Hiring Marketing Technology to do the job for you and the business (save money, make money and provide insight)
Marketing technology, first and foremost, was created to make the jobs of marketers easier; to automate, integrate and streamline the Marketing and Sales process. However, as the now infamous martech supergraphic demonstrates, the industry is becoming saturated with so many products and features that marketers are now struggling to wade through this tech to get to what their business actually needs.
In 2016, Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen published ‘Competing Against Luck’, a business book surrounding his latest theory: ‘Jobs to be done’. Its’ central premise is that consumers aren’t buying products or services from you, they ‘hire’ them to do a ‘job’. This is an important distinction because it forces marketers to think ‘what is the customer hiring this product for?’, rather than ‘how can I make this customer buy this product?’. The martech space is no different, and when buying marketing technology, marketers need to ask themselves, what problem is this martech solving?
According to Gartner, 2020 will be the first year that the spend on marketing technology will be higher than the spend on marketing resource. As a result, Christensen’s theory has never been more important, simply because marketers need to be buying martech to improve the job of Marketing, and not get sucked in by these feature led technologies that aren’t actually solving problems.
The Complications of the Martech Stack
Mixpanel define a tech stack as a list of all the technology tools and services used to build and run one single application. Facebook’s tech stack, for example, is comprised of a combination of coding frameworks and languages including JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, and ReactJS. A tech stack essentially works to turn an incoherent jumble of technologies into a coherent product or service.
This methodology struggles to transition across to the martech space because martech software and services can work perfectly fine on their own, and yet when combined poorly, can end up an incoherent mess of unintegrated software. This is an eventuality that the term ‘martech stack’ actively encourages because it doesn’t prioritise integration and simplification, rather just symbolises a pile of technologies.
The Martech Spine™ is a clear and simple solution to this in that it asks that key question: what is the tech being hired to do?
If the answer doesn’t clearly align with your business objectives then it’s not worth hiring. When investing in marketing technology, it is important to consider what you want to achieve and how the different technologies will work together in order to achieve your goal. This enables you to ‘hire’ martech to solve problems within your business, saving you money and man power in the long term, rather than pouring money and man power down the drain in products and services your business isn’t making best use out of.
Defining the ‘job’ of the technology you ‘hire’
We believe that there are around 12 business reasons to invest in martech, that is 12 jobs which we believe martech can be hired for, and it is important to initially pick 4-6 of these as your core before building out to the full 12. For example, these can include:
- Smarter revenue
- Improved Customer Experience
- Data compliance and governance
- Sales Enablement and ABM
Once you have identified your business reasons for investing in martech, you need to then consider how the martech you want to invest in will help simplify those processes, as well as integrate them with each other, creating a seamless experience for the customer, and their transition from Marketing to Sales.
Organisational Design
However, investing in the right martech for the right reasons isn’t enough, you must also consider organisational design and development, so your business moves and progresses alongside the marketing technology you are investing in. Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be happening because, currently, investment in martech is three times that of investment in organisational design. Because of this, 57% of marketers believe they’ll change martech platform over the next few years, and the blame seems to lie too much with the software and less on the soft skills developed from a successful organisational development and design plan, which is equally as important as choosing the right martech.
Conclusion
When you invest in marketing technology, you are essentially hiring that product to do a job, and that job needs to run in tandem with your business needs, as well as your organisational design. There is very little point in investing in martech that your business is not equipped to make the most out of. Structure follows strategy and not the other way round. While the spend on organisational design is significantly lower than that on marketing technology, companies are increasing their own risk as they have more and more martech that they simply don’t know how to use, nor have a plan for their organisational design to get the most from it.
If you’d like to find out more about how to improve your organisational design and development, click here
Alternately you can listen to our CEO and founder Adam Sharp discuss this in detail in a webinar below: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/15475/406011