Dive Brief:
- The most cited objective for marketing technology was increasing marketing ROI at 69%, followed by improving marketing efficiency (48%), improving decision making (40%) and gaining competitive advantage (36%), per Ascend2 research made available to Marketing Dive.
- The martech functions that respondents said would most likely increase ROI include analytics or predictive modeling (50%), data management (45%), marketing management (38%), content or user experience (37%), social or relationships and advertising or promotion (both at 35%), and e-commerce or direct sales (28%).
- The four challenges to acquiring marketing technology that were cited by at least more than one-third of respondents are: budget availability (59%), forecasting ROI (44%), integration requirements (43%) and prioritizing needs (36%).
Dive Insight:
Overall, the report underscores the value and importance of marketing technology, especially in driving ROI. The report found that martech had a dramatic impact on ROI with 97% of marketing influencers reporting ROI was increasing either significantly (52%) or marginally (45%) while the remaining 3% reported ROI was decreasing marginally.
Given that budgetary concerns were cited as the biggest challenge in implementing martech solutions, marketers would be well served to survey the martech field because while enterprise-class automation and artificial intelligence (AI) driven analytics tools might be out of reach, martech exists to match essentially any budget even if it’s something as simple as a social media tool or basic email automation software.
Nearly four-out-of-ten (39%) of marketing influencers believe a reasonable time-frame from the implementation of a marketing technology system to achieving ROI should be four to six months with a total of 93% believing ROI should be achieved in less than a year.