Martech capabilities exceed marketing’s ability to utilize them

As human beings, we love tools. And as Marketers we like a tool as much as the next professional. Of course, we need martech to make the magic happen, we believe it, furthermore we are trained to believe it by the market. With so many technologies racing to solve for a marketing’s every challenge, combined with marketers’ desire to evolve and advance, it is no wonder we end up with more tools and features than we are able to fully utilize.

To look at a particular area within Martech; Gartner’s 2021 Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs saw a continued evolution of AI and ML capabilities embedded among a growing set of features. Primarily aimed at providing marketers the tools to deliver progressive marketing campaign optimization and personalized experiences. In other words, some wonderful examples of marketer tool development leveraging advanced technologies.

However the overall utilization of marketing technology is stifled, as is exhibited in Gartner’s 2020 marketing technology Survey with respondents citing utilization of only 58% of their stack’s full capabilities.

But why?

Part of the answer can be found in Gartner’s 2021 Digital Marketing Survey. This year’s results providing clear signals as to where digital marketing leaders feel the most pain. ‘Delivering personalized experiences to customers’ is 5^th in the list with 63% of respondents stating that it represents a moderate to significant challenge. However all of the challenges cited above, it are enablers to it. Such as ‘leveraging integrated customer data to drive digital marketing execution’ or ‘hiring qualified personnel to support digital marketing efforts’.

It comes as no surprise, given the breadth of dependencies, and level of challenge, that delivery of personalized marketing messages and experiences requires more than just the right combinations of marketing technology features.

How  do you remedy this problem?

Gartner research addresses many aspects of this complex set of challenges, and there’s no silver bullet here, however Best Practices to Improve Martech Utilization suggests an alternative perspective to technology-first orientation, instead focusing on people and process as the principle enabler.

Resources are biased in this scenario toward ensuring people and process evolve in concert with the technology and data environment, as opposed to resourced being biased toward technology and data implementation outcomes.

For most marketers, the capabilities of their martech stack exceed the capability of the organization to use them. Martech utilization will never be 100%, this is about finding the right orientation, and  saturation point of martech utilization that creates most value for your organization and customers.

For a deeper dive into how this can be done, Gartner for Marketers clients should check out Best Practices to Improve Martech Utilization.