Marketing Technology (i.e., MarTech) spending is up, but let’s face it: Digital experiences that marketing technology can deliver often underperform. MarTech investment in the U.S. grew by more than 14% in 2022 (after more than 20% growth in 2021), but that’s not yet translating into standout experiences. Forrester predicts “an erosion of CX differentiation in three-fourths of industries” in 2023, with most teams “stuck on basic find-and-fix work, unable to help their organizations innovate.” So, as a CMO (or CTO), how do you solve this challenge and maximize the promise of your MarTech stack investment?
From my perspective, a powerful way to solve this conundrum is to ensure that your employees have the resources and the support they need to learn and innovate. Enable them with the freedom to explore the possibilities of the technology and remove any barriers that make their jobs frustrating. This will translate into a better experience for your team and an even bigger improvement to your customer experience overall.
People first; Technology second
In many cases, marketing teams are following an outdated model of how to choose, implement, and leverage MarTech tools. They follow a “find-and-fix” approach which focuses on purchasing individual, point solution-based technology tools for specific experiences they want to create. The result? A disjointed, even troublesome MarTech stack that includes landing pages and a website built with different technology, multiple analytics capabilities and siloed marketing automation. These tools may be providing the experience the marketing team wants to provide to their customers, but there is no synergy or coordination, so findings have to be manually developed.
Rather than focusing on buying that shiny MarTech tool that promises to solve your CX problem and then expecting your people to adapt to it, marketers and IT teams need to unite and focus on building an internal experience that supports the employees.
People-focused MarTech in action
What does this fresh approach to MarTech selection and implementation look like in practice? Let’s dive into some important assumptions as I take you through a simple, but powerful exercise you can do to visually illuminate where you have gaps in your people experience.
I’m going to assume that all the hard work has been done to create a customer journey flow and is something that already exists in your marketing organization – and it is your starting point for mapping out your employee experience. The concept is simple: Get your marketing team into a conference room for a few hours, display your customer journey and, as a team, take a shot at matching-up the technology used in each step of that journey. Make sure to include all of the technology tools (like a CRM or point of sale system) that are linked to each step of the CX journey, not just what the marketing calls their MarTech tools.
After mapping the technology identify which department owns each of these tech tools. Then, list the roles supporting each of these tools and match a name to each role. Now, take a step back from your masterpiece, take a breath and analyze what this new view is showing you. I promise this will be a very eye-opening experience – but your job is far from done. Your masterpiece won’t be perfect, it needs to be shared with the rest of your organization, starting with IT.
Follow this same process with your IT friends, asking them to fill in anything that is missing or incorrect.
Your IT team will know who you need to speak to next if the picture is still not complete. Depending on how your organization is structured, you may need to meet with several different parts of your organization to understand how certain technology tools are being used. Expect this audit to take many rounds of edits before it is complete.
Keep in mind that you only need to focus on understanding the technology that your marketing efforts depend on. This is not a “map the whole organization’s tech stack”-type of exercise. It may be necessary to limit the number of teams you work with, otherwise you’ll never finish this exercise. Just make sure you include the team and the decision makers that know how the data flows through each of the tech tools if this is not part of what your IT team supports.
A roadmap to better experiences and MarTech ROI
The perceived goal of this exercise is to understand where you have gaps and identify supporting technology to enable your CX. Along the way, you’ll gain a strong understanding of the pain points and challenges your team faces daily. It is important to bring empathy to each of your meetings, especially with your team. Expect to uncover unintended dysfunction and communication silos between departments. That’s OK… this is normal and happens in nearly all organizations.
The final stage of this process is to get your employees vested in their – and your – success. Challenge each of your team members to create the ideal employee journey map for themselves based on the outcome of this exercise. Challenge them to be bold and innovative with their personal journey map.
Ask them to choose one of the pain points or challenges that they would like to own and solve for.
- What do they want to do to make things better?
- Do they have a skill that isn’t being used to its fullest or a new skill that they want to learn that will help improve their experience?
- How can they bring other areas of the organization into their daily lives to reduce communication silos?
Ensure that each of the goals that are set as part of this exercise are tied to a metric that the employee can be measured by.
This “people first, then technology” approach takes a bit of time to understand but can provide a clear path to more effective MarTech implementation and improvements. Plus, you build alignment and consensus throughout your Marketing and IT teams.
You do not have to do this process on your own – hire a third-party partner to help you if you need the additional support. Taking the time to understand your employee journey will provide long-term benefits and proves that happy employees create better customer experiences.
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