Palantir and Zeta Global announce strategic partnership.Read News
Palantir and Zeta Global announce strategic partnership.Read News
By Daniel Eisenhut, Group Vice President, CRM. For marketers, efficiency and effectiveness are two sides of the same coin. It’s crucial to invest in technology that’s a good fit for your use cases, organisational maturity, and that aligns with the goals of those operating it.
A recent Gartner survey of 405 marketing leaders revealed they’re only utilising 33% of their martech stack’s capabilities, marking a second consecutive year of decline (42% in 2022, and 58% in 2020). This not only indicates that businesses are paying for dormant functions, but that their stacks are a lot more complex than necessary.
This tips off a disastrous domino effect. In addition to being a waste of time and effort, low adoption rates can lead to low return on investment. Low ROI leads to difficult questions as to why your team is spending so much on software that no one is using.
To unlock the full potential of your marketing, you want to be sure to align the sophistication of your tech stack with your marketing organisation’s level of maturity. The system of checks and balances ensures you maximise the value of your tech investments without incurring unnecessary costs.
In this post, we’ll uncover why your organisation’s maturity should be driving your technology decisions and how to get the highest ROI for your marketing pounds.
Your organisation’s level of maturity plays a huge role in how you should be adopting technology. Marketing maturity at a rudimentary level can be identified by a shift from a seller-centric to a buyer-centric approach, with clear use cases in mind. They tend to be more project-focused, whereas those that are more established focus on holistic strategic growth.
Increasing levels of maturity are commensurate with levels of digital marketing sophistication and expertise. Marketing maturity is not synonymous with revenue, employee count, company age, or how many campaigns are being created. It’s based on how you interact with your customers and how central their needs are to your strategy.
Although marketing maturity is fluid, there are indicators and pain points you can identify to figure out where you fall on the spectrum. This framework from Marketing Profs is a great starting point:
Emerging
Aligned
Unified
Optimised
By understanding where your organisation falls on the maturity spectrum, you can better evaluate your needs and understand where your growth is coming from.
At a basic level, marketers have two choices when selecting technology investments—an all-in-one solution or a variety of point solutions. An all-in-one solution might look enticing because of easy implementation and quicker time-to-value, but the reality is often that organisations use only a fraction of the features they pay for, which leads to lower ROI.
On the flip side, point solutions, while more focused, might have features that will go unused by businesses at a lower stage of marketing maturity and require more effort to seamlessly integrate with each other. So, how do you make the right choice?
he first step is getting a sense of your marketing maturity, might we put you onto the 60% rule? The rule states that if you plan to use 60% or less of the features that a particular point solution offers, then an all-in-one solution will likely meet your needs. This is an easy way to determine where you sit on the maturity spectrum and avoid superfluous software.
During your evaluation, break your needs into major software categories (outlined below) so you can figure out where you need point solutions and where an all-in-one platform will suffice. Ask yourself how you will utilise each category when building campaigns, and most importantly, be honest. There’s no value in needlessly overcomplicating your stack.
Data Management
Data Enrichment
Automation
Personalisation
Omnichannel Execution
Analytics
By carefully parsing each category, you can better understand where you are more mature and where there is room to grow. This is important because opting for a point solution in an area where you are less mature might mean you’re paying for advanced features you don’t need or won’t use.
As your business grows and your marketing demands more sophisticated functionality, branching out to a point solution might become inevitable. Make sure you understand where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow so that you can invest in technology that will meet your needs in the long term.
At Zeta, we acknowledge the unique challenges businesses face in their technological journey. Recognising that a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t always the best, we’ve created an incredibly flexible integration framework to help marketers get the functionality they need to be successful.
Rarely does a single system account for all your use cases, which is why Zeta wraps around your existing tech stack and seamlessly fills all the necessary gaps. Not only does Zeta come with many pre-built integrations and connectors, but it also offers the flexibility to easily create custom connections that meet your business requirements. This ensures that you’re not backed into an all-or-nothing corner.
Unlike some platforms that bundle numerous features into a licence – whether you need them or not – we emphasise flexibility. Our goal is to make sure that you get the highest ROI for your marketing pounds. If a specific tool offers something we don’t, we advocate for integration, ensuring you spend wisely and get the functionality you genuinely need.
It’s essential to align strategy with technology. By auditing your tech stack against your marketing maturity, you can make informed decisions, optimise your investments, and ultimately, drive better results. At Zeta, we’re committed to partnering with you in this journey, helping you build the best possible experience for your customers.
The Zeta Marketing Platform empowers businesses to offer highly tailored experiences driven by AI.