Marketers ‘under-utilising’ martech platforms despite rise in investments

Marketers are utilising less of marketing technology or martech platform capabilities on average than ever, according to analyst firm Gartner, which found that marketers leverage only 42% of their capabilities available in their marketing technology stack overall, which is down from 58% in 2020.

A marketing technology stack is essentially a cluster of technology-based tools that digital marketers use to efficiently perform marketing activities, across various digital channels using tools, including analytics, email marketing, social media, customer relationship management (CRM) and project management.

As per Gartner, the lower utilisation of marketing technologies is a matter of concern because the survey shows chief marketing officers (CMOs) are reported allocating a quarter of their entire marketing expense budgets to marketing technologies this year.

“Despite turbulent budgets in previous years and current economic headwinds, tech investments are a priority for CMOs and proving their ROI is more crucial than ever,” said Benjamin Bloom, Gartner Marketing practice VP and analyst. “Yet the challenges associated with martech underutilisation, such as new business models and disrupted customer journeys, are making it difficult for marketers to demonstrate technology’s value,” he added.

The lower utilisation rate was attributed to an overlap of features among martech solutions (30%), challenge in identifying and recruiting talent to drive adoption (28%), and complexity or sprawl of the martech ecosystem (27%).

Across marketing channels, nearly one-third of respondents said they’ve deployed technology to support social commerce (32%) and 30% are piloting such solutions. Just over one in four (26%) also said they’re deploying technology to support advertising in the metaverse - a virtual-reality space in which users can interact with a computer-generated environment and other users - while 37% are piloting related solutions. NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are also popular and nearly 60% of respondents are exploring or piloting technology to enable creation of these Web 3.0 tokens.

Another popular technology investment area is streaming audio and podcasting advertising: 25 per cent have deployed tech solutions for this purpose, and 66 per cent are exploring or piloting associated technologies.

“The fact that marketers are already leveraging technology to support emerging activities underscores their desire to outfox the competition and get a head start on controlling their own destinies in a world of more fallible identifiers,” said Bloom.

While the percentage utilisation in a martech platform is dependent on the industry and use case, an earlier Gartner report released in 2021 estimated that martech makes up 26.2% of the average marketing budget. The report said, two-thirds of the CMOs surveyed aim to boost marketing technology spending and that CMOs utilising 70% of their martech stack’s capabilities were achieving 20% better marketing ROI than their peers.

Siva Prasad Nanduri -Chief Business Officer(CBO), TeamLease Digital, who rates martech among the "hottest jobs in India in 2022 and beyond", said, “organisations should look at empowering or upskilling marketers to use new tools, improve analytics to drive a better customer experience, if they want to focus on customer journey analytics and decisioning”.

Companies including Hubspot, Clearbit, Aircall, Heap, and others are in a race to creating martech stack today.

Another report from Ascend2, a US-based marketing research firm, found out around 38% of respondents prioritise a martech stack that easily integrates with current technologies. Interestingly, only 19% indicated that they have a martech stack strategy, while 60% were still working on a strategy.

That said, marketing tech stacks are getting smarter, sleeker, and infinitely more streamlined. “This not only saves time and makes marketers more efficient, it reduces the amount of budget required for effective campaigns,” the report noted.