MarTech Bloat: What To Do With Too Much Marketing Data and Tools

Modern marketing is heavily data-driven. Through our work with large enterprises, we’ve seen how chief marketing officers (CMOs) need to be able to analyze data effectively to understand the preferences, behaviors, and needs of their customers, measure the success of their marketing efforts, and efficiently plan their future initiatives. However, with too much data and too many tools at their disposal, the modern marketer is overwhelmed.

The digital marketer today has many tools for their many tasks.

Figure 1. A zoomed-out view of MarTechMap’s table listing digital marketing tools by function 
Image credit: chiefmartec and MarTechTribe 

The image above might be hard to make out, so let’s zoom in a bit:

Figure 2. A zoomed-in version of MarTechMap’s table 

Even with just a partial view of the list of tools available to digital marketers, we can still clearly see how marketers are spoilt for choice — so much so that they find it hard to choose. However, there are some companies that don’t have this problem and go so far as to use over 50 solutions at a time. How many is enough? How would marketers know if their MarTech system has become unwieldly?

How to tell if your organization has MarTech bloat

These are the telltale signs that your MarTech stack needs rightsizing:

Your marketers underutilize MarTech. According to the 2023 Gartner Marketing Technology Survey, marketers utilized just 33% of the MarTech capabilities available to them. There are four main reasons why underutilization happens:

•    The technology ecosystem has become overly complex. 
•    Solutions overlap each other significantly, making many capabilities redundant. 
•    The organization does not enroll enough users to adopt and utilize MarTech tools. 
•    Marketers are turning more toward generative AI tools instead of MarTech tools to fulfill certain tasks. 

Ultimately, underutilization means that companies could be getting more business value out of its Martech stack, but they aren’t. This makes proving MarTech ROI difficult.

Your marketing budget is not spent optimally. When companies have numerous possible channels for digital content, such as social media platforms, blogs, and display ads, marketers can struggle with identifying the most efficient and profitable ones.

Your MarTech tools are misaligned. Key marketing tools and platforms sometimes don’t have a standard way of measuring basic data. For example, HubSpot and Google Analytics track website visits differently. This means that even simple data can be problematic, and having more tools could be making the situation worse.

Your MarTech has lost its purpose. When the MarTech ecosystem is sprawling, overly complex, misaligned, and riddled with redundancy, marketers find it difficult to handle data, draw actionable insights, and make data-driven decisions.

Avoiding MarTech bloat while keeping up with new technologies

Despite the known dangers of having an oversized MarTech stack, marketers must nevertheless keep up with MarTech changes. New technologies, tools, and platforms keep emerging regularly, and CMOs need to stay updated with these changes to stay competitive. The most prominent new tech as of this writing is generative AI. In fact, according to a Gartner survey, 63% of marketing leaders plan to invest in generative AI in the next two years.

Marketers can use generative AI to quickly produce assets such as blog posts, display ads, and packaging designs, among others. These assets can be close to or exactly be what marketers want, because generative AI models can learn specific branding guidelines and other creative constraints. With enough speed and consistent accuracy, generative AI that are geared for creating marketing content can make the team more efficient. Because of this, CMOs are being asked to communicate a vision for how marketing will capitalize on the promises of generative AI — from boosting productivity and efficiency gains to building competitive advantage through enhanced customer engagement.

Another reason why MarTech bloat is difficult to avoid is that marketers must go to where their customers are — and their customers are now on multiple platforms. Firms must provide them with a consistent and seamless experience across all these channels. To achieve this, marketers must fully understand a customer’s identity, interests, and needs. They must also learn how a customer can respond to their marketing initiatives via multiple digital and traditional touchpoints. All these require a holistic cross-channel analysis and attribution model — and the tools for fulfilling these requirements.

In short, the marketing department can’t help but expand its capabilities. It can’t shrink so much as to become unable to effectively compete for customers. At the same time, it must also temper its expansion for the sake of cost- and process efficiency. Given these conflicting priorities, commercial analytics services providers like Lingaro can help firms optimize their MarTech systems. 

Lingaro Commercial Analytics: Enabling marketers to optimize their MarTech system

Customers interact with businesses on different platforms. To illustrate, a clothing company announces a sale in a Facebook post. A customer likes the post, then just scrolls through her feed right after. She receives an email announcement but does nothing with it. When she gets an app notification that the sale has started, she taps the notification to open the app and proceeds to shop to her heart’s content.

The fluidity in which customers shift from one channel to the next means that analyzing channels as standalone items would not enable marketers to see the big picture when it comes to customer behaviors. Therefore, a holistic view is warranted, where every channel is analyzed together all at once. Marketing teams that come to this inevitable conclusion would naturally want to be able to achieve this, but often find that it is too technically difficult to achieve. This is why organizations come to rely on commercial analytics services from external providers like Lingaro.

Commercial analytics, in a nutshell, is firstly about making the most out of existing channels and tools by turning these into one whole, integrated system. Then, if capability gaps are discovered, we could address those by introducing additional specialized tools, such as a customer data platform. Lingaro’s commercial analytics services are transformative and can be administered at any point in an enterprise’s marketing optimization journey. In fact, the company provides an end-to-end solution called Complete Marketing & Media Analytics Transformation. Whether a client avails of one service or all of them, Lingaro’s business expertise, technical knowledge, and demand-driven approach guide their MarTech investment decisions and fulfill their MarTech requirements. 

A data-driven approach to building the right analytics platform

At Lingaro, we’re always proud to say that we don’t just focus on the technology side of what our clients need, but we align that with their business goals and objectives. Our combination of business expertise and technological excellence is what sets us apart from other service providers. From this foundation rises our data-driven approach, which guides our decisions on MarTech optimization. To illustrate, let’s look at our Complete Marketing & Media Analytics Transformation offering.

We begin the transformation by aligning the client’s analytics needs with their business goals and then creating an analytics transformation road map. Then, in a process called journey mapping, we assess how customers go through the marketing funnel as well as how marketers utilize the MarTech stack to complete tasks and accomplish goals. With the analytics and journey maps in hand, we can develop the client’s bespoke Media & Marketing Intelligence Platform, the nexus where all MarTech tools will be integrated and where all marketing data will be housed.

Last but not the least, we’ll address the challenge of reaching multichannel customers. Using advanced analytics modeling, we create marketing mix models and develop a tool for multichannel attribution for lead generation and conversion. A facility for reporting marketing ROI is the cherry on top of this multilayered MarTech cake.

Lingaro Commercial Analytics: The synergy of technical and business expertise

Our many technical and business experts help clients optimize their MarTech platform in the following ways:

•    Consumer and marketing analytics experts support product owners and help them form a MarTech strategy.
•    Marketing management and reporting experts serve as support network.
•    Data science and AI experts, data engineers, and business intelligence specialists enable advanced capabilities for the client’s domain.

Furthermore, our experts have substantial experience with and mastery of over 40 solutions that are dedicated to all areas of enterprise commercial analytics. We use all of these to help clients build a MarTech system that’s right for them.

An overview of how Lingaro’s capabilities and solutions
in commercial analytics solutions address marketing challenges 

A MarTech ecosystem can be boiled down to just the set of platforms and tools that help firms meet customers where they are. Optimizing this system, therefore, requires commercial analytics to find the most cost-effective configuration to do just that. This takes not only technology excellence, but also business expertise, which is why some of the largest enterprises in the world trust Lingaro to help them set their multibillion-dollar marketing budgets toward achieving marketing intelligence and innovation.