Our Senior Product Marketing Manager, Matt Cheeseman, discusses why, with 1 Million job vacancies in the UK right now, it's never been more pressing to have a plan on how to address the war for talent in martech. (About the Author)
Do you have the skills in your business to drive your martech?
As part of our State of Martech report, we discovered that 72% of marketers have struggled to hire Marketing Automation or Marketing Cloud talent. We also found out that 57% of marketers think they will change their platform in the next few years. These are interesting figures, and may partly explain why so many organisations end up migrating today.
Businesses are struggling to hire the right people to both design the plan for, then operate, their martech. Subsequently they end up believing that their platform isn’t right for them, rather than understanding that perhaps their people aren't trained in, or unable to see the possibilities, in the platform they have.
Download our guide to martech migration
The commonly adopted solution
The enormous lack of talent in the industry has created a gaping hole in the skill sets of many organisations, businesses that subsequently fail to make the most of their MA or MC platform. The solution for many is to migrate away from their existing martech in an attempt to ‘start over’, and hope the new platform brings more of an impact to the business.
If you’re on one of the big 4 Martech platforms (Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua or Marketing Cloud) then your more prevalent issue is likely to be a lack of MA or MC talent, not that the platform isn’t right for you.
A better way
There are a number of solutions other than migrating, ranging from 'levelling up' your employees through online and in person training courses delivered by an accredited provider, to outsourcing some – or all – of your martech capability to an external specialist consultancy.
Only 24.5% of marketers are certified in their chosen martech platform, and so outsourcing to a consultancy can be an easy solution to your martech issues, rather than the costly, and on many occasions, fruitless efforts of upskilling your existing workforce – what’s to stop your martech talent being snapped up by a rival and all your investment going to waste?
Download our guide to martech migration
Keep it simple
Another solution is to invest in simplification software that will allow you to create and edit assets from within a central tool, a tool that enables your marketers to do all their work outside the platform and thus limit the amount of unskilled hands involved in the platform.
Momentum is a simplification tool that creates landing pages and emails for Marketo or Marketing Cloud, made by Clevertouch, and used by the likes of Brewin Dolphin, Fujitsu and Shell.
Download our guide to martech migration
In summary
For Marketing to deliver and demonstrate business impact, the marketing ops function has to have the right people in it.
1/ Migrating to a new technology platform can be the right move to better match your talent to the tech.
2/ Acquiring and developing your team to better use your existing setup is another way to go. This does leave you exposed to sudden staff changes.
3/ Alternatively you can outsource your martech capabilities to a trusted partner.
If you think your organisation is perhaps not quite at the migration stage yet and may benefit from a consultancy providing some insight, IP and technical assistance, then please get in touch.
About the Author
Matt Cheeseman holds a First Class degree in Marketing and has worked at Clevertouch since 2014. An integral part of the team behind the winning of, and delivery to, over 500 clients from global Enterprise to SMEs. Matt also delivers lectures to students at the Southampton University Business School on achieving Marketing Automation success through implementation, training and organisational alignment.