Why now is the perfect time to audit your MarTech Stack
The ongoing coronavirus crisis has forced most companies to pull back on marketing spend across the board with 69% of brands reporting either a high or possible likelihood that they will be decreasing their ad spend this year. (Source: Coronavirus (COVID-19) Marketing & Ad Spend Impact Report)
Even for those least impacted, or even those fortunate enough to be experiencing a boost in sales, a large scale reassignment of marketing spend and effort towards digital channels will be occurring for the foreseeable future.
Especially in the B2B world, where in-person events are a key part of marketing and sales tactics in attracting, acquiring and converting leads. Physical events from small roundtables, right up to large flagship conferences, largely replaced by a plethora of webinars of some guise right now, are not going to be the same for a long time. As a result, this enforced period of global remote working has seen both sales and marketing teams having to shift further online to acquire prospects and build the key relationships they need to succeed.
And with this digital shift, now more than ever, it is vitally important to ensure your MarTech stack and team processes can be relied upon to allow you to capture, track, engage, enrich and analyse your leads and marketing ROI throughout the funnel.
If sales and marketing alignment wasn’t a focus before coronavirus, it certainly should be now.
Connected marketing and sales teams working with the same data, agreed metrics for success, standardised reports and regular catchups between the two, ensure alignment on what campaigns are working, what content is being read, where and who the best leads are, when they should be passed over to sales and much more. Sales teams can have much more effective conversations if they are up to speed with what is being tracked in the CRM systems, what journey a prospect has taken to that point. And as a byproduct have more faith in the leads being gathered by marketing. And marketing can tailor their campaigns to the leads that are driving real business goals, instead of just clicks and other top of the funnel vanity metrics.
But none of that is possible without the underlying data structures and tech stack being reliable and most importantly, scalable.
With ad spend pulled back whilst marketers wait for the world to re-emerge, now is the perfect time to use that budget and time to audit the marketing and sales technology stack. Improve the website, install and bed in new systems and processes where required. Ensure teams are aligned, connected and educating each other. Fix inconsistent data collection, misaligned teams and the resulting wasted marketing budget that inhibit your ability to grow at the best of times. Let alone when businesses begin to unleash their marketing budgets on the world again and the competition for people’s attention once again intensifies.
It is a time for both experimentation and introspection in marketing and sales teams as they shift budgets to digital channels as well as new processes and systems. The companies using this time to put their data driven ducks in a row, will be the ones best placed to accelerate out the other side. Even if in-person events, wider marketing plans and ad spend return to something resembling normal any time soon, the improvements being made and lessons being learned by those marketers in this enforced period of digital focus will continue to serve them and the businesses they work for well in the future.
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