How many martech subscriptions do you have that you struggle to justify? And how do you decide what martech you really need? And how do you maximize the impact of the martech that you keep?

That’s what we're discussing today with a seasoned marketing professional who's led multifaceted teams of customer experience, data, CRO, and technology experts to deliver amazing customer experiences.

She currently helps brands to define their optimum martech architecture as the Martech Director for digital agency Digitas.

A warm welcome to the Strategic Marketing Show, Kerry Dawes.

You can find Kerry over at Digitas.com.

Topics discussed on this episode include:

• You say that organizations are currently reporting utilizing only 42% of their MarTech investments (down 16 percentage points since 2020) - why is that?
• Should firms be reducing the number of martech platforms that they use?
• How do you get more use out of a martech platform?
• How do you better connect data & tech so we can finally deliver connected acquisition, conversion & retention journeys?
• How do you decide on the martech that you should be using?
• What’s a brand that’s using martech really well at the moment?
• How do you stay on top of evolving martech technology?

Technology has always been brought in to solve the problems, but I think what the biggest challenge has been, as we’re seeing from Gartner, is some brands are getting over-tooled, and they haven't really invested in actually getting them set up and getting them invested into their organization and integrated.

The other challenge we're seeing is that actually, sometimes, they've got too much capability for their teams. Teams are – it’s like your iPhone, you probably use 10% of it. It's the same with marketing technologies. They're unable to access and gain value from all of the capabilities they've got while delivering their BAU marketing activities.

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Hey, it’s David. How many martech subscriptions do you have that you struggle to justify? And how do you decide what martech you really need? And how do you maximize the impact of the martech that you keep? That’s what we're discussing today with a seasoned marketing professional who's led multifaceted teams of customer experience, data, CRO, and technology experts to deliver amazing customer experiences.

She currently helps brands to define their optimum martech architecture as the Martech, Director for digital agency Digitas. A warm welcome to the Strategic Marketing Show, Kerry Dawes.

Yeah, great. Thanks, David. Really great to be here today.

Well, I think it's a really interesting report and Gartner does this report every year. So, we're seeing a decline in the utilization of martech. I think what the challenge is, is there's been a real influx over the last 10/15 years where technologies have been brought in to solve all the problems that marketers face. We're drowning in data, we’re being demanded to do more with less, budgets are getting increasingly tight, and technologies are growing.

There are almost 10,000 technologies out there, which has grown exponentially over the last 10 years. Technology has always been brought in to solve the problems, but I think what the biggest challenge has been, as we’re seeing from Gartner, is some brands are getting over-tooled, and they haven't really invested in actually getting them set up and getting them invested into their organization and integrated.

The other challenge we're seeing is that actually, sometimes, they've got too much capability for their teams. Teams are – it’s like your iPhone, you probably use 10% of it. It's the same with marketing technologies. They're unable to access and gain value from all of the capabilities they've got while delivering their BAU marketing activities.

So is it a case, then, of just having one all-encompassing martech platform that they're just not utilizing enough? And it's continually having more features added to it that just aren't being utilized? Or is it continually purchasing new martech platforms that aren't being used enough?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit of both, but more the latter. What we're finding is brands are having challenges getting insights into their customers, so they're going out and buying new tools or a new dataset that are giving them a different kind of perspective or are going to help them reach their customers in a different way. But actually, what they haven't done is built the infrastructure underneath it.

So they haven't built good data infrastructures and they haven't built good team infrastructures. Are their teams enabled? Are they bringing in the different departments to actually utilize this?

The other thing that's happening is they're buying in a lot of capability that actually overlaps each other. What you'll find is marketing technologies out there are selling in capabilities and saying, “We can do everything”, and the reality is quite different. So a company goes and buys something else. And then, all of a sudden, you're back to this Gartner report where you have a huge amount of capability, but you're only using a tiny part of each of them – because that's the core capability that you need.

So how does a marketing director do an audit to establish what marketing technology they actually need and what they can potentially get rid of?

I think we take technology out of the equation, surprisingly. I think what we actually look at is: What is the business trying to deliver? What marketing campaigns, activities, and things are they trying to do? That might be that they're trying to reach new audiences, they're trying to drive more automation, or they're trying to be more efficient because they've got less budget. We're actually really trying to understand what they're trying to achieve. Then we look at what data they have because data actually is the connective tissue between all these technologies. But we also want to look at the people and the processes and the governance that go around it.

Again, I think marketing technologies were brought in 5/10 years ago by marketing teams because they were frustrated with IT. What's now happening is they're realizing, “Actually, we do need IT onboard with this because we need access to our customer data. We need security involved. We need governance and processes to make sure that this is working.”

So really, we're trying to unpick all of that legacy and historic decisions, and really go, “Right, what is marketing technology here to do?” Because, ultimately, marketing technology is there to help businesses and not hinder them. At the moment, there are all too many customers that are really being hindered by their technologies.

