Discover how to optimize the value of your organization's resources to fuel resilient business growth
Marketplace uncertainty has expanded the role of marketing in many businesses. Marketers are now often co-architects of resilience strategy, enabling business growth amidst marketplace headwinds while helping organizations minimize costs. Yet resilience can be costly. It requires a well-equipped team capable of leveraging technology and data to create high-performance strategy. It necessitates ready access to advanced analytics, allowing marketers to draw insights from raw data and quickly adjust front-office strategy in response. In addition, marketers must craft user experiences that accommodate evolving consumer preferences while ensuring that day-to-day decisions are in sync with current revenue imperatives. Lastly, marketing teams must also ensure that MarTech and other sales enablement tools are performing with optimal efficiency and that when new technologies are adopted, they provide tangible and long-lasting benefits that drive revenue.
With marketing budgets at an all-time high and the importance of marketing increasing in more than half of all companies during the pandemic1, it is critical for marketers to understand how to optimize their investments when facing these challenges. There are three critical components to optimize marketing’s impact in an organization:
Underutilized MarTech tools mean productivity drain. When IT and marketing teams collaborate using MarTech and sales enablement technology that is user-friendly, efficient, and simple to integrate within existing workflows, performance (rather than debugging) can become a priority.
As organizations increase their spending on MarTech tools, it is critical for marketing teams to select and integrate technologies that justify their expense with demonstrable value, from providing better sales performance to enhancing the relevance of customer insights. Marketers’ best strategy for highlighting the value of their existing MarTech or justifying new investment is to focus on the areas that are explicitly connected to cost efficiency and revenue growth. Marketers should provide answers to the following questions:
CMOs report allocating a quarter of their entire marketing budget to marketing technology1, yet respondents say just 42% of the capabilities in their MarTech stack are utilized2. Organizations struggle to utilize technology for a multitude of reasons:
Couple underutilization with the research showing that marketers often state there is significant overlap in marketing technology solutions2 and it is likely that organizations are overinvesting in tech.
Technology overlap is also common following M&A activity and with over 36K M&A transactions in 20222, teams should pay close attention to hindering impacts on their MarTech stack and its associated budget.
As a result, organizations are budgeting for multiple tools that perform redundant functions instead of recognizing consolidation and cost reduction opportunities. This lack of utilized technology impacts cost-effectiveness of implemented MarTech.
Here is how to stop wasting your marketing budget:
1
Strategically invest in talent and technology with a revenue-building focus
Organizations must evaluate how to identify and recruit new tech talent to enable utilization of technology and drive efficient resource allocation. One way for organizations to fill these skill gaps is to seek out newly available tech staff following recent downsizing instances at tech companies.
2
Share relevant data, resources, and revenue objectives across the entire organization
Once the right resources are identified, a cross-functional and collaborative operating model will support sharing of data and insights across the organization. Eighty percent of marketers say that their organization leads customer experience initiatives by coordinating across marketing, sales, service, and commerce.
3
Stay the course on collaboration
Resilience is a collaborative process and it requires consistent, purposeful interactions across teams to make it work. This trend of cross-functional collaboration can also be seen within technology; marketers adopted four collaboration technologies on average in 20224. Intentional operating model design that considers available skill set, collaboration, and technology utilization will support value realization of marketing investments and drive insights across the organization.
As organizations face uncertainty, inefficient marketing processes are often the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to quickly cutting costs. Yet front office teams also drive revenue and provide the infrastructure for the inflow of vital customer insights. That means front office teams need to gain access to MarTech and analytics systems that help them limit productivity drain, amplify performance, and streamline tasks so that performance will consistently outpace marketing costs.
As you focus on the challenges ahead, KPMG can help you improve the ROI of your marketing investments by informing strategies for marketing technology, marketing operations and processes, and talent with connected insights. If you have identified front office challenges within your organization, reach out to our Customer Advisory contacts.
