Unlocking the Power of Marketing Technology to Help You Meet Your Unique Goals
In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses are constantly on the lookout for ways to optimize their marketing efforts while keeping costs in check. This is where MarTech steps in, the seamless integration of marketing and technology that transforms how businesses can connect with their audience, streamline operations, and foster growth.
What is MarTech?
MarTech, short for Marketing Technology, is where technology intersects with marketing strategies to drive efficiency and innovation. At its core, MarTech leverages digital advancements and data analytics to enhance marketing efforts, improve customer interactions, and boost business outcomes.
Encompassing a broad array of software tools and platforms, MarTech offers adaptability across various marketing functions. From customer relationship management (CRM) systems and email marketing platforms to print marketing tools and marketing automation software, the MarTech landscape is diverse and continually evolving to meet the needs of marketers.
Within this arsenal, MarTech can help fulfill crucial functions pivotal to marketing success, including audience targeting, content creation and distribution, campaign management, lead generation and nurturing, and comprehensive data analytics and reporting (to name a few).
What Are the Benefits of Cost Optimization?
Efficiency and Automation: MarTech tools empower businesses to automate repetitive tasks and streamline workflows, minimizing the necessity for manual intervention and conserving valuable time and resources. By automating processes like email marketing campaigns, direct mail outreach, and social media advertising, businesses can enhance operational efficiency and reduce labor costs.
Targeted Marketing Campaigns: With MarTech, businesses can use data analytics and segmentation tools to target their marketing endeavors more precisely. By pinpointing and engaging specific audience segments based on demographics, behaviors, and preferences, businesses can optimize their marketing spend by concentrating resources on the most relevant and high-value prospects.
Improved ROI Measurement: MarTech tools offer robust analytics and reporting capabilities, enabling businesses to watch and assess the performance of their marketing campaigns with enhanced accuracy and granularity. By scrutinizing key metrics like conversion rates, customer acquisition costs, and lifetime value, businesses gain real-time insight into the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns, enabling them to quickly find underperforming channels, tactics, or campaigns and make timely adjustments to optimize results.
Scalability and Flexibility: Many MarTech solutions are engineered to scale alongside businesses’ requirements, enabling them to evolve and expand without incurring substantial added costs. Whether incorporating new features, venturing into new markets, or accommodating shifts in customer preferences, MarTech offers the flexibility and scalability businesses need to minimize costs while still being adaptable and responsive to market dynamics.
Tips for Executing Cost Savings
- Improve Data: To achieve cost savings effectively, prioritize using customer data as a valuable resource, which not only aids in understanding customer behavior but also enhances the overall customer journey. Every marketing action and customer interaction provides valuable insights into customer behavior. Focus on consistently improving data quality to show a comprehensive view of each customer, allowing for deeper analysis. Enhance this data by including transaction-based insights, sentiment scoring, and social media profiles to better understand customer preferences. Use master data to inform predictive models, improving the ability to predict customer behavior and refine segmentation strategies for targeted engagement. By using customer data in these ways, businesses can optimize marketing efforts, improve the customer journey, and realize cost savings.
- Resource Consolidation: With MarTech, businesses can streamline their marketing operations by merging multiple functions and tools into a single platform or suite of integrated solutions. This consolidation cuts redundant tools and licenses, reducing maintenance and support costs while enhancing efficiency. By having a connected ecosystem, businesses can better meet the demands of customers for personalized experiences across all touchpoints with the brand. This integrated approach significantly saves costs and ensures a seamless and cohesive customer journey.
- Invest in Team Training: Understanding how to effectively use your MarTech solutions is crucial for achieving efficient and cost-effective results. Investing in team training through webinars and other educational resources can significantly enhance technical ability and ensure the longevity of these tools within your organization. Consider reaching out to your service provider to inquire about available training courses. By empowering your team with the necessary skills and knowledge, you can maximize the value of your MarTech investments and drive long-term success.
- Choosing the Right MarTech Partner: Navigating the complexities of MarTech solutions can be time-consuming for busy business professionals. Partnering with a MarTech expert can simplify this process and ensure cost-efficient solutions tailored to your needs. It’s crucial to select a partner who aligns with your business goals. Before making a decision, assess how well the features and capabilities of a MarTech solution align with your specific objectives. Whether your aim is to improve lead generation, increase conversion rates, enhance customer engagement, or enhance operational efficiency, ensure that your chosen partner can deliver results that align with these goals. For example, consider our success in delivering a programmatic, highly configurable, and secure computer-to-computer connection via an existing marketing portal to a highly regulated Fortune 500 Financial Services Company responsible for providing timely annual notices to clients. This shows our ability to tailor MarTech solutions to meet the unique needs and regulatory requirements of businesses in various industries.
Final Thoughts
MarTech presents a wealth of opportunities for businesses to streamline operations, enhance marketing efforts, and drive cost savings. By understanding the fundamentals of MarTech, implementing best practices for execution, and choosing the right partners, businesses can leverage these tools to achieve their goals efficiently and effectively. With the right approach, MarTech can become a powerful ally in your quest for success in the digital landscape.
Ready to take your MarTech strategy to the next level? Contact us to learn how our term of performance-driven experts can help you harness the full potential of MarTech for your business.
