Martech 2019: Marketing technology shows no sign of slowing down in Northern Europe

Is your business prepared for the future of customer experience?

Odyssey, Wiraya, Swedma and CMO goes TECH went to marketing managers and asked for their views on how different challenges, priorities, learnings, and investments helped evolve their customer interactions.

The result is Martech 2019, an exploratory study which aims to understand how marketers are investing, deploying, and getting real value from marketing technology.

You may wonder what Martech really is. The term refers to business strategies combined with technology in order to become more customer focused.

Both consumer behaviours and technology are constantly changing. When we combine the two together - fluctuating behaviours and evolving technology - huge doors open up, and allow us to create solutions that can help organisations provide automated and personalised customer interactions throughout the customer journey.

However, in order to get the full effect and avoid costly mistakes, you need to keep a close eye on competence, processes, management commitment, data management, and the new privacy policies.

Let's dig into some of the insights which have emerged from the survey.

Current scenario

In last year's Martech report, more than 50% of interviewed CMO's couldn't define Martech. This year, surprisingly, the concept appeared way more established.

Looking at the action side, there are further good news. Indeed, Martech shows no intention to slow down. As a matter of fact, 96% of marketers believe Martech is necessary for achieving future goals and 91% are planning to increase automated customer interactions by using it. Moreover, 82% believe it has changed how they interact with their customers.

Challenges

When questioned as to what the three biggest challenges are to becoming a successful Martech user, 62% say competence, 51% say integration between solutions, and 43% named organisation.

Overall, there seem to be four common challenges for the whole marketing industry:

• Actionable data: The data is there, what is needed is the ability to integrate and act on it. Many systems have not delegated responsibility for the quality of the data.

• Right competence: Businesses either lack analysts or Martech specialists in SEO/SEM, marketing automation, content and similar.

• Customer ownership: After almost a year with GDPR, companies seem more cautious but CMOs still look at being compliant as a challenge.

• Internal clarity: CMOs need support from many departments and commitment from management - realities where cross-functional virtual teams work together seem to be more successful.

Investment

Marketing technology has seen a significant share of marketing budgets in recent years: 93% of marketers will keep increasing their investments in technology in 2019.

According to Gartner's international report, there has been a 12% difference between 2017 and 2018 on CMO's spend in Martech.

29% of the marketing budget is spent on technology (17% in 2017), making it the single largest area of investment, and in 2018 it surpassed labour costs.

This means that costs previously included in agency fees, such as services within Google's marketing platform, are now moving back in-house and taken as Martech operating costs. The digitisation and changing buying behaviours have also turned traditional sales costs into marketing technology costs.

In conclusion, here are a few recommendations to help you take the right path when it comes to marketing technology:

1. BE REALISTIC: With the increased investment in Martech, it is important to check the technology used on a regular basis so that it actually links to a business return.

2. TAKE A HOLISTIC APPROACH: Make sure that you can integrate the systems/software, customer data and your marketing activities.

3. BE OBJECTIVE: A lot of resources are spent on personalisation efforts - make sure you can measure its success and you know how to properly manage the data.

To read more about Martech 2019, visit https://odyssey.se/martech .