We all love playing around with WebMD and diagnosing ourselves, so this is no different!
Martech bloat can be a huge roadblock for organizations who were just hoping for a more streamlined, simplified structure through the power of modern marketing technology.
Don’t suffer in silence any longer, check out the symptoms below and seek help.
What is martech bloat and do you suffer from it?
Martech bloat occurs when an organization invests in too many marketing technology tools for its own good, making operations needlessly complex and minimizing ROI.
Symptoms of martech bloat could include:
- You don’t have a core, central platform (e.g. Marketo, Salesforce, Hubspot etc.) that acts as your hub, with the other accompanying technology acting as the spokes
- Your data is all over the place, living across a bunch of different systems
- You’re failing to analyze this data, or you’re having difficulty trying to transfer it to an analytics platform
- You spend far too much time creating processes to compensate for all of this martech, rather than moving the business forward
Nowadays, the average martech stack contains a dizzying 91 cloud services, so how can marketers separate the essential from the nice-to-have?
How to simplify your martech stack
We’re not talking about going back to the Stone Ages, we’re just suggesting some changes that will significantly streamline your stack.
Mark Gonzales, Senior Director of Customer Technology at Elicit, told CMSWire that a common challenge is that every marketer wants the “best-of-breed” technology for their specialty. “The email team will buy the best email tool, the social team [will buy] the best social tools, the digital marketing team [will buy] the best digital placement tools [and so on]. There’s no single platform that does it all on the market without significant compromises.”
Stop thinking in silos and start strategizing together. Lay out a martech roadmap that includes both your current needs and any long-term goals or needs. Within this roadmap, determine how these systems will all work together, how data will be transferred, and how your central hub will work with your spokes (i.e. tools).
We recently spoke to martech icon, Scott Brinker, who believes that these central systems will continue to consolidate.
“I think one of the things we’ll see is increasingly there will be a relatively small number of tent-pole solutions, these central systems of record that companies use as the foundation for their martech stack.”
“At the same time, almost all of these tent-pole solutions, all of these major marketing platforms, are truly becoming open platforms. They’re opening up more APIs, they’re creating programs to interface with third-party developer ecosystems. I think what that’s going to enable now is an incredible explosion of further entrepreneurial innovation around more specialized solutions that become much easier for marketers to plug into these platforms.”
His martech vision is that we’ll end up with the best of both worlds, the stability of a central hub paired with the diversity of specialized solutions.
How can I cut the cord?
Sick of feeling like the heroes that have to battle every evil comedian or orc army that comes up?
It’s all about setting boundaries, as Dr. Phil would say.
Start by controlling access to certain platforms and tech, and set guardrails within them to ensure the right people are working on the right tasks under the right permissions.
Additionally, by simplifying your martech stack and ensuring that all the tools work cohesively together, you’ll find that marketers won’t come up against as many obstacles as before.
To read the full interview with Scott Brinker, check out our blog here; Marketing Masters: Scott Brinker Reveals the Future Martech Roadmap.
