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Why martech integration needs more than technical skills

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Why martech integration needs more than technical skills

Integration is essential when building and optimizing your marketing stack. It creates a more efficient and effective digital ecosystem data that allows marketers to gain real-time insights into campaign performance while providing a holistic view of customers and marketing efforts. 

Yet for most organizations, martech integration is not a priority — and understandably so. The technical part of the endeavor makes it a resource-intensive and daunting task. On top of this, additional capabilities are required beyond technical readiness to successfully tackle the martech integration challenge. 


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Technical requirements for integration

Integrating your marketing technology stack into a unified digital ecosystem can be challenging and time-consuming. It can also be costly and frustrating without the right martech consultants to lead strategic and tactical road mapping and execution.

But failure to start with integration initiatives now presents many challenges, including technical debt. Technical debt in the case of marketing technology is similar to that of software development projects. 

In both instances, it’s primarily driven by the cost of rework caused by taking the easy road to a “now” outcome instead of using a more reasonable approach that might take longer.

Martech debt can be caused by:

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  • Lack of requirements and resources.
  • Inadequate vendor/product due diligence.
  • Rushing to solve the problem du jour.
  • Poor leadership. 

Martech integration is complex work that requires considerable technical acuity. Furthermore, organizational and martech skills and a culture of experimentation are at the core of successful integration initiatives. 

Let’s explore each of these areas in a bit more detail.

Organizational skills

When I say organizational skills, I’m not talking about time management, analytical thinking, attention to detail, etc. Although these skills are essential, I’m referring to the ability to build, lead, and work on cross-functional teams across an organization.

The most crucial organizational skill concerning martech is cross-departmental collaboration. Forging a mutually beneficial relationship between marketing and IT is vital.

The CMO and CTO didn’t have much in common a decade ago. Today, with the cloud, data-driven marketing, mobile, e-commerce, cybersecurity, and untethered consumers who move faster than every brand they engage with, CMOs often spend more on technology than their CTO colleagues. 

Some 25% of marketing budgets are spent on marketing technology, according to the 2022 Gartner CMO Spend Survey. That’s a considerable investment worthy of some risk management. In other words, developing the organizational skills necessary to build this relationship is an absolute must. 

For example, you may not need the IT department to directly develop or manage martech for your marketing organization. Still, your CTO partner likely has valuable experience and advice that can help you understand how to get it done and avoid the pitfalls that lead to 70% of projects failing to deliver on expectations.

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Martech skills

“74.18% of our participants reported that they already have someone explicitly in charge of marketing technology or plan to have someone within the next 12 months.” This is a key finding from a 2017 Chiefmartec survey of 275 marketing leaders.

Fast-forward some five years, and a Linkedin search of people in senior marketing technology roles returned over 5,000 people globally, with more than 3,000 in the United States alone. Some individuals carried multiple titles and were not fully dedicated to the martech role. Still, there’s no denying that the martech lead has become essential in businesses worldwide.

The martech leader is a critical resource for the CMO to help forge the marketing/IT relationship I mentioned above. Martech leaders need a solid mix of business, marketing, and technology skills. They are agents of change and know how to build relationships across the enterprise. 

Just as important, they have a vision of how business, marketing, and technology align to drive measurable business outcomes.

Read next: Aggregation is key to the new Martech Map

Culture of experimentation

Continuous innovation is rooted in experimentation

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Paraphrasing from Stefan Thomke’s excellent book, “Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments,” the most successful companies: 

  • Ensure the entire organization is steeped in the value of experimentation.
  • Has the required capabilities to think experimentally.
  • Is empowered to proceed under the mentality that “everything is a test.”

Our experiences during the recent pandemic prove that this model is, at the very least, worthy of exploration. 

COVID-19 sped up technology adoption by at least one order of magnitude and spurred unprecedented e-commerce growth worldwide. E-commerce sales increased by 43% in 2020, the first year of the pandemic, according to the 2020 Annual Retail Trade Survey (ARTS). It’s safe to say this e-commerce explosion was partly due to a tremendous surge in experimentation.

Many corporations embrace team experimentation, especially in software development. Team experiments help you discover new strategies or validate existing ones. Google recommends the following practices to help you improve team experimentation:

Empower teams. Get out of the way, and allow teams to work on new ideas to surface and achieve business goals that solve significant problems.

Provide information and context. Measuring organizational outcomes provides information critical to making the best decisions so teams can achieve expected results and solve problems. Providing teams with information and context lets teams make informed decisions about the right work.

Leave the details to the team. In the highest-performing teams and organizations, teams are allowed to make informed decisions about the tools and technologies they use. Understand and acknowledge that they are the experts, and empower them to change stories, specifications, and technologies when they decide it’s appropriate. 

