If you’re a modern marketer, you live or die by your martech. Fortunately, we recently carried out research among 250 UK CMOs in mid-sized enterprises with annual revenues between £100m and £500m, and 94% agree that they fully understand their martech stack.
Brilliant. End of article. Nothing more to say.
However, the research didn’t end there. It also highlighted that CMOs spend nearly two full days a month troubleshooting their martech – that’s almost a full working month a year! Moreover, a quarter (24%) have lost customers due to martech error and nearly 40% say their media targeting is ineffective or leads to wasted spend.
Does that sound like “fully understand” to you?
Actually, to me it sounds like there are a whole bunch of hidden risks lurking in your martech stack – and marketers are overestimating just how well they grasp their technology.
To begin with, just look at the amount of complexity creep. There are now more than 15,000 different tools and platforms available to marketing teams. The latest shiny toy, complex AI functionality, is often bolted onto legacy stacks that can struggle to handle it.
The result is a “Frankenstack” of disparate tools trying to work together. Marketers may understand each piece of software in a vacuum, but not necessarily how they work with each other. One tiny error in one part can bring down the whole thing or lead to massive inefficiencies – like ineffective targeting.
Managing this complex conglomeration is a full-time job. But that’s another risk – whose full-time job is it, exactly? Is it the role of marketing to manage the stack and troubleshoot it when things fall over? Does the CFO have the last word? Is it the IT department to which the CMO has to go, cap in hand?
Our research found that responsibility for the stack was fragmented across all of the above. And add to that the fact that if a brand has branches in multiple countries and territories, each one might have responsibility for its own marketing operations and martech.
The fact that martech is now so intrinsic to the role of marketing means that CMOs are having to bring technology specialists into their teams to manage the operation – and therein lies yet another risk.
What we’ve seen is more and more marketing departments in which the tech experts outnumber the actual marketers. And, even if they don’t, it still means there are people sitting in marketing teams who don’t have the skillsets and creative nous to develop remarkable, eye-catching campaigns.
That is perhaps the greatest risk involved in an ill-defined and poorly-managed martech stack. Rather than augmenting what the team is doing and helping them create efficiencies in their brilliant activations, technology is acting as a barrier to success. The marketing experience within the team is what suffers – after all, people don’t generally pursue a career in marketing because there weren’t enough tech support jobs available.
Steve Kemish is CEO of Intermedia Global