And there's so much technology out there, isn't there? Because I recently recorded a discussion with a lady called Daria Kravchenko and she mentioned that there are nearly 10,000 marketing technology platforms or tools – and you shared that within your notes that you provided me before this conversation, about those tools.

But what are your thoughts on how marketing professionals can actually possibly determine what the optimum technology is for their business when there are so many options out there?

I think, again, that's a lot of what we do in these audits, it’s actually: “Let's take out the technology providers. Let's actually understand, what functions are you trying to deliver for marketing?” Again, I think we've lost sight, a little bit, of what marketing technologies are there to do. They're there to help make marketeers’ lives easier. So what we actually need to do is build an ecosystem, forgetting the technology, and say, “How do I want to drive major acquisition? How do I want to run my CRM program? What customer data do I have? And how will I make it available? How do I want to manage privacy and consent?” and build an ecosystem that is targeted and relevant for you as an organization.

The other thing that we need to do – and it sounds incredibly boring – but you need to then define roles and responsibilities for each of those tools. Because, with 10,000 tools in the market, there is going to be overlap in capability. CRMs and CDPs are two great categories of technologies that massively overlap. Sometimes that's a great thing but, equally, that's where you may then have a CRM system and a CDP system and they're actually overlapping too much, and you end up with competing or conflicting capabilities.

What we need to do is take the technologies out, really understand what you want to be doing and how you want to be doing it, making sure it maps to your team and your organizational design, and then start going out and procuring the tools that need that. That's about, again, defining, “What do I want a CDP to do? Do I need it to have inbuilt AI? Maybe. But is that a must-have? Probably not.” Therefore it really helps you drill down actually, “What do I need this tool to do? I need it to allow me to convert, connect, segment, and make data really available for other marketing tools.” Great, let's go and buy that. That's where you can start to take the landscape and really drill it down to what's going to be suitable for the client.

Many marketers will be thinking, “Is it best to have an all-encompassing tool that does most things for me? Or is it best to actually have a tool that does as many things as possible, but perhaps the individual tasks only 90% as good as the individual pieces of software that specialize? There are pros and cons to each one. Do you have any preference?

Yeah, absolutely. I think it's hard to think that any one tool is going to be able to solve all of your problems. That's the reality. Most all-encompassing tools are through acquisition; they've acquired and brought in different capabilities from different organizations. What I think businesses need is a flexible and scalable architecture. This is going back to, “Let's define what the architecture is” and, “How can I create an ecosystem, particularly a data ecosystem, that allows me to plug in and plug out any tool I want at any one time? So, in three years’ time, when the latest technology around ChatGPT and AI and all that comes out, how can I bring in those tools and plug it into my data and technology ecosystem really easily?”

It does lean more towards that best-of-breed approach, where you've got best-of-breed technologies for different purposes. I particularly like brands, or technology providers, that are largely independent, they're designed to integrate into lots of different things because that benefits them, and that benefits everyone else. These closed-boxes environments, with the monoliths, are just not going to be suitable anymore for most organizations. That really scalable, really integrable ecosystem is going to be what we should be doing moving forward.

I think the challenge that large organizations have is that it's quite appealing to have one piece of software that does everything or most things. If you're a small organization, you can have 20 different pieces of marketing technology, you can tie them together with something like Zapier, and you can have so many different rules flying about and data going from one provider to the other. But that's not so easy, I would have thought, for an enterprise that perhaps deals with a million different records. Is that a reasonable thought?

I think what we're talking about is one place for your data to live in a way that is accessible – so all those millions of records, yes, that needs to live in one place. But, in terms of the marketing technology and the advertising technology, as much as we'd love to find a company that does all of them, it just does not exist as far as I'm concerned.

There are 10,000 providers out there and there are, I think, 10 different categories in that marketing landscape. There is no one organization that's going to be able to do it, and not one organization that is going to be able to do it perfectly for every organization. Again, going back to what I was saying earlier, getting your data ecosystem and your data feeds and your data integrations really robust means you can maybe plug into one monolith, but you can also plug into other technologies as you see fit.

I've worked with lots of enterprise organizations that have been very locked into these large, monolithic, organized technology providers. And yet, they still have others that they rely on as well.

Technology changes quite often, of course, as well. Functionality within an individual piece of martech will change and will be added to.

Is it appropriate, then, to do an audit, perhaps once a year, to establish the functionality within that platform and what you're using as a business?

Yeah, I think it's important to set a technology vision for five or so years. These should be based on some principles: What are your architectural principles that you want to work towards? Are you a business that needs to be real-time, and therefore is real-time a really important feature? So, what are those principles? As your technology grows and evolves, you can make sure that they're all in line so any decision you make to bring into the business, you go back to those principles and say, “Right, it does actually fit in, and therefore it's going to fit into our wider ecosystem.”

But yes, you should absolutely be auditing your technologies regularly. I would say you should be auditing and governing technologies on a quarterly basis, on an individual technology basis. But then actually, the overall ecosystem, definitely.

