Marketing budgets are slowly returning to pre-2020 levels, with 25.4% of spending dedicated to Marketing Technology (MarTech). Yet today, industries face another stumbling block: a downturn in economic conditions.
Additionally, the Great Resignation and tight labor market continue to affect team structures, documentation of processes, tool adoption, which can be costly. During a time when businesses need to tighten their belts in other areas to avoid passing inflationary costs onto consumers, evaluating non-human components like your MarTech stack can help save money.
The Forbes Technology Council recommends evaluating any tech stack before adding new technology. When was the last time you took an in-depth look at the tools you are using today? To help you get a handle on your MarTech, we’ve put together an easy-to-follow list to guide you through performing your own evaluation.
You can also join BDO Digital for a webinar on October 25th, where we will be discussing best practices for assessing your Marketing Technology. Register today.
Step One: Uncover the Why
There are many reasons for a MarTech stack to become disorganized and expensive but understanding why each tool has been implemented and what it does helps uncover its contribution and ROI. To untangle your current stack, work to determine why different technologies were chosen in the first place. Below are some of the most common reasons teams add unnecessary tools:
- Functionality: All too often, a slick, new tool comes out with a specific functionality the marketing team cannot live without. In the world of fast-paced, competitive marketing, a cutting-edge tool can make a quick impact. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet, and when Shiny Object Syndrome brings in unproductive tools, you create more headaches in the long run.
- Platform integration: Most marketing organizations use a Marketing Automation platform. These Marketing Automation vendors have developed native integrations with many MarTech tools that make it easy to implement new tools. However, many marketers are overly focused on this ease of implementation — not on whether they’re the right tools for the job.
- Previous owners: The career path of a marketer can have many twists and turns. As people move from job to job, many introduce new technologies used in previous positions, adding to the complexity of the MarTech stack. Only to leave it behind, sometimes with limited documentation about the purpose of the technology, if documentation exists at all. This can become quite costly for a company.
Step Two: Perform a MarTech Assessment
Performing a general assessment of your MarTech stack is essential to reining in unnecessary costs and confusion, especially when new leadership arrives in the marketing department or new tools are up for consideration.
There are five main areas to consider for each piece of tech:
- Impact: What impact does the tool have on meeting your marketing objectives, and is it redundant?
- Usage: Who is using the tool? How is the tool being used against marketing goals and objectives?
- Adoption: How fully have people adopted the technology? Is it considered important to the team? Do they feel the tool to be vital to their mission?
- Integration: How well does the tool integrate with mission-critical applications? Do you need to spend time maintaining custom integrations?
- Investment: Does the value the tool provides align with the expense?
Step Three: Strategic Alignment Check
The third step provides the opportunity to dig in and visualize the integration and utilization of your MarTech stack with your overall marketing strategy. A MarTech audit and strategic alignment check can be completed to help rein in costs, achieve new goals and identify areas that need to be built out. Use the lists created in steps one and two to make a mind map or thought tree to understand how each piece of tech fits into the three disciplines of the D3 Methodology:
- Demand Creation.
- Demand Management.
- Demand Expansion.
Assuming these are all part of your strategy, assign to each discipline the corresponding amount of revenue it generates and the MarTech resources it consumes. This allows for a dynamic assessment of your MarTech budget.
Things to consider:
- What are my goals with this evaluation?
- How much am I spending on each demand phase compared to the amount it brings in?
- Are my investments proportional to my needs?
- Am I too heavily invested in one area?
- Are my tech assets focused in ways that assist the three D’s?
- Am I using MarTech features under one discipline that can be applied to other places?
- Do I have multiple tools that accomplish the same thing? What are the functional and monetary costs of consolidating?
- What parts look like they could be cut back, and what parts do I need to build out?
Whether you complete the evaluation to save money, assess new tools or gain a baseline understanding of your MarTech stack, completion of all three steps yields a comprehensive picture of your current technology and gives you ideas to construct an actionable plan for enhancing the effectiveness of your stack and strategy.
The good news is that these assessments can save thousands of dollars on technology that may or may not be a good fit for your company. And with the unexpected around virtually every corner, making the most of your MarTech stack and marketing strategies has never been more important.
Want to learn more about this topic? Join BDO Digital for a webinar on October 25th, where we will be discussing best practices for assessing your Marketing Technology. Register today.
Patti Ammann, a Client Engagement Manager at BDO Digital, works with clients of all sizes to understand their objectives, needs and challenges, and to build and maintain relationships with key stakeholders across the organization. She has over 15 years’ experience in project management, strategic account management, marketing operations, high-tech marketing and sales, and implementation and execution of campaigns supported by marketing automation platforms.
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