Way back when, there was a time where “technology” and “marketing” were two separate worlds. Engineers sat on one side of the road and marketers sat on the other, with not much of a link between them. But in this day and age, they’ve collided to create a whole new entity that has changed the face of how we do business: MarTech.
According to a recent Gartner survey, in 2018, 29% of CMOs’ budgets were being allocated to MarTech, up from 22% in the prior year. Clearly there’s a lot of opportunity available when it comes to implementing marketing technology into your business. While the possibilities with MarTech and how it can enhance marketing efforts are endless, that potential can also lead to an endless loop of questions and confusion when it comes to implementation and integration.
Scott Brinker is the creator of chiefmartec.com, the mind behind the MarTech conference, the VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, and the author of “Hacking Marketing”. Scott has played a major role in helping to curate this vibrant ecosystem of tools and resources. He’s witnessed the bridging of the gap between these two worlds, and is a foremost expert on the subject. And he’s got a lot to say about how to integrate tools like these most effectively.
API integration, finally
According to Scott, “all the major marketing platforms for years basically resisted this idea of ecosystems”. He explains that despite his best efforts to propose building everything themselves, the platforms turned their noses up at the offer. But eventually, they came around, realizing finally that there was something of value to the idea of integrating and playing nicely with other platforms. Now, the integrations are all essentially plug-and-play. This was a major win, because as Scott points out, “we should be able to figure out a way to get these things to connect instead of always forcing the poor marketer to figure it out from scratch on their own.”
The Value Gap
Most people in this space can relate to the idea that a product and its offerings may not meet everyone’s needs 100%. In fact, the product may not even be utilized 30%. Understandably, this can leave users feeling like they’ve wasted their time and/or money on a product that they haven’t gotten as much out of as they anticipated. Scott posits that this, in fact, is an adoption gap. “it’s not that the tool isn’t capable of actually delivering…the capabilities that were promised, …it’s not marketing automation that does it itself.” He references Avinash Kaushik’s 10/90 rule, saying that making the investment in a MarTech tool is just 10% of the process, and often made without an understanding of the enormous learning and training curve involved in the implementation of the tool. To Scott, this is why the value gap is so large.
“What makes a really great agency is when they see themselves as a deep operational partner with the client.” – Scott Brinker, Founder – chiefmartec.com
We live in a world of constant innovation and technical evolution. So why is change still such a hard concept to grasp? Scott says that in order to allow for digital transformation, you’ve got to change the process, and without doing that, the endeavor fails. “I think in digital transformation and MarTech adoption, the systematic failure is just not recognizing that the adoption of the tool is going to require organizational behavioral, mental model changes.” He suggests that marketing enablement is the answer – give your teams the tools and education necessary to get the job done.
According to Scott, keeping up with the pace of technology is necessary to succeed. And if you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the possibilities MarTech presents, Scott recommends finding a great agency partner for implementation. We tend to agree with him.
To hear more from Scott Brinker, listen to our interview with him: Marketing Technology: How Many Marketing Tools is Too Many?
To learn more from Scott Brinker about how to adapt successful management frameworks from the software industry to the practice of marketing, read his book “Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative”.