Wrapping up

Strategically integrating disconnected and divergent martech tools into a unified digital ecosystem should be prioritized. This allows organizations to take full advantage of marketing technology investments and help reduce the risk of martech debt. 

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But martech integration needs more than technical skills. Beyond the tech chops required to harness the power of APIs and other integration tools, additional skills and cultural considerations are necessary for success. 


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


About The Author

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Gene has been a Martech Healer for over three decades, inventing the future while helping organizations and leaders ‘Ride the Crest of Change.’ A serial entrepreneur since his first newspaper delivery start-up, Gene developed early innovations in social media networks, digital-out-of-home narrowcasting, and SMS mobile marketing. He currently serves as the president and chief strategy officer at GeekHive, a New York-based marketing technology consultancy helping clients maximize their investments in martech.

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MARKETING

Trends in Content Localization – Moz

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Trends in Content Localization - Moz

Multinational fast food chains are one of the best-known examples of recognizing that product menus may sometimes have to change significantly to serve distinct audiences. The above video is just a short run-through of the same business selling smokehouse burgers, kofta, paneer, and rice bowls in an effort to appeal to people in a variety of places. I can’t personally judge the validity of these representations, but what I can see is that, in such cases, you don’t merely localize your content but the products on which your content is founded.

Sometimes, even the branding of businesses is different around the world; what we call Burger King in America is Hungry Jack’s in Australia, Lays potato chips here are Sabritas in Mexico, and DiGiorno frozen pizza is familiar in the US, but Canada knows it as Delissio.

Tales of product tailoring failures often become famous, likely because some of them may seem humorous from a distance, but cultural sensitivity should always be taken seriously. If a brand you are marketing is on its way to becoming a large global seller, the best insurance against reputation damage and revenue loss as a result of cultural insensitivity is to employ regional and cultural experts whose first-hand and lived experiences can steward the organization in acting with awareness and respect.

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

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How AI Is Redefining Startup GTM Strategy

AI and startups? It just makes sense.

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More promotions and more layoffs

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More promotions and more layoffs

For martech professionals salaries are good and promotions are coming faster, unfortunately, layoffs are coming faster, too. That’s according to the just-released 2024 Martech Salary and Career Survey. Another very unfortunate finding: The median salary of women below the C-suite level is 35% less than what men earn.

The last year saw many different economic trends, some at odds with each other. Although unemployment remained very low overall and the economy grew, some businesses — especially those in technology and media — cut both jobs and spending. Reasons cited for the cuts include during the early years of the pandemic, higher interest rates and corporate greed.

Dig deeper: How to overcome marketing budget cuts and hiring freezes

Be that as it may, for the employed it remains a good time to be a martech professional. Salaries remain lucrative compared to many other professions, with an overall median salary of $128,643. 

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Here are the median salaries by role:

  • Senior management $199,653
  • Director $157,776
  • Manager $99,510
  • Staff $89,126

Senior managers make more than twice what staff make. Directors and up had a $163,395 median salary compared to manager/staff roles, where the median was $94,818.

One-third of those surveyed said they were promoted in the last 12 months, a finding that was nearly equal among director+ (32%) and managers and staff (30%). 

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Extend the time frame to two years, and nearly three-quarters of director+ respondents say they received a promotion, while the same can be said for two-thirds of manager and staff respondents.

Dig deeper: Skills-based hiring for modern marketing teams

Employee turnover 

In 2023, we asked survey respondents if they noticed an increase in employee churn and whether they would classify that churn as a “moderate” or “significant” increase. For 2024, given the attention on cost reductions and layoffs, we asked if the churn they witnessed was “voluntary” (e.g., people leaving for another role) or “involuntary” (e.g., a layoff or dismissal). More than half of the marketing technology professionals said churn increased in the last year. Nearly one-third classified most of the churn as “involuntary.”

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Men and Women

Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540Screenshot 2024 03 21 124540

This year, instead of using average salary figures, we used the median figures to lessen the impact of outliers in the salary data. As a result, the gap between salaries for men and women is even more glaring than it was previously.

In last year’s report, men earned an average of 24% more than women. This year the median salary of men is 35% more than the median salary of women. That is until you get to the upper echelons. Women at director and up earned 5% more than men.

Methodology

The 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey is a joint project of MarTech.org and chiefmartec.com. We surveyed 305 marketers between December 2023 and February 2024; 297 of those provided salary information. Nearly 63% (191) of respondents live in North America; 16% (50) live in Western Europe. The conclusions in this report are limited to responses from those individuals only. Other regions were excluded due to the limited number of respondents. 

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Download your copy of the 2024 MarTech Salary and Career Survey here. No registration is required.

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