Marketers lose a month every year sorting out unreliable technology tools
New IMG research reveals how much time CMOs are wasting on broken, bloated martech stacks Over the past year, senior marketers have spent the…
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By Kate Frost, Head of Optimisation at Intermedia Global (IMG)
In my experience, too many marketers seem to make the same assumption: adding more technology to their business will automatically add value and make things easier. AI has accelerated this trend in recent years, but before that it was everything from CRMs to DAMs to work management systems.
Technology providers’ sales teams will proclaim that their product will fix the problem easily – and it may do, but not if the underlying process isn’t understood and you don’t implement the technology where it’s needed most.
And the situation has also not been helped by growing expectations that marketers should be able to do more with less, which have grown in line with the AI hype. Efficiency is the watchword and CFOs want ever higher ROI. So, if a new tool automates tasks or cuts production costs, why on earth wouldn’t you embrace it as a saviour?
However, presuming that technology is always and invariably the answer is a bad habit. The reality is that this attitude will likely cause more pain in the long run rather than reducing it – because it stops people from taking the time to look into what the actual problem is from a broader perspective.
If new technology is the sticking plaster, more often than not it’s processes that are the still bleeding wound. It is a constant source of amazement to me just how few marketing teams properly document their processes, instead relying on people keeping it in their heads after learning it from people who also kept it in their heads.
On top of which, teams are constantly working in silos – even when they think they’re being collaborative. Marketing leaders are constantly dealing with duplicated efforts and situations where the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. Or, where the right hand desperately needs access to a set of creative assets but only the left hand has the necessary permissions.
It often stems from a lack of oversight. No-one clearly owns the operational side of the marketing department and there’s no campaign planner or campaign manager to keep an eye on workflows, track faults or issues with existing processes, and ensure silos don’t develop.
To take an example, we worked with one studio that was having a real problem with creative assets not answering the brief from the stakeholders. They were considering everything to solve it, even outsourcing the creative entirely, when it actually came to light that the briefing process was to blame.
They took a step back, documented their processes and spotted where the problem sat. Jump to six months later, with a new ‘internal contract’ template in place to ensure every brief continuously matched the requirements, even when those requirements changed mid-project, and they had a 97% right-first-time record as a result.
Another very common workflow issue within marketing teams is the quality of not just their data, but their metadata. They will typically have a digital asset management system but may need better ways to ensure that the right people can find the assets they need quickly.
All too often people buy those systems and don’t put in the work to define a proper taxonomy at the beginning: noting these are the specific words and tags you use to create and search for assets, even down to lowercase versus uppercase. The number of times we’ve seen situations like ‘email copy’ and ‘Email Copy’ creating two different files for the exact same asset is not even funny.
Something as simple as a rigorous and thorough file naming and tagging convention avoids all manner of issues that have nothing to do with tech – and will in fact be exacerbated by adding a new piece of technology to the mix: duplicate assets, dark assets and so on.
It also helps manage issues that crop up in reporting. Good luck accurately reporting how many display ad iterations you created last month when you can’t use the search function in your shiny new system to find them all.
Will bolting on yet another new platform to the martech stack solve this type of problem? Hardly.
It sounds obvious, but before adding a new piece of technology to the stack, marketing teams – and senior marketers in particular – need to step back and determine if the problem they’re trying to solve has nothing to do with technology.
Spend time with all the delivery teams, observing how they work, and document those processes. Then bring those people together and ask them where the pain points lie. What are the issues they keep running into and the brick walls they keep banging their heads against? What should the processes look like going forward?
From that, develop a plan of where to prioritise the time and investment in a way that will do the most good – which might mean bringing in new tech or it might not. If in doubt, fall back on the old MoSCoW prioritisation technique: M – Must have, S – Should have, C – Could have, W – Won’t have.
And speaking of needing investment, be sure you know who owns it for when new technology actually is required. Does the tech budget sit under marketing, or IT, or someone else?
Our research last year found that the CMO is the most likely role to have responsibility for the martech stack, even over the CFO or the CIO/CTO. In 35% of organisations, it’s down to the head of marketing, ahead of 19% where the stack ‘belongs’ to the head of finance. In only 18% is it the head of IT’s job.
After that, review the existing tech stack. Rather than needing to add another level or a new tool, would the underlying process actually be improved by consolidating or getting rid of some systems?
Stacks built up of legacy tech, bolted together in hope rather than expectation, aren’t going to appreciate having to balance a new and highly complex AI automation platform on top of everything else. Is adding a fourth CRM system to the three you already have (two of which you don’t use but are somehow still sitting there gumming up your data flow) going to make everything okay?
And speaking of AI, given that it’s the shiny new tech of the moment, don’t assume that it’s always going to be the silver bullet either. Most AI systems, out of the box, are highly generic. It takes time and effort to train them to your brand and your voice. Doing so is just another process that needs to be properly managed, documented and tracked or else it will cause more issues than it solves.
So, no matter what you hear or read, please don’t assume that new technology is always going to be the ideal solution. Thinking in terms of back-end processes might sound deathly dull in the face of a new and impressive AI platform, but it may well turn out to be a far cheaper and far more effective answer to your problems.