Marketing Tech Investment: Why Does Everything Take Longer?

Large companies and other organizations are spending more on MarTech in recent years than ever before. MarTech investment promises automation, insight, and speed to marketing teams who are too often stretched thin. Given their expense, there is tremendous pressure to get and prove ROI on your platform investment, especially as we look toward the post-pandemic period.

So once the MarTech purchase is made it will solve all your problems, right? Sadly, no. Instead, a common phenomenon after implementing a new solution is that efficiency seems to go down as MarTech investment goes up. Why?

Let’s drill down on six reasons why you might notice your efficiency waning post-MarTech and what you and your team can do about it.

1. Key data between systems may not be connected, causing slowdowns

As with so many areas of business, data silos within Marketing create inefficiencies, which is true regardless of your MarTech stack. Multichannel marketing can require a great deal of copying and pasting content between different systems, which duplicates efforts, multiplies work, and slows down performance.

2. No consolidation of data creates issues

Like data silos, failure to consolidate your data leads to slowdowns (even when your MarTech gives you the ability). Repeating the cycles of content creation and content entry into a given platform, coupled with testing, approval, and publishing, multiplied by the number of language or other segment variants... You see how the work adds up. Locating all social snippets for a given piece of content centrally in a CMS, for example, saves users’ time rather than forcing them to create separate posts for the content manually in LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

3. Lack of streamlined workflow that matches your approval process

Having a CMS is a valuable asset, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it is set up to help your specific business. For all their similarities, every CMS is its own product, and not all are created equal. Your CMS might have a dedicated workflow that doesn’t match your organization’s workflow, leading to slowdowns, confusion, and frustration. Not having a CMS that maps to your internal processes presents real challenges to the efficient use of the program.

4. Access issues with multiple users

Access challenges can impact the usability of your MarTech. For example, not all users will have required access to CMS fields they need to edit, or they may face a lack of flexibility around what can be entered in key fields, like SEO-related ones. This results in routine escalation of basic functions to those with permissions, causing bottlenecks. Similarly, lack of sufficient access can hinder user adoption and marketing operations overall. Users who lack adequate access may be reluctant to engage with a CMS, seeing it as a source of frustration rather than a powerful tool to aid them in their job. And for staff who are busy and can’t always log in to the CMS, any source of friction with the platform is likely to discourage them from engaging with the tool, making it feel like just one more thing they have to deal with.

5. CMS partner implementation challenges

Sometimes challenges to MarTech efficiencies can come from outside your organization altogether. Many implementation partners are good at designing UX, QA, and digital experiences. They will provide you with a beautiful website that converts. Unfortunately, they too often lack an understanding of back-end UI design for the CMS. The interface for back-end users can be challenging or filled with extraneous fields that are not needed and just become ‘noise’ for users, further slowing down getting done what is required.

6. Slow response from third-party development partners

Once the big splash of a website launch is complete and the initial bugs ironed out, as your site enters the ongoing maintenance phase of its life cycle, the responsiveness of third-party development partners can slow to a crawl when you need changes made. All website adjustments take time, but the reality of business is that you need them made yesterday. But you’re often hostage not only to the queue of changes you need but also all the changes that the other clients served by your third-party development partner. Priority items or emergencies—a Black Friday website crash, for example—for these other clients can also bump your items down.

How to avoid these issues

There are a couple of direct steps you can take at the outside of a MarTech implementation to set your business up for success and ensure that you don’t suffer the feeling that your technology is slowing you down.

First, do the data exercise upfront and consolidate as much as possible. Understand the critical data for your organization and where it is coming from. This will help you streamline your process in advance. Moving towards a consolidated model before implementing a MarTech solution will lead to a more efficient transition.

Think about this data exercise as a long-term investment. Yes, it’s a lot of work upfront, but the benefits of a proper setup compound over time. The best way to see the advantages and efficiencies of your MarTech stack is to take your time, think long-term, and plan for the long haul.

The second way to ensure the success of your MarTech is to find a CMS that works for you, not the other way around. CMS ease of use depends on your internal business process and the roles and responsibilities of your business and your campaigns. Your vendors and development partners should be recommending technology solutions that fit you and not pushing you into doing what they think you should be doing. Make sure to ask your CMS partner how they pay attention to the back-end user experience and what kind of training they offer for technology systems.

Symetris has extensive experience helping teams get the most out of their MarTech over the long run. For a free consultation on how we can help you, fill out the form below.