Access to Flexible Martech Integrations is Key to CX Success
The marketing technology stacks or Martech stacks owned by modern CMOs are getting more complex and rigid with each passing day. If CX is your key differentiator in the marketplace, your martech stack must be a great piece of art and engineering. Alas, only a handful of CMOs can boast of working with a martech stack that fulfills their CX promises. When a new CMO is hired, they are mostly expected to turn around the CX fortunes within a few weeks, the existing and upcoming challenges related to its adoption and usage notwithstanding. Even the most seasoned CMOs and martech practitioners find it difficult to bring in a holistic approach to solving the CX problems in such a short time. Reason?
The reason is the Martech stack’s SaaS spread which creates silos within the organization. While CMOs are forced to wear multiple thinking hats to strategize their CX efforts in a hyper-competitive marketplace, an expansive and disjointed martech stack kills the momentum.
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A lack of flexibility in the integration of a new martech solution with other platforms in the stack would likely emerge as the number one barrier in the CMO’s checklist. And, if not addressed at the earliest, this lack of flexibility could affect the customer experience (CX) strategy of your marketing and sales teams.
According to a report on the martech integration strategy, a winning CX strategy is built on the foundations of customized martech integrations that supercharge an engineering team’s ability to create new ones using out-of-box tactics. Customized martech integrations and the flexibility to create new integrations could help any CX team achieve its immediate and long-term goals with ease. Marketing Cloud vendor, Zeta Global commissioned the study and published the findings in its report titled, Elevate Your Integration Strategy for Maximum Business Impact.” This study examines the current state of marketing technology or Martech and the biggest challenges that brands face in their quest to improve CX.
We reviewed the report to understand the role of customized martech integrations in generating powerful and relevant CX results for brands. This is what we found.
Marketing budgets could be dropping, but Martech stacks are exploding in size!
Are you aware of the size of your martech stacks? How many apps and solutions feature in your marketing SaaS environment? An independent source mentioned that business leaders often underestimate the size of their enterprise technology stacks, which include martech tools and apps.
Marketing budgets are shrinking at an unprecedented rate in 2023. This means CMOs are looking at new Marketing Technologies to solve their problems and meet customer expectations without blowing a hole in their budgets. While it’s exciting to be working with all the new and emerging Martech tools, especially those that are powered by AI, CMOs are overwhelmed by the obscure results generated in the system.
The report found that a majority of organizations have more than 10 martech tools and solutions within their stack. Only 50% of marketers possessed the capability to identify and manage all the martech fragments to solve their marketing bottlenecks. Almost all the marketing bottlenecks resulted from poor integration, and fixing these meant spending more time, effort, and money, eventually resulting in further complexities with the stack. Also, poor integration created more challenges for the martech team when new solutions are added to the stack. When the budgets are shrinking and achieving marketing ROI is getting harder, promising cutting-edge CX outcomes fly off the radar faster than you can imagine.
What CMOs and CIOs could do to improve their organization’s CX deliverables?
Consolidate the martech stack with a comprehensive martech integration strategy.
Optimizing the martech stack with flexible integration allows the users to connect data from multiple solutions, analyze disparate data, and streamline the outcomes without feeling the pain of using too many solutions in the stack.
Companies could be using 11 tools that impact CX
A poorly crafted martech integration strategy can have multiple, rolling effects on business KPIs. Poor integration of martech tools can drastically reduce a marketing team’s ability to launch campaigns (59%) and cause revenue loss (55%).
CX trends are fueled by martech solutions, the data they ingest, and the best practices that govern privacy management strategies. 84% of respondents mentioned they use 11 or more solutions that impact CX. Nearly one-third of users store and process nine different types of customer data using these martech tools for their CX efforts. Instead of helping CMOs in building and delivering a solid CX strategy, these fragmented martech stacks hamper their ability to create personalized experiences for customers. When budgets are tight, losing revenue to a poorly-performing martech stack can dampen growth and sustainability.
Working with too many martech tools increases your attack surface
54% of respondents surveyed for this research cited that too many tools increased their security vulnerabilities. A new tool in the martech stack opens up new attack points for threat agents. Moreover, a misaligned martech stack negatively impacted the brand’s reputation and ability to deliver an exceptional CX, resulting in further loss of revenue opportunities across multiple functions.
What is a good CX environment?
The latest survey proposed high-quality insights into what an ideal CX environment could look like. A good CX environment is free of bottlenecks and complexities related to integration and usage. It provides seamless access to a variety of customer data in a centralized, secured, and integrated ecosystem.
There are two problems associated with using a large martech stack for CX.
First, not every martech solution is tapped 100% for achieving CX goals. Some of these tools could remain hidden under the layers of “most preferred” and easy-to-use solutions.
Second, all the martech tools could be giving fragmented results which becomes very hard to implement in an existing CX campaign.
Both problems lead to an inflation of cost and inefficiency.
What are the benefits of working in such a CX environment?
Hear it from the CX practitioners.
Almost 6 out of 10 marketers attributed their CX success to a fine-tuned and well-integrated martech environment that empowered them to deliver:
- exceptional tailor-made experiences (63%)
- improved internal collaboration (61%)
- superior customer targeting for campaigns (61%)
- faster campaign execution and delivery (60%)
Reduced duplication of efforts is another major benefit of working in a well-integrated CX environment. 48% of marketing professionals agreed to this aspect of Martech consolidation for CX campaigns.
A good CX environment is built on a powerful martech strategy that removes all the pain points that marketing professionals have to face while analyzing customer data using fragmented tools. If your CX team is facing difficulties in testing and optimizing campaigns and feeling threatened by security vulnerabilities, it’s time to relook into your existing martech integrations and switch to a more robust and flexible environment. This would accelerate your data activation, enabling you to execute personalized CX campaigns based on holistic customer profiles and personas.
Conclusion: Our take on Martech Integration
Marketing teams definitely need a more robust approach to martech stack integrations and consolidation. A flexible integration strategy could make all the difference to your CX results, especially when every brand that you are competing with is fighting for the same limited attention time from the customers. Thankfully, Martech vendors understand these challenges. Top martech vendors that we speak to, now deliver sophisticated CX-as-a-service solutions within their cloud offerings. Marketing professionals can build their own customized martech stacks using flexible integrations to support their varied CX campaigns. It includes the use of CDPs and marketing automation tools for augmented intelligence, deeper analytics, and efficient data activation in a secured environment. There is another family of martech applications that seems to be gaining prominence. It’s called Data Clean Rooms or DCRs. With the rise of AI and deep learning capabilities, marketing professionals can consolidate their entire martech stack using new-age capabilities such as Co-pilots, code generators, and no-code/ low-code automation solutions.
So, what are your thoughts on the existing CX trends and the state of your martech stack?
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