Why Martech Matters & How Businesses Must Use It

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Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) in Information Technology (IT) companies as large as Google and as small as the smallest startup pour over Gartner deliberations and insights.

If you’re not in the IT sector you may have never heard of Gartner, a global  industry analyst firm that makes sense of the IT sector, user trends in IT, and who’s “in” and “out” in the IT space.

When Gartner shines its spotlight on the martech (marketing technology) space (Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2018-19) it’s worth taking a look at what they say.

Here are five reasons why you should should care about martech and why it’s useful and important for Small-to-Medium Businesses.

The Investment In Martech Is Big

Gartner reports that, although flat, martech represents “a whopping 29% of total marketing expense budgets” – with overall marketing budgets also flat, and labour costs dropping.

In other words, more and more companies are using martech in new, interesting and strategic ways to get their messages into market, to become faster at responding to changes in the market and to changing client needs, to understand and respond to their customers, and to start to make sense of the big data in their organizations. 

SMB take-out: at whatever level, use martech to manage your marketing and business development programs. Choose a solution that gives you real-time insights so that you can respond in real-time. Make sure your budgets work as hard as possible for you.

Digital Accounts For One-quarter Of Marketing Spend

According to Gartner, digital covers the full spread of options: paid search (SEM), organic search (SEO), websites and email – and represents one-quarter of all marketing spend

RELATED ARTICLE: Everything small businesses need to know about SEO

Gartner also notes that marketers and businesses always need to prove the value of marketing techniques and of their investments in them. Gartner claims it’s difficult to demonstrate the economic impact influencers have on Return On Investment (ROI).

We believe you can, by assessing the engagement influencers have, the frequency with which they discuss and share your content, and the size of any direct investment you might choose to make.

RELATED ARTICLE: Influencer Marketing – 6 Ways You’re Probably Doing It Wrong

SMB take-out: continue to invest in paid search, organic search, and paid and organic social media  – in the proportions that deliver the best ROI to your businesses. Use martech to track the performance as you spend – don’t wait until the end of the month or the end of the program. And use martech to understand more about the influencers you should engage with.

Consider The Relative Importance Of Customer Experience, Customer Analytics, Acquisition And Retention

Gartner points out that customer experience (CX), customer loyalty, and customer retention and growth, have dominated recent CMO focus, including on the skills they seek to hire.

For example, CMOs estimate that 18% of their overall marketing budgets are allocated to CX programs, and as Gartner emphasizes, the point of CX is to create business value.

SMB take-out: focus on which of customer experience, analytics, acquisition and retention are your primary focus – and the answer can be “all four”. Then use data to create and roll out your programs, and refine. Ensure you transfer customers from one part of your relatinship funnel to the next, as they move from acquisition through to experience and retention.

Awareness, ROI and Market Share

Many CMOs still focus on awareness over ROI, customer value and customer satisfaction.

This is a real surprise when any number of other pieces of research indicate the strategic imperative of CX for CMOs.

We agree with Gartner when they say that it’s important for marketers to measure what matters for both marketing and the business.

SMB take-out: awareness is important, but don’t ignore customer experience and other direct measurements of customer satisfaction. Use martech to set up KPIs that you can track.

Personalize

Digital allows personalization, and consumers and B2B prospects all prefer personalization. It’s the ultimate manifestation of the mantra, “What’s in it for me?”.

CMOs spend an average of 14.2% of their budget on personalization efforts, and this level of investment applies across most industry sectors, say Gartner.

SMB take-out: use the data you receive as a result of your personalization activities to refine, refresh and revisit what you communicate. If you have the luxury of direct feedback from your customers, act on it.

Digivizer’s SaaS technology makes martech affordable and accessible to SMBs and startups, who can now measure the performance of their programs, take action, and get the maximum returns on their martech investment.

With martech now firmly established in the armouries of large organizations, and with martech implementations more-sophisticated than ever, it’s time for SMBs to emulate their large competitors. With a platform like Digivizer, they can.

About Digivizer

Digivizer helps businesses understand and get more from their digital investment across all major social and search platforms. Digivizer’s platform helps businesses measure and understand the performance of their digital marketing programs across owned, earned and paid media, in a single view, in real-time.

Digivizer offers plans that scale to the number of users, the number of connected paid and search accounts, and the number of influencers and hashtags being tracked. Digivizer Free plan offers 30 days of data for you to measure your performance.

Digivizer is an ad partner and development partner to the major social and search platforms including Facebook (incorporating Instagram), Twitter, LinkedIn and Google (incorporating YouTube).


Author: Alan Smith / Head of Strategic Business Communications at Digivizer

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