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What are the Top Martech Challenges?

Martech Outlook | Monday, October 11, 2021

CMOs continue to invest in martech and technology to make the best of a bad situation.

FREMONT, CA: CMOs will face significant difficulties in digital marketing and technology domains as the disruption of 2020 continues into 2021, extending from restoration to resilience and innovation. Establishing CX-led business models, having the data story right, optimizing martech, and developing future-ready marketing teams are at the top of the list while preparing for recovery from the pandemic's devastation.

According to the CMO Survey, only two aspects of marketing avoided budget cuts in 2020 and 2021: technology and digital advertising. CMOs will invest just over a quarter of their entire marketing budget on martech this year, according to the survey, and the most want to expand their investment in technology in 2021. This reaffirms that martech will continue to be a vital part of the CMO's mission, essential for marketing efficiency. While no one can deny the importance of martech, most firms' deployments, applications, and, most crucially, results have been far from perfect.

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Even as CMOs plan on spending more on martech in 2021, they must overcome some of the most pressing and significant obstacles if martech is to solidify its role as a strategic enabler of business success. These difficulties are not listed in any particular order of significance. They are all crucial and interconnected, so not a single problem can be adequately solved without affecting or affecting others.

As the organization's acceptance and consumption develops, CMOs must outline a precise acquisition and retention plan for their martech technologies, tools, platforms, and apps on a strategic level. For operational agility and responsiveness to dynamic marketer requirements, the stack must be simplified. It must be interconnected to provide a smooth flow of data throughout the company, allowing for campaign orchestration and omnichannel marketing.

Building Marketing Teams to Handle the Martech: If marketing technology accounts for more than a quarter of the budget, it's worth considering how much money is invested in training people to use it effectively. While marketing leapt on the SaaS martech bandwagon in part because it could successfully minimize reliance on IT, it has not kept up with developing the necessary mentality and expertise set throughout its ranks to handle that technology efficiently.

Reverse mentoring from digital natives, cross-pollination of data analysis and data science skills from other functions or vendors for innovative and advanced marketing applications, and, most importantly, developing data and system mindsets throughout the function must be the primary focus of the CMO currently, before investing in new technologies.

Belling the Martech ROI Cat: Transparency in performance and the capacity to easily measure metrics and ascribe outcomes were the critical promises of digital marketing, which were enabled by digital tools. During the following years, most of that promise did not happen.

CMOs must establish an ROI roadmap that explicitly relates the business value of martech investments to business objectives and results before spending more in martech this year.

 

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