When CMOs own and define their company's marketing technology strategy, their organization achieves more targeted, relevant, and efficient customer engagement and greater revenue contribution, according to participants in a CMO Council study titled "Quantify How You Unify."
Marketing Technology: You Can't Live Without It
Whether you're an established company or a startup, marketing technology is a necessary tool. But, because the marketing technology landscape has exploded, it's hard to know which tools are required and which are a nice-to-have, depending on your company's maturity and goals.
Scott Brinker, a co-founder and the CTO of ion interactive who writes at Chiefmartec, has been monitoring the marketing technology landscape since 2011. The 2015 edition of his marketing technology landscape supergraphic identified 1,876 suppliers in 43 categories.
The vast number of available marketing technology options is proof that marketing is evolving into a technology-powered discipline. It is now imperative that you have a road map and framework for marketing technology investments.
Moreover, to ensure those investments truly help your organization thrive, you need to consider whether and how they will create an effective and efficient sustainable "technology ecosystem."
The Marketing Technology Ecosystem Defined
The term "ecosystem" is typically associated with biology, and in that context it includes all of the living things (plants, animals, and organisms) in a specific area, their nonliving environment (weather, terrain, climate, etc.), and how they interact with each other. In an ecosystem, each organism has its own niche and role to play, and the ecosystems are dependent on their environmental conditions.
In a thriving ecosystem, there is diversity, energy, and balance. Thriving ecosystems are adaptable and resilient enough maintain balance during times of turbulence and disruption. In a thriving ecosystem, all the players are interdependent; they all function to support and sustain the ecosystem. The relationships are primarily symbiotic, which means the organisms live together but their relationships are not necessarily mutually beneficial. When an ecosystem is suffering, the landscape becomes barren, life forms die off, and there is bloodthirsty competition for limited resources.
An ecosystem is an excellent framework to apply to marketing technology. A thriving marketing technology ecosystem enables marketers to understand the market and customer better and to roll out marketing content faster, more efficiently, and more consistently across channels.
You have a vast number of potential marketing technology choices. Think of each potential option as an organism in the system. Accordingly, you must understand how each organism fits in the environment and works and interacts with the other potential "organisms." Although various plants and animals exist in an ecosystem, the specific types of flora and fauna matter: The wrong plant or animal can damage the ecosystem—even potentially destroy it.
Therefore it's not a question of whether you have systems for data management, marketing resource management, digital asset management, marketing operations management, marketing experience management, and so forth... A technology ecosystem requires that those various systems must exist; it's a question of ensuring the ones you choose can support and sustain one another—and, therefore, the larger ecosystem.
Questions to Address to Create and Sustain Your Technology Ecosystem