Top B2B Martech Challenges – What Do You Think?
This website, as noted on the home page, “is designed to help marketing professionals—particularly in small-to-midsized B2B companies—make more strategic decisions about acquiring marketing technology (martech) tools.”
It’s based on experience and anecdotal knowledge about the technology challenges faced by SMB marketers. There’s no question some B2B companies struggle to:
- Develop an overall strategy for building their marketing technology stack (or more accurately, their martech matrix).
- Select tools based on their fit with the organization’s overall martech environment and strategy—rather than just the “best” tool within a specific functional silo.
- Integrate their tools and get the proper training, on a business level rather than just a “how to” for tool use, to maximize value from their martech investments.
There is at least some research to support these points as well. MarTech Today has reported that integrating different martech tools is among the top challenges marketers face, and advises CMOs and directors to “Consider your full marketing technology stack when making software decisions, and avoid inefficiencies and sunken resources resulting from too many solutions providing similar functionality and value.”
But in general, while there are numerous studies done each year on the challenges faced by B2B marketers generally, there’s a dearth of research specifically focused on marketing technology.
And what is produced is often targeted at the enterprise level, such as the prediction from Forbes that “B2B marketing technology choices will simplify in 2017 because…the predictive marketing automation market will consolidate.” That’s a real possibility, but not something SMB marketers are thinking about. Even the “all-in-one marketing cloud solutions” touted by MarTech Today as potential solutions to integration issues are primarily targeted at large companies.
One other challenge noted at the SMB level is underinvestment in technology. Marketers often have difficulty getting budget allocated for technology purchases because of their inability to prove ROI from the tools.
But that creates a chicken-and-egg situation: it’s extremely difficult to prove the value of investing in marketing technology without first investing in analytical tools that can track the metrics required to prove the ROI.
Anyway—what are your thoughts? Are the challenges noted above familiar? If not, what are the biggest martech challenges your business faces this year?