As marketing technology improves and evolves, it can be challenging for today’s marketer to keep up with all the new tools, and understand which ones best fit their needs. Balancing the level of need with concerns about budget, competitiveness, implementation time is never easy work, and it can even lead to paralysis where a team just treads water with the martech it has because sticking with a mediocre or worse status quo is less daunting a challenge than doing the work necessary to identify and implement the right solution for the future.
It was with that in mind that we approached the research report, “Marketing Technology Trends from the Enterprise Perspective,” alongside Ascend2. We wanted to dive deeply into the minds of the marketers at Super Sender companies to better understand their priorities, the biggest challenges they face, and what’s working the best for them to meet their goals.
Highlights from the report
- Enterprise marketers’ top priorities are Improving Marketing Efficiency (53%), Integrating Disparate Systems (44%), and Increasing Marketing ROI (44%). All of these point to teams trying to be more efficient in their work, and using their time/money wisely. Integrating disparate and siloed systems has always been a challenge, and it’s something we see in email marketing quite a bit, where teams have their data cordoned off behind their firewall, while they’re building and customizing emails in their ESP’s marketing cloud. Bringing those together is essential for the success of Super Senders.
- Their most challenging barriers to martech success are Integrating Disparate Systems (61%) and Attributing Revenue to Marketing (44%). Improving Marketing Efficiency is a high priority, but not a significant barrier (25%). Same with Increasing Marketing ROI (44% vs. 22%), while Integrating Disparate Systems is both a high priority (44%) and the biggest barrier (61%). Once again, we see a need for tearing down silos, but also a feeling that it’s a massive challenge many of them struggle to tackle, with more than 60% saying it’s the biggest one they face. With respect to data, finding an ESP that will connect directly to your database is a big step toward integrating those disparate systems so they work as one.
- Email Marketing (44%), Content Marketing (42%), and Marketing Analytics (42%) are the most effective martech. This doesn’t seem surprising. Email marketing continues to lead the field in terms of ROI for sending messages to customers, while content is an essential component of email success. Without a thoughtful content strategy, email marketing is likely to fall flat. And, without an effective analytics engine that taps into your live, real-time data as it comes in, you’re flying blind.
There’s plenty more interesting information in the report. Download and read it for free. If you have any questions, we’d love to hear from you.
Jeff Haws
As MessageGears’ Senior Marketing Manager, Jeff is focused on producing engaging and thoughtful content that resonates with enterprise marketers, helping them to better understand how MessageGears makes their jobs easier. He’s passionate about understanding the way data impacts messaging, and he’s also hopelessly obsessed with baseball.
