Bridging the MarTech Gap

Authors: Anne Lifton and Derek Plemons

“Marketing’s job is never done. It’s about perpetual motion. We must continue to innovate every day.” — Beth Comstock, Former CMO & Vice Chair, GE

In 2012, it was correctly predicted that Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) will spend more on IT than Chief Information Officers (CIO) do. Three key features of this prediction have come true.

First, technology is increasingly being used for marketing applications. Second, utilizing big data is has become key to achieving an advantage over competitors, and third, marketing budgets are consistently increasing faster than IT budgets.

What is MarTech, and what does it do for business?

MarTech, or marketing technology, refers to the support technology for the automation, personalization and analysis of marketing spend and campaign success.

In the modern age, this covers the myriad of digital channels such as Google Search, Bing, Meta, and other product and organizational sponsorships. With so many digital and physical channels available, specialized tools are required to optimize across platforms. Note that MarTech is not the same as AdTech. AdTech tools and software are used to influence buyer behavior using promotions and pricing. On the other hand, MarTech refers to the set of tools used to maximize the outcome of time and money invested into marketing.

Like most capabilities, marketing technology is continuing to evolve. It often begins with spreadsheets, manual email authorship and ad hoc analytics. With modern tooling, marketing technology can become incredibly sophisticated. For example: Creating automated email campaigns coupled with deep personalization, A.I. generated text and video, and engagement optimizations. These advanced capabilities depend on the careful interconnection between tools, models, and data.

The greatest benefit to investing in your marketing tech stack is in ensuring that every dollar of your marketing spend, whether in AdTech, SEO, email, print or television campaigns, is targeted to the population segment most likely to respond and engage with your messaging. Effective utilization of new tools can significantly increase the impact of marketing spend. There is, of course, a flipside. Ineffective MarTech can lead to organizations footing the bill for technology that they are unable to use well.

[Read More: Driving Qualtrics XM Adoption and CX Improvements]

The MarTech Gap

We have identified six major areas of third-party software which support marketing customer and spend management.

• Email and Text Marketing Tools
• Content Management
• Customer Experience Software
• Customer Relationship Management Software
• Marketing Attribution Models
• Analytics and Reporting Tools

There is often a significant gap in the capabilities of third-party tools to connect the parts of an organization’s spend into one view. This leads to an incomplete understanding of the impact of marketing spend. This problem can only be solved with business consulting and strategic bridging technology to bring an organization back into control of the ROI for their marketing spend.

For instance, an email campaign advertising a discount may be ineffective, or even harmful, if there isn’t a holistic understanding of customer lifetime value (CLV). CLV may be estimated and stored in a different analytics platform than the email service, making it difficult to target market spend and discounts.

We believe that driving business outcomes should drive MarTech strategy, rather than the other way around. In this example, focusing on connections between the data systems and CLV-driven intelligence will become a roadmap for creating additional intelligent marketing systems within an organization.

The Solution

RevGen Partners has expertise in leading organizations to achieving full MarTech synergy through all their various channels and tools, resulting in much better outcomes than the piecemeal approach due to missing or incomplete relationships between third-party tools.

If you design a technology stack that is founded on a single, measurable outcome, you can continue this pattern over and over again to great success. In this way, the MarTech stack grows organically and in a focused path that creates consistent, stepwise value.

We believe in creating a direct value through iterative and healthy design focused on using well-understood and standardized metrics, built with trusted data, that is measured and evaluated for success. This approach is highly scalable, creates value intrinsically, and drives proactive, prescriptive marketing strategies.

Is your organization struggling to make the most of your marketing technologies? We are experts in elevating organizations with critical data and analytics so that they can have holistic oversight of their marketing spend. To learn more about the services we offer visit our Analytics & Insights page.

Anne Lifton is a Sr. Architect of Data Science and Machine Learning at RevGen. She has over 10 years of experience in building, deploying and managing the lifecycle of data science models across several industries and all three major cloud platforms.

Derek Plemons is a Consultant in RevGen’s Analytics & Insights practice. He specializes in data science, machine learning, and big data.