There’s nothing mysterious about the challenges facing companies when implementing marketing technology.
Many are hobbled by budget issues, plain and simple, and by other practical problems, according to Marketing Technology Implementation: Strategies, Tactics & Trends, a study by Ascend2.
Among the challenges are:
Budget constraints — 45%
Executing a strategy — 43%
Determining appropriate technologies — 38%
Training staff — 35%
Integration with existing stack — 28%
Organizational buy-in — 28%
Internal adoption — 28%
Attribution — 11%
Despite these challenges, 69% are increasing their new technology budgets in 2021, 19% significantly and 50% moderately. Another 20% are maintaining the existing budget, and 11% foresee decreases.
A whopping 96% of firms attempting this are successful at it, and 42% are very successful, or best in class.
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The main technologies — those likely to have the most impact next year — are:
Real-time marketing — 43%
Analytics — 36%
Artificial intelligence — 36%
Customer Data Platforms (CDP) — 34%
Data consolidation — 30%
Programmatic — 22%
Multi-touch attribution — 20%
Voice search — 16%
Blockchain — 12%
Why do firms invest in new technology? Their goals are:
Improving marketing efficiency — 50%
Improving customer journey — 45%
Improving data quality — 38%
Increasing ROI — 31%
Streamlining workflows — 26%
Accommodating a new product or service — 26%
Improving marketing attribution — 22%
Integrating data — 20%
Removing redundancies — 10%
How do they know whether they are achieving these ends? This requires constant evaluation.
Of those polled, 43% say marketing technology performance should be evaluated at least quarterly, while 29% say at least monthly; 17%, twice annually or more; 9%, once annually; and 2%, other.
What are the top areas for evaluation? They are:
Ease of use — 55%
Associated costs — 37%
Ability to customize — 36%
Insights and analysis — 35%
Ability to automate — 30%
Ability to integrate with existing stock — 28%
Scalability — 23%
Data governance — 17%
Dashboards and visualization — 12%
Marketers seek a single view: 87% agree that a technology that consolidates multiple tools into a single platform appeals to them, and 38% say it appeals very much. Another 9% are neutral, and 2% actually disagree.
Eighty-nine percent desire ease of implementation, and 45% strongly agreeing with this. Strangely, 5% disagree.
Ascend 2 and its Research Partners surveyed 270 marketers. Of those, 31% were in B2B, 43% in B2C and 26% were in both equally.