Picture this: You have somewhere to be, and you have to get there fast. But your car has a cracked windshield, a broken steering wheel, and a jammed gas pedal.

You're missing basic—yet critical—requirements: visibility, control, and acceleration.

That is the reality that many of today's marketing teams live in. Much like the car, the tech stacks of enterprise marketing organizations can often withhold those fundamental prerequisites of visibility, control, and speed.

It all comes down to stack disparities.

Tech stack disparities undermine marketing strategy

As Marketing has evolved into a team of specialists, and as the number of those specialized skills and functions has grown (brand vs. product vs. demand, etc.), the channels, processes, and tools engineered to support them have also exploded, creating significant complexity. That has manifested into an overinvestment in point solutions, disconnected workflows, decentralized repositories, lack of KPI reporting... the list goes on.

Although legacy software categories (those traditionally designed for a specific team, function, or purpose) have evolved, they often still omit or lack features in key areas.

The problem, of course, is that those gaps result in major silos—team silos, process silos, and data silos—and create inefficiencies (or inabilities) in planning, executing, and measuring marketing.

Today's tech stacks are more like a set of sidecars that have been bolted together than a system that, in theory, should contain all the moving parts and mechanisms a complete vehicle needs to operate. It's far from a luxury sedan that's been designed, engineered, and built with seamless purpose: all crafted parts working in unison and precision for a flawless experience.

Marketers have a lot on the line. They need a sedan, not the piecemeal approach so many marketing departments are forced to take.

The question is, How best to get there?

What is marketing orchestration?

Marketing orchestration is a strategic and differentiated approach to execution.

It's not linear and sequential like project management. Rather, it's a set of processes within a process; and it focuses on bringing together the core tenets of marketing (teams, content, channels, integrations, and data) together to ensure a harmonious relationship and facilitate visibility, control, and speed at every phase of the journey.

Marketing orchestration platforms do exactly as the name indicates: They help orchestrate marketing strategy, either by providing the functionality natively so that campaign planning and execution can happen in the software, or by delivering the right integrations to help transfer data and content at the appropriate phases of that continuous process.

Here are five reasons that adopting such a philosophy is critical for today's brands.

1. Successful execution starts with the proper alignment of resources

Teams need the ability to set and share a global (or cross-functional) marketing strategy and ensure their colleagues have visibility into what's happening, and when. Furthermore, marketing leaders need the control to strategically allocate resources (both people and budget) to ensure marketing success.

2. Accelerating campaigns and content creation is paramount

With a plan in place, the work begins. But marketing teams must eliminate the review/approval bottlenecks and process inefficiencies that so often delay them getting their work out the door. Instead, they should move seamlessly from planning to execution: Get the work done quickly and turn it out in a manner conducive to high-quality output.

3. As work progresses, the need for control compounds

Maximizing the strategic output of a team means having your finger on the pulse of their workflow. It requires maintaining control across all of their marketing resources, content, and creative assets, as well as campaign spend and budget health. Without that visibility, it's difficult to know what each member of your team is working on (as well as when and why), and what resources your team has at its disposal.

4. If you can't measure it... what's the point?

Whether for documenting and improving team efficiencies or understanding the performance of marketing campaigns and individual assets, marketers need the technology to report back on what's working, identify what is not, and surface insights for ongoing optimization.

5. A connected tech stack is the key to true measurement and reporting

Ultimately, disparate technologies are the biggest culprit of process inefficiencies and data silos. Teams need to be able to seamlessly connect tools to drive better processes, synchronize the flow of work/content, and improve reporting.

If systems do not speak the same language, how does everything come together to create the bigger picture?

Fortunately, marketing orchestration brings together everything marketers need to run all of their marketing, and does it better—with unprecedented control and visibility across every phase of the process.

Marketers are motivated by delivering meaningful results—and marketing orchestration allows them to do that.

More Resources on Marketing Orchestration

What Is Marketing Orchestration? [Infographic]

Five Steps to Integrating Your Blog, Social Media, and Email Marketing

How to Use the Six ABM Processes to Align Sales and Marketing and Drive Real Results