It seems like the age of consolidation is upon us.
The latest MarTech Landscape features over 6800 MarTech vendors (despite being called the MarTech 5000), each hoping to add some value to your workflow. But if it seems like you and your team are stuck in a never-ending cycle of internal selling, evaluating, implementing and training, you’re not alone. Are we making things harder on ourselves with too many marketing tools? Are the tools making us as fast and nimble as we need to be?
According to The CMO Survey, conducted twice a year by Duke University, Deloitte, and the American Marketing Association, fewer than half (48.4%) of marketing leaders rate their company's marketing excellence as strong or excellent. This number has decreased over the past few years, despite the growth in Martech vendors.
It’s sometimes easy to forget that every marketing tool is simply that – a tool that is designed to make your life easier by fixing a specific problem. But what if all those tools are not actually helping? What if they’re just adding complexity and activity that’s not actually contributing to success? Then maybe it’s time to start simplifying your Martech stack.
This is certainly one of the key reasons for the explosive growth in CDPs. More and more businesses are looking to optimize the technology they have, rather than purchase new point solutions, and ultimately better understand the data available to them. CDPs rise to the top because they are purpose-built to consolidate disparate data sources and simplify the process of uncovering key customer insights to drive better marketing decisions.
A lot of companies are finding that in today’s market, speed and agility are key competitive advantages. If you’re wasting time training staff on redundant tools and managing multiple piles of siloed data, then it may be time to step back and analyze your needs. It’s quite easy to perpetuate a complex situation – you inherit certain tools, processes, ownership struggles -- but more than ever, marketing teams need to strive for agility and focus, and that often demands simplification.
Case in point: A multichannel retail client of ours was feeling the pain of vendor and technology overload. Technology systems weren’t being used to the fullest capability, our client didn’t have access to systems owned by some of their vendors, and customer data was completely siloed. We worked with them to implement a customer data platform that helped them integrate all of their data, providing them with 360-degree view of the customer all within a single platform. The other benefit? They were able to replace 7 of their vendors with just 2, streamlining their marketing workflow and helping drive double digit growth in their business.
Your customers are demanding a seamless experience from your company. Shouldn’t you strive for a seamless marketing experience as well? Just consider how much more effective your team could be with a more streamlined and consolidated tech stack.
For more information on how a CDP can consolidate your data, visit https://quickpivot.com/customer-data-platform/. If you’d prefer to talk with us specifically about your company’s potential use case, let’s set up some time to .