The reality that you see instead, though, is a marketing team, whomever it may be, says, “I need to solve this problem. I need to go and get this technology, and I want to bring it in now.” Therefore we need to have this really relevant and open dialogue around everyone coming together and agreeing on what marketing technologies and how they work together, as a business moving forward, rather than these individual silos that we've seen over the last 10 years.

How do you apply the technology to the customer journey? Because you've got to think about how you're acquiring customers, what the journey looks like, and how you're converting customers as well. Do you establish that first of all, before selecting technology?

Yeah, absolutely. One of the misconceptions I often have to have to overcome, being a martech specialist, is that I'm actually less interested in the technology, I'm more interested in the customer journey. I think I'm in the role I'm in because I want to help people achieve the customer experience they’ve been desperately trying to do for so long – and technology's a way to achieve that.

I'm not here to say, “Buy more technology” and “It's really cool. There's all this funky stuff we can go and get.” It's actually, “Right, let's understand the customer journey. Let's understand the ambition that you have as an organization: Where do you want to get to? What's really important to you? And then, let's find the technology and the data ecosystems that are going to help you achieve that.” That's the bit that is really missing most of the time.

What brand out there is doing a really good job of using marketing technology at the moment?

Yeah, it's a really hard question to answer because the reality is, any brand is doing a good job, you don't notice it, because you're having a really seamless experience and you go about your day and don't think much of it. The reality is, as humans, we love to find the bits that go wrong. The ones that are doing a bad job are much more obvious.

I posted something about an email I got recently from the AA. We all know they have a great renewal scheme, and I got an email as a loyal customer coming up to my renewal: “Click here to join a competition and win 100 pounds!” I clicked on it and instantly landed on a homepage with a new customer proposition that gave me a much cheaper price than I was offered. That, for me, is a really bad example of disconnection in the martech. That is a really simple example of where CRM and the digital team should be talking together and making sure that the landing page should be personalized to the CRM that I've just received.

Technology should help make that happen and data should help make that happen, but it didn't. I don't know the team at AA, so I'm sure there are some capabilities or challenges that they’re facing, but these sorts of examples are coming up time and time again, and people are exposing them. It's just not good enough anymore, that brands are not delivering these seamless experiences.

Having said that, there are some companies that I think do a great job with their technology and I know Ocado, for example, has a really big investment in technology. They're really driving their product forward based on consumer needs, and all the features they're building are really relevant and make the whole process really seamless. For a brand that is selling a premium product, in a market where we've got the cost of living crisis, and succeeding so well – it’s simply down to a great customer experience that is driven by technology and automation.

You've mentioned ChatGTP already. It seems that every couple of years there's a new way of communicating with a customer. Maybe four years ago it was WhatsApp, then it was chat marketing, different chatbots that you could use, and, more recently, ChatGTP.

How does a Head of Marketing, a Marketing Director, actually stay on top of what communication channels are absolutely key to be incorporating within their martech? And indeed, what martech they should be evolving to over the coming months?

With any new technology, there's always that adoption curve, and I'm not sure ChatGPT is going through the wave at the moment. It will kind of die off and become a little bit more mainstream – and then, in the coming years, as we've seen with other technologies.

I'm one of these “brilliant basics” people, though, and I'd go back to – you know how you communicate with your customers, and you know that you have problems reaching them in your current channels. Address that. Because ChatGPT is not going to, all of a sudden, wipe out all of your other marketing channels: websites, email, and all those other good things.

So yes, be excited by them and yes, keep an eye on them through online learning and conferences. But again, don't use that as a reason to buy yet another tool to fit into your suite to be dead in a few years’ time. Keep going back to, “Can I consolidate? Can I reduce what technologies I have? Can I make sure I am delivering really great automated customer experiences, so my team is freed up to go and explore those new opportunities?” That's a real issue I'm seeing. People are spending so much time being hindered by technology – spending days reading through data and trying to get a data list for CRM – when your technology should be doing that for you.

Not necessarily thinking about what we've been discussing so far, what is the number one thing that marketers need to incorporate into their strategy,

Connectivity; always connectivity. Connecting the customer experience, connecting your data, and connecting your technologies.

Over the years, people have really lacked investment in integration. People are bringing in new technologies, as I've talked about, but maybe not integrating them into their sales systems or their digital website systems. Really taking a step back and connecting those is going to be absolutely essential for you to deliver those connected experiences. As I've said, consumers are just not going to have any more patience for having bad, disconnected experiences anymore.

Great advice, and nicely demonstrated with your experience with AA.

Yeah, sorry AA! It's just the one I got two weeks ago that’s front of mind, but I've got plenty in my store of other bad experiences.

In your portfolio, okay. Well, I've been your host, David Bain. If you'd like to find out more information about Kerry’s portfolio, you can find her over at Digitas.com. Kerry, thanks so much for being on the Strategic Marketing Show.

Thanks so much for having me.

And thank you for listening. Here at IFP, our goal is simple: to connect you with the most relevant information, to help solve your business problems, all in one place. InsightsForProfessionals.com.