marketing decisions while providing transparency over strategy performance?
Data sharing:
Is it simple to share marketing performance data across the organization and create data cuts that show a clear connection between marketing strategy design, marketing performance, and revenue goals?

Why buying more tech does not solve the problem:

CMOs report allocating a quarter of their entire marketing budget to marketing technology¹, yet respondents say just 42% of the capabilities in their MarTech stack are utilized². Organizations struggle to utilize technology for a multitude of reasons:

Skill requirements
A lack of integration
Architectural complexity
Poor data ingress

Couple underutilization with the research showing that marketers often state there is significant overlap in marketing technology solutions² and it is likely that organizations are overinvesting in tech.

Technology overlap is also common following M&A activity and with over 36K M&A transactions in 2022², teams should pay close attention to hindering impacts on their MarTech stack and its associated budget.

As a result, organizations are budgeting for multiple tools that perform redundant functions instead of recognizing consolidation and cost reduction opportunities. This lack of utilized technology impacts cost-effectiveness of implemented MarTech.

Here is how to stop wasting your marketing budget:

Encourage IT and marketing to collaborate on budgeting
Companies that report collaborative funding (i.e., marketing + IT/technology + other functions as primary contributors) to martech investments report higher current utilization rates (46%) than the overall survey average (42%)³.
Leverage new data to craft a MarTech integration strategy
As marketing utilization rates increase, organizations can leverage more data and create more impactful insights, better understanding their customer’s decisions, behavior, and expectations.
Reexamine the human and technical resource requirements of the MarOps model
Organizations should ensure that teams have the requisite skill sets, collaboration abilities, and alignment of strategies.

Organizations can improve their MarTech ROI by following these steps:

Strategically invest in talent and technology with a revenue-building focus

Organizations must evaluate how to identify and recruit new tech talent to enable utilization of technology and drive efficient resource allocation. One way for organizations to fill these skill gaps is to seek out newly available tech staff following recent downsizing instances at tech companies.

Share relevant data, resources, and revenue objectives across the entire organization

Once the right resources are identified, a cross-functional and collaborative operating model will support sharing of data and insights across the organization. Eighty percent of marketers say that their organization leads customer experience initiatives by coordinating across marketing, sales, service, and commerce.

Stay the course on collaboration

Resilience is a collaborative process and it requires consistent, purposeful interactions across teams to make it work. This trend of cross-functional collaboration can also be seen within technology; marketers adopted four collaboration technologies on average in 2022⁴. Intentional operating model design that considers available skill set, collaboration, and technology utilization will support value realization of marketing investments and drive insights across the organization.

As organizations face uncertainty, inefficient marketing processes are often the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to quickly cutting costs. Yet front office teams also drive revenue and provide the infrastructure for the inflow of vital customer insights. That means front office teams need to gain access to MarTech and analytics systems that help them limit productivity drain, amplify performance, and streamline tasks so that performance will consistently outpace marketing costs.

As you focus on the challenges ahead, KPMG can help you improve the ROI of your marketing investments by informing strategies for marketing technology, marketing operations and processes, and talent with connected insights. If you have identified front office challenges within your organization, reach out to our Customer Advisory contacts.

Footnotes

Source: The CMO Survey, “Marketing in a Post-Covid Era” September 2022
Source: S&P Global, “2023 M&A Industry Outlook”, 2022
Source: Gartner®, “The Chief Marketing Officer”, 2022, as on 5^th April 2022
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
Source: Salesforce, “State of Marketing Report”, 2022.