Marketing technology in 2014 : You need to take control

6 implications for selecting and managing marketing technology today

Wow! Scott Brinkler @chiefmartec is a real enthusiast to even attempt to map the technology landscape. He’s done a good job since his latest 2014 Marketing technology landscape provides a great framework to help managers think through the best technology to improve their marketing and to review the leading technology vendors in each category. It’s a retina-burning graphic, which doesn’t look great on a blog, but if you click to expand you can see its value and impact – it prompts you to ask “How do we make sense of this – what does it mean for us?!“

How do you find this? Is it scary to you because of the potential expense and business case preparation? Not to mention the challenges of managing implementation and integration of these systems. Or is it an opportunity to use technology to compete and create more relevant engaging customer experiences than your rivals.

The tool is useful in its own right, but I think it’s useful to not just think “wow!” or “scary”, but think of what the complexity and range of options in technology means for how you manage marketing using technology, so I will explore this also in this post.

Categories of marketing technology

The first implications of this “infographic like no other” is that when you’re reviewing your approach to using technology, it’s useful to audit your technologies across these 6 categories and the 42 subcategories

The six main categories to review are described like this by Scott:

1. Marketing Experiences — more specialized technologies that directly affect prospects and customers across their lifecycle, such as advertising, email, social media, SEO, content marketing, A/B testing, marketing apps — the “front-office” of modern marketing.


2. Marketing Operations — the tools and data for managing the “back-office” of marketing, such as analytics, MRM, DAM, and agile marketing management.


3. Marketing Middleware such as DMPs, CDPs, tag management, cloud connectors, user management, and API services.


4. Marketing Backbone Platforms such as CRM, marketing automation, content management, and e-commerce engines. [These are quite different in their application, so need to be reviewed separately].


5. Infrastructure services such as databases, big data management, cloud computing, and software development tools.


6. Internet services such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter that underlie today’s marketing environment. [How you integrate with these key platforms]

Selecting the best marketing technology

Beyond this, there are many other implications about how you select technology or make recommendations to your clients. The answers will vary a lot by type and size of company, but the implications are similar. Technology is a significant marketing investment, so it needs a structured, not piecemeal approach.

A solid business case and review approach is needed. Define a process and template for technology business case that avoids wastage and duplication and prioritises the technologies that will give the biggest returns. In larger companies this needs to be centralised to a great degree to avoid maverick purchases.

A technology roadmap is required as part of digital strategy. Starting from scratch, it would take years to implement these technologies. A technology roadmap helps prioritise and make it achievable.

All-in-one vs Best-of-breed solutions. One approach to reduce complexity is to use all-in-one solutions such as the Marketing Cloud services that many of the large technology companies like Oracle, Salesforce and Adobe are now offering. But these may be overkill for some businesses who may be best using simpler tools, for example, an email service provider rather than a full blown marketing automation system.

Open source options can give significant savings. Open source can give significant savings in some areas such as content management or video hosting. But savings in licensing need to be offset against potential lack of support.

Businesses need to get the value from technology. Implementing the technology is just the start. If a technology isn’t used by the business to get the value from it, then that’s bad management, not the fault of the technology.

Change management and education are as important as the technology. None of these technologies work without human intervention or intelligence. Customisation is needed, so encouraging ongoing adoption is key, although not all technology vendors support this as well.

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