Marketers are using too many tools and integrations — and getting too few results, according to The State of Martech, a study from SharpSpring conducted in partnership with Ascend2.
This is a special headache for email marketing teams, since email is the top tool used by both marketing and sales. Overall, 83% agree that consolidating tools would increase their
efficiency.
In general, 21% of firms are extremely successful at achieving their priorities with their marketing strategy , and 70% somewhat so. Only 9% are
unsuccessful.
But they’re unhappy with the tools they use for these functions:
- Use data between the sales and marketing teams to
management and convert leads? Six, a failing grade.
- Track customer demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data across the entire lifecycle? Six.
- Achieve a single, centralized view of the customer? Six.
- Work with customer data seamlessly across all tools? Six.
Some of this may
have to do with skill level: Of the marketers polled, 52% have the expertise to personalize the customer experience based on demographic data. But only 41% can do so with behavioral data, and 37% with
firmographic data.
And, 61% of marketers are only somewhat satisfied with their ability to link Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across channels and stages of the funnel. Only 10% are
extremely happy, and 25% are somewhat unsatisfied and 4% very much so.
In general, marketing campaigns have these priorities:
Acquiring more customers —
59%
Growing revenue — 59%
Building a strong brand — 42%
Generating quality traffic and leads — 32%
Optimizing
customer experience — 30%
Increasing ROI — 18%
Aligning marketing and sales — 13%
Improving conversion rates — 9%
Measuring
performance — 9%
Note: Executive teams are 40% less likely than others in the firm to consider general quality leads and aligning sales and marketing as top
priorities.
Their greatest challenges have a different skew:
- Generating quality leads — 37%
- Attributing results to
marketing — 26%
- Generating enough leads — 25%
- Retaining customers — 22%
- Staying current with
new marketing trends —21%
- Tracking leads — 18%
- Personalization — 18%
- Brand
consistency across all channels — 17%
- Allocating sufficient resources — 17%
- Interpreting data and analytics — 16%
- Alignment with sales team — 15%
- Determining success of specific channels — 12%
- Understanding customer journey/buying cycle
—10%
What’s more, marketers are bedeviled by these problems:
- Lack of time — 47%
- Lack of budget
— 47%
- Lack of people to perform work — 39%
- Lack of tools or technology —
30%
- Lack of appropriate data — 29%
- Lack of buy-in from management — 11%
What goes
into the average martech stack? Marketing teams use these tools:
- Email — 78%
- Social engagement — 60%
- Landing pages
— 39%
- Video — 34%
- Brand management — 31%
- Social listening —
29%
- SEO — 28%
- Ad retargeting — 26%
- Forms — 25%
- Workflows/drip campaigns — 18%
- CMS—15%
- Testing—12%
- Chatbot—10%
Sales teams utilize these tools:
- Email — 76%
- Social media —
60%
- Calendar/scheduling — 43%
- Project management — 32%
- Video — 31%
- Brand management—30%
- CRM — 26%
- CMS — 26%
- Conferencing/demos — 25%
- Automation/sales enablement — 12%
The most successful marketers are 182% more likely to be using drip
campaigns to nurture all of their leads:
- Every time — 5%
- Most of the time — 16%
- Sometimes — 31%
- Rarely — 23%
- Never — 25%
How many tools do they use?
Of those polled, 52% use three, 27% deploy six and
12% have 10. In addition, 5% have 11 or more tools and 4% have none.
Companies manage their customer data in customer data platforms (6%), customer relationship management systems (35%),
spreadsheets (21%) and a combination of the above (36).
Working with SharpSpring, Ascend2 surveyed 187 marketing professionals in the U.S. in July 2021.