Aaand here comes another Gartner report breakdown!!
That’s right if you haven’t had a chance to check out the 2020 Marketing Technology Survey, now’s your chance. We’ve taken all the juicy stats, recommendations, and findings and boiled them down in a (kinda) condensed version.
The goal for Gartner on this one was to reveal how marketers are investing in, deploying, and getting value out of technology. CMOs should use this year’s martech survey results to track martech adoption, utilization, investments, and agility.
The survey examines:
As a result of COVID-19, CMOs have fallen back to cautious growth strategies. 79% of CMOs are relying primarily on existing customers to fuel growth
The survey also finds that martech leaders are under pressure to make shrewd investments in martech. Nearly 60% of respondents expect to make moderate to severe budget cuts to planned investments.
Gartner finds that respondents are basing investment decisions on one of two strategies. This decision is being made in direct correlation with how COVID-19 has impacted their budgets:
Budget cuts mean that martech leaders are forced to do more with less, choosing to focus on extracting more from existing customers.
However, the data reveals that 68% of respondents face challenges with utilizing their stacks’ full breadth of capabilities, making this objective challenging for most.
66% of respondents facing a pandemic-related cut to their martech budget have delayed the purchase of at least one previously approved marketing technology.
There has also been a shift in focus for existing vendors and internal users to further existing tool adoption strategies without buying new technologies (39%).
Leading organizations are taking advantage of the economic downturn as an opportunity to make a greater marketing impact while other brands are retreating.
37% of those receiving increase investments are in the process of overhauling their martech stack to capitalize on new investments – acquiring new technology while pruning old technology to adapt to changing business and consumer climates.
In 2019, most respondents reported selecting the ‘best’ solutions to solving challenges, irrespective of vendor.
2020 reveals a sharp reversal in this approach with 59% of respondents preferring to select their technologies using an integrated suite approach, relying primarily on a single vendor with multiple capabilities.
Recommendations
Martech teams face mounting pressure to utilize more of their stacks’ capabilities during this time when every dollar must count!
Respondents cite a series of impediments standing in their way of increasing martech utilization, many of which are people or process-related:
Despite the high usage of customer data platforms (CDPs), a “lack of a strong customer data foundation” is still a top impediment to martech utilization:
So why are teams still challenged with establishing a strong customer data foundation?
CDPs are often, mistakenly, viewed as a sort of panacea for all customer data management woes. Although CDPs are typically owned by marketing, many other business units seek customer data, ranging from sales and service to BI, finance, and operations.
In reality, multiple views of the customer are often needed by an enterprise, resulting in disparate teams investing in applications of their own.
Recommendations
However, this confidence seems exaggerated, considering that 20% of respondents who say their stack is effective also agree that they struggle to utilize the full capabilities of their stack.
Recommendations
Given its highly technical nature and impact across the organization, martech is an inherently cross-functional undertaking. This is apparent where respondents cite cross-functional collaboration, lack of talent, and a need for more training as impediments preventing them from achieving greater utilization and effectiveness.
This year’s survey finds martech teams collaborating with their IT counterparts more closely than they did in 2019. As many as 60% of respondents state that their activities are conducted in the ‘collaboration zone’ between marketing and IT.
Once a technology has been selected, don’t assume that marketing will have everything under control, as hiccups often send business teams back to IT.
To effectively partner with peers in IT, Gartner suggests:
While 80% of respondents have identified a need for additional martech staff, 73% struggle to recruit qualified candidates.
In response, martech teams have opted to raise the profile of their staff and team skill development. More than half (56%) of respondents are building new processes and team capabilities to improve their team’s ability to utilize more of their stack.
Recommendations
According to Gartner’s 2020 Marketing Operations and Organization Survey, 67% said their marketing organization prioritizes effectiveness over efficiency when it comes to marketing technology. But, to succeed, teams must value both:
Just 10% of survey respondents report an agile planning approach to their martech roadmap, but this cohort is much more active in responding to the pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating that they put a variety of agile practices into action.
According to this year’s survey, respondents with agile roadmaps take more actions across the board relative to the rest of the respondents.
Gartner found that organizations that have an above-average number of martech users achieve greater levels of martech utilization compared to others in the survey. For this reason, Gartner suggests adding external partners such as creative or media agency teams to facilitate collaboration and further improve impact.
According to survey results, respondents who adopt an agile or formalized planning approach to their martech roadmap struggle less with martech utilization than their peers with less mature roadmaps.
By incorporating regular sprints found in agile methodologies, you can identify gaps more quickly and capture the value of opportunities by breaking down large shifts in your martech ecosystem into smaller, more agile blocks.
Recommendations
Be sure to check out the full report to drill further down on these findings and recommendations provided by Gartner.
What do the results of this survey mean for you and your organization? How has the way you approach marketing technology changed because of the COVID-19 pandemic?
Let’s find ways to come together as a community so we can all make the most of our technology investments. Share your ideas and challenges in the comments below, in slack, and throughout the entire MO Pros community!
Source:
2020 Marketing Technology Survey: Cost Pressures Force Martech Optimization and Innovation
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