The good news: Marketing technology is more advanced and plentiful than ever. Seemingly endless point solutions exist in the market. Sure, it’s a lot. But stack them all together and you can do just about anything you’ve ever wanted to do as a marketer.
The bad news: Where are you going to find the time?
Yes, today’s marketer has access to lots of great and wonderful tech, but the problem is that they hardly have enough hours in a day to manage and use it all. While more technology is being introduced, marketing’s bandwidth is being reduced, so time is limited. The abundance of choice starts to become overwhelming, and dealing with the complexity of disjointed tech becomes a time suck.
It’s a problem.
So let’s jump in and explore this great challenge modern marketers are facing — too much tech, too little time — and discuss what to do about it.
So. Much. Tech.
What an era to be a marketer. Marketing technology has enabled us to personalize, segment, automate, and execute in highly advanced and sophisticated ways. From the biggest juggernaut enterprise solutions to the small lean-team next-gen point solutions, numerous options are available — all of which are designed to help you achieve your goal of engaging more customers and driving revenue for your business.
But the number of options is growing fast. Really fast. According to Forrester, we can expect martech will grow at nearly 10% compound annual growth over the next five years.
Have a marketing objective or goal? No problem — the tech to help you achieve it (probably) exists. But the limiting factor to acquiring, navigating, and employing all these solutions isn’t just your marketing budget alone; it’s also your bandwidth.
Bye Bye Bandwidth
Marketing budgets have dropped from 11% of revenue in 2020 to 6.4% in 2021 (Gartner), meaning teams are smaller, and individual marketers are taking on more and more work. In fact, according to the latest retail marketing research from Emarsys, nearly 30% of marketers have a role where they are responsible for customer experience, brand, digital marketing, CRM, customer retention, and more. If that breadth of responsibility sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. (Heck, I’m exhausted just from thinking about it.)
Clearly, marketers are being asked to wear more hats than ever before. They are also pushed to generate greater amounts of revenue for the business. And even with the abundance of solutions available to ease their burden, they simply don’t have the time to master each and every piece of their growing tech stack.
The same research tells us “41% of in-house marketers at retail brands lose time moving between different technologies” and “28% say they have too many tools in their marketing stacks.” When your bandwidth is already limited, you can’t afford to burn precious minutes of the day bouncing around from one piece of technology to another, or angling to get your disconnected channels and data sets to talk to one another.
You want, and frankly need, a lot of this technology to achieve your goals as a marketer. But you need a solution that allows you to get the most from all this tech without sacrificing your bandwidth.
Make Your Life Easier by Consolidating Your Tech Stack
Think about this: If you were the mayor of Metropolis, would you rather hire and manage one person to leap tall buildings, another person to fly, another person to fight crime, another person to unearth a Fortress of Solitude (if you’re into that), and another person to moonlight as a journalist… or would you rather just hire Superman?
Until you find a way to cut through the clutter of your bloated, disjointed tech stack, you’ll always be short of time. So if you’re one of the 41% of marketers burning time jumping between your tech or the 28% overloaded with tools in your martech stack, consider consolidating. It will make your life easier.
“One of the biggest challenges that we had in our existing environment is that our channel data was in silos, so we couldn’t deliver that coordinated communication or conversation with our customer. Now with Emarsys, we’ve been able to combine all of our data. So, our sales data, the big one, offline and online, launching profiles, product catalogs, web interactions, email engagement data, all in one central location in the CDP. So we’ve really been able to connect the dots and also synchronize in near-real time as well. And as a result of being able to stitch that data together, we’ve got a really nice, unified customer view, which is really helping us to start to enable and unleash that one-to-one personalization.”
Consolidating your technology and data sets into a single unified solution doesn’t just save you time (though time-saving is nothing to sneeze at); it also makes your marketing significantly more effective. Having all your data and channels connected, rather than siloed, allows you to deliver sophisticated, real-time, 1:1 experiences that are consistent across all channels, at scale. Moreover, with everything unified and executed from a single platform, you can better track and measure the efficacy and value of your campaigns and ultimately prove marketing’s impact on driving revenue and delivering results.
The added benefit is that you’ll have happier customers (because you’ll actually be able to provide them with the tailored, personalized experiences they desire) and a happier C-suite (because you’ll be able to demonstrate exactly how and where marketing is moving the needle when it comes to business outcomes).
“It starts with analyzing the data that you’ve got, bringing it all together in one place so the data is no longer siloed, and analyzing, and then making use of all of the technology that Emarsys has, in terms of recommendations.”
Final Thoughts
You face many challenges as a marketer. The paradox of “too much technology, too little time” is perhaps one of the most frustrating examples. Martech is advancing, finding exciting and novel ways to solve the technological challenges of digital marketing, but how do you solve for the time- and resource-related challenges?
Fortunately, you can break through this potential roadblock. A fully integrated, unified omnichannel customer engagement platform will allow you to execute and scale your marketing much more effectively, and in less time, so you can achieve better results with less effort. And as a marketer, what more can you ask for?
The truth is, “too much tech, too little time” isn’t the only roadblock you’ll contend with as a marketer. Our latest report, Retail Roadblocks: The Challenges Holding Retail Marketers Back in 2021, brings together data from more than 500 retail marketers and reveals the most pressing challenges currently faced.
To see the latest data-backed findings on retail marketing roadblocks, plus tips from brands that are smashing through them, download your free copy of the report.
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