Martech isn't working; marketers urged to start again

Companies may have already spent billions on multiple martech systems, but now they must rethink their entire approach to technology adoption if they are to make the most of their investments.

That is the stark conclusion of a new Forrester report, The Future of Marketing Technology, which shows while marketers’ efforts to consolidate their platforms are laudable, no out-of-the-box solution or single product can meet the twin expectations of technical efficiency and marketing efficacy.

Whether that means they need to deploy the average of 50 martech platforms to execute their campaigns is a moot point but Forrester reckons that to turn the martech stack into a strategic advantage, companies will have to redefine the technology as an “ecosystem that prioritises interoperability to support data, orchestration, and emerging AI capabilities”.

This new approach has four key pillars:

Customer-first data strategies: The forces of data deprecation force marketers to update their data strategies to focus on first- and zero-party data and data privacy. They need tech that collects customer data and aligns it with their own data, resolves customer identities, and generates robust customer profiles.

The report quotes Newell Brands senior director of marketing technology and enterprise products Soloman Hussain, who said, “Any new tech investment needs to support our approach to data, consent, and privacy because we’ve got to recognise the customer, cover off privacy issues, and correct for loss of visibility, yet our customers still expect great experiences.”

The personalisation mandate: Marketers remain focused on achieving personalisation at scale: 41% of B2C marketing decision-makers cited personalising communications, experiences, and interactions as among their biggest challenges with marketing execution.

But consumer attitudes toward personalisation are nuanced, and delivering relevant, timely, and channel-agnostic experiences is a technical puzzle many have yet to solve. No single technology will solve for the personalisation mandate but rather multiple technologies working together, Forrester insists.

Expectations for martech investments to contribute to the business: A turbulent economic environment puts martech spending under a microscope, as new investments require a more robust business case and companies look to eliminate redundant or underutilised capabilities. Among B2C marketing decision-makers, 26% cited changing economic conditions as one of their top marketing challenges but 66% said that they planned to spend more on martech in 2023.

Support for invisible experiences: Marketing is part of the broader CX family of customer-facing touchpoints like sales, service, and digital. Seamless customer experiences that proactively anticipate and address customer needs depend on data practices that incorporate contextual data, analytical processes to understand product and service interactions, and the execution of individualized interactions, all in real time.

Marketers must invest in high-performance systems that prioritize scalability and speed to handle the volume and speed of required decisions and delivery.

Twilio product leader Kathryn Murphy concluded: “A couple of years ago, marketers could buy new tech because it was cool. Today, they must check all the boxes to rationalise investments; they can’t just throw more tools and staff at issues.”