Gartner’s 2018 CMO Survey reports that the average CMO is spending 29 percent of their budget on marketing technology. That’s as much as 3 percent of overall company revenue. Whether or not your overall marketing budget is on par with industry leaders, marketing technology is a line item with a constant upward trend, and you need to understand the best ways to spend that money for your organization.
How should you determine how to allocate this budget? We suggest starting by matching the technology investment to your organization’s marketing life cycle.
Divide your existing customer life-cycle model into key stages. Consider each customer touchpoint, what story or information you are sharing, what data you need to collect and how that data will be used to improve the next touchpoint.
A simple model is REACH > INFORM > CONVERT.
At each of these stages, marketing technology plays a key role. Focus on making sure you have the tools that will have the most impact in each stage. Tie them all together in a common analytics package that can help you understand activities throughout the customer journey. A common tool set may look like the following:
Companies tend to overinvest in software licenses and underinvest in the integration between tools and the skills to manage them. As you travel along your marketing technology road map, understand the measurement, integration and staffing strategies for each piece of the solution before moving on to your next investment.
Data access and privacy issues are throwing a shadow over the technology sector, as the data explosion threatens to become an ethics implosion.
In a culture where ROFL does not bring to mind the piano-playing dog from The Muppets, where entire sentences are not only abbreviated to initialisms, but we have actually learned to interpret such shorthand and extract meaning from it, what role do accuracy and correctness play in written communication?