Why visual creativity is the wrong metric to judge a martech strategy

Around this time every year Cheifmartec.com host the ‘Stackies’ – an award ceremony celebrating the best in martech stacks. This year they’ve been postponed, but they’ve still shared some of the entrants and their stack graphics – or Stackies. This runs in tandem with the release of Scott Brinkers now infamous ‘martech landscape’, now with over 8000 apps, up from just 150 in 2010.

 

 

However, the question is, with all these new software’s, and the pretty graphics that accompany them, is the marketing landscape actually any easier to navigate?  The above certainly doesn’t help the CMO or their marketing department do their jobs.

The stack has now become commonplace in the world of martech, but in our opinion this is undeservedly so. The Stackies’ graphics are undoubtedly visually creative and an interesting format from which to present your martech capability outside the business, but what are they really showing, and who are they targeted at? For many executives, and indeed all other levels of the marketing structure, these graphics look overly complex, very expensive, and give no insight into how these pieces of software work together. In adding complexity, these graphics add risk; risk in that many of these technologies will never be integrated into the business or connected together – there are simply too many of them.

Here at Clevertouch, we believe in the Martech Spine™ over the stack. The Spine champions the prioritising of 6 core technologies, integrating them, and limiting that amount of tech to only what is necessary, thereby creating marketing efficiencies. Limiting the technologies allows your organisation to focus on the seamless integration of your core platforms. In doing so you increase the connectivity of your business, while also enabling a more informed workforce as they build their skills up around your core tech, rather than dabbling in huge numbers of disparate platforms. This couldn’t be more important today as – according to our own research – 45% of marketers do not have even the most basic Martech Spine in place. Consequently, the ability to report on the holistic view of marketing success is not possible, and the tech is not doing what is what bought to do.

 

The Martech Spine for the SMB and Mid-Market Business

The SMB and Mid-Market Spine would typically be capable of meeting all business objectives from marketing, providing all these systems are joined up. It maps to the customer lifecycle and internally to other departments such as Sales and Customer Success. This should be sufficient for Marketing to be successful with marketing technology, as well as being more relevant and important to the rest of the business.

 

 

 

The Martech Spine for the Enterprise

When we move into the Enterprise space, marketers will need to plan their content and campaigns across a more complex environment - different regions, business units, product lines and so on. Therefore, they will need marketing technology to support this - such as Percolate, to help plan the strategic content management and campaigns.

They will also have a much bigger Sales team to support and making sure they are all on brand and on message in the market is essential for consistency and impact. For this, a Sales Enablement platform drives efficiency and effectiveness in the Sales team so that they no longer have to keep looking or building the latest content - marketing can supply an updated library of content to help them sell easier and at a higher level.

 

 

 

If you want to find out more about the importance of the Martech Spine, our CEO Adam Sharp explains the Spine clearly in his piece ‘The Stack is dead. Welcome to the Spine.’