As we’ve noted in other blogs, and tell our customers day in and day out – asset management is key to business success and reputation management. Not only is it key, but poor asset management can truly be the downfall of your marketing, and even of other aspects of your company. Asset management isn’t just the use of the right logo or letterhead. It’s fully utilizing all of your available, valuable content and resources across the board to get the most out of your messaging and produce the highest possible ROI. Failing to use materials isn’t just a waste – it’s a loss! In this blog, we’re outlining the real cost of poor asset management, and what leads to it.
What is Asset Management
When it comes to business marketing and communications, asset management is the organization, distribution, and utilization of all marketing and communications resources, from logos to sales sheets. It’s the process a company uses to execute, keep track of, and share resources that are pertinent to a company’s proceedings. If you’re interested in further understanding the importance of asset management, feel free to check out our blog “Managing Your Marketing Assets to Protect & Reinforce Your Brand”.
How Does Poor Asset Management Happen?
Bad asset management can happen, and continue to happen, for a variety of reasons. Here are the most common ones:
Too Many Communication Channels
When too many channels are used to communicate, distribute, use, and edit materials, it can be really confusing for your team! This confusion can cause a loss in productivity. Plus, when there are several versions on numerous channels – it’s easier to make mistakes and share or use the wrong materials.
Lack of Processes/Organization
As you may know, when it comes to many business practices, SOPs are vital, and asset management is no exception. If your company doesn’t have a system of processes for managing marketing and communication assets, how can employees be expected to know about materials, and to use the right materials? With SOPs, employees know what to use, when to use it, how to use it, and so on (and don’t have to play any guessing games). When employees have to guess and search, a lot of valuable time gets wasted (and, as you know, time = money).
Additionally, SOPs for the actual naming and organization of assets is just as important – as files can be labeled and sorted in a way that makes them easier to find.
No Versioning Control
If how you create, edit, update, and delete asset versions is not communicated and well-established, the wrong versions of marketing assets end up getting distributed and used.
Additionally, if there’s no standard for when assets get thrown out, things can get trashed too soon – causing a huge time waste of having to recreate already-created materials.
Using a Bad Platform (or No Platform at All)
It’s important that employees are able to find what they need, and that it’s easy for them to create, manage, and adhere to processes, communication, and organization. Sometimes, it’s not within budget to have a specific employee managing and creating these processes, and even if your company does have the money for this – one person likely doesn’t have the bandwidth to manage it all. We’d recommend an asset management platform, like the ones Strata creates and customizes, to store and distribute your company’s assets.
No matter what platform you choose, make sure it makes sense for your company’s individual needs, as they likely don’t call for a one-size-fits-all approach!
Costs of Poor Asset Management
As noted above, bad asset management can cause a variety of unwanted, unnecessary costs for your company. Let’s discuss some of the big ones.
Money
Of course, we’d be remiss to talk about how poor asset management can cost you, in general, lots of money – impacting your bottom line. “51% of marketers waste money producing or recreating assets that go unused because people don’t know they exist or can’t find them. In addition, 46% waste time downloading and uploading assets into different tools.” – Demand Metric.
Additionally, turnover is more likely to increase if employees feel confused, out of control, and lost, and it becomes more difficult to keep good talent (which you can’t truly put a price on). This difficulty hiring and keeping employees also impacts all the expenses used to hire – from recruitment and onboarding to training and corporate culture.
Lastly, when assets are unorganized, it’s much harder for teams to accurately measure the ROI of marketing materials. In turn, teams waste time making materials that don’t produce ROI, or miss out on creating materials that would be highly impactful.
Time
As mentioned above, poor asset management causes confusion and reduces employee productivity. Tons of time gets wasted when employees can’t find materials, or when employees are forced to frequently fix mistakes and re-create. Poor asset management often causes a lot of additional, unnecessary effort from the marketing team, who are more likely to create duplicate content due to a lack of organization.
Credibility
This one is fairly self-explanatory, but can be highly detrimental. If assets are unorganized and poorly managed, and wrong or old materials are distributed, customers are more likely to lose trust in your company. Inconsistency in messaging and branding can even cause and otherwise happy customer to begin to lose faith in your business.
Inability to Scale
If assets and materials are well-communicated throughout an organization, scaling to support new verticals and brands is much easier and more seamless. But, if your assets and materials are poorly stored and not up-to-date, new pieces often require starting from scratch – or at least close to it. Poor asset management makes it almost impossible for marketing teams to quickly adapt to meet changing business needs.
Opportunity Costs
Last but definitely not least, if an organization’s teams don’t have the right assets for sales, customer service, recruitment and other initiatives, opportunities get missed.
Speed is especially important when it comes to sales and conversions. If your team doesn’t have the right materials and assets right away, your competitors will win customers over.
And, when it comes to other departments, such as marketing, if your team doesn’t have the right assets to create, for example, an on-the-fly email or a quick social media post, they may miss opportunities to join the conversation, send news of a last-minute promotion, effectively manage your company’s reputation, and so on.
Interested in better managing your assets and avoiding the above costs? Contact our team or visit our Integrated Marcom Tech page for more information.