Martech Migration: Three signs it's time for change

Our Director of Consultancy, Jamie Burrell, discusses why businesses should regularly review their martech and ask if they would benefit from a migration to a different marketing technology. (About the Author)

What is a martech migration? Why does it matter to you?

Marketing Technology (martech) exists to enable companies to be more effective in their communication with their customers and prospects. It is not a one-size-fits-all marketplace and different software vendors offer martech platforms, and broader Enterprise focused ecosystems, to serve the needs of different businesses across a variety of industry types.

A martech migration is the process of changing which technology you use. Although it sounds simple enough, the reality is significantly more complex, with large risks associated with your brand reputation as well as the potential for both significant internal disruption and lost Sales opportunities.

However, if your martech is no longer fit for purpose, or you're seeing business revenue slip away due to inadequate process or platform functionality, a migration is a consideration you may need to have.

Download our guide to Martech Migration

 

What are the options?

There are several Marketing Automation (MA) software vendors for Enterprise scale businesses: Salesforce's Pardot, Adobe's Marketo and Oracle's Eloqua are three of the most popular. Each of these vendors are building a comprehensive martech ecosystem, often containing a Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM), a Content Management System (CMS), a Business Intelligence tool (BI), and a Sales Enablement platform (SE).

Additionally, as Content Data Platforms (CDP) are developing their capability of offering the Single View of a Customer, Marketing Cloud is advancing the art of what's possible in omni-channel, adaptive and personalised journeys.

Email Service Providers (ESP) such as HubSpot, Act-On and MailChimp are solid tools for businesses of a certain scale, but may not be fit-for-purpose as you reach your strategic ambitions.

The Marketing Automation marketplace has seen a number of acquisitions and changes in recent years (IBM Marketing Cloud bought Silverpop, dotmailer is now dotdigital) and the choice to a buyer is growing.

But before you get lost in choice, how do you know if you should migrate?

Download our guide to Martech Migration

Questions to ask before considering a migration

Migration often means grappling with the complexities of managing and moving every platform instance, hundreds (if not thousands) of integrated automation workflows, and transferring every piece of data you’ve ever collected through your existing platform. All while keeping your live marketing campaigns running without interruption. It’s no mean feat.

Before you make the leap into the unknown, it’s important to ask:

• Have you truly outgrown your current platform?
• Or, Would a strategic organisational design review and/or further martech training and certification be the better option for you?

 

The three signs you’ve outgrown your current Martech

1/ You’re stuck in the single-channel age

As a tool, marketing technology has matured beyond being just a single-channel medium for email marketing, lead nurture and simple scoring. As its popularity and usage has grown, so have the creative interpretation and abilities.

Today, many marketers are going beyond the single channel approach and are looking for better integration capabilities, an omni-channel approach or more sophisticated reporting. They are looking to build out an ecosystem of marketing tools built around their marketing automation / marketing cloud platform.

If you’re on one of the big four (Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua and Marketing Cloud), it could be that additional training is required to reach the full potential of what Martech can offer you.

But, if your requirements are based on real needs to ‘do more’, it could mean your marketing activity has matured beyond the capabilities of your current tech.

If this is the case, a simple and inexpensive assessment of your current Marketing Automation strategy will help highlight the current state of marketing maturity in your business, and whether your MA technologies are supporting, or hindering, that progress.

 

2/ It's costing money, not proving ROI

This is a straightforward question: Are you seeing a return from your investment?

If the answer is no, this can be down to one of two things:

• You haven’t closed the loop, and as a result, you can’t prove the true return from your marketing activity.
• You’re simply paying too much for what you are getting. Perhaps your licensing fees have increased as you’ve grown your marketing database, or you’ve simply bought into the wrong platform for your business needs.

Both are relatively simple to fix and won’t necessarily mean you need to migrate to a new platform. Closing the loop can be as simple as reviewing your platform needs to ensure your CMS, CRM and MA technologies are talking to each other properly.

A regular data audit will ensure you’re not pushing the fee limits for your database. It’s something you’d need to do in order to migrate anyway.

 

3/ You’re going global

If you're using its potential, your martech platform will be intrinsically linked to the rest of the business, from Sales to Customer Services, through to your recruitment and HR teams. As your business grows and evolves, so should the technology you use.

Take the example of a business that works in multi-country regional divisions, and is growing. As the company expands its regional marketing activity, a single platform instance can quickly become disorganised. This will become hard to govern as a mix of different processes across different sectors clash with central marketing, with poor uniformity of process and brand consistency.

If you’re sending out a million emails per week, it can also quickly become very difficult to track performance.

The right martech platform can help you scale and standardise your marketing operations using workspaces and partitions, creating better customer experiences, manageable reporting practices and a scalable marketing process.

Download our guide to Martech Migration

Thinking of pursuing a martech migration?

You aren't alone. According to our recent State of Marketing Automation report, up to 30% of Marketer’s are thinking of migrating their marketing technology in the next year.

If you can't see any way back and are fully committed to a migration, don’t take it on alone.

Clevertouch helps some of the world’s leading businesses migrate to a new martech platform. From initial project planning and management, to database audits and API integration, we’ve got you covered.

If you're thinking about a martech migration, download our comprehensive martech migration guide now for further advice.

 

About the Author

Jamie Burrell is an experienced Consultant with a demonstrated history of working with enterprise clients to successfully deploy and optimise technologies into their Sales and Marketing organisation. An expert at both designing and guiding successful martech implementations that maximise return on investment.