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Blog
3 Reasons Your MarTech Stack Is Fragmented—And What to Do About It

By Domenic Colasante, CEO

MarTech utilization has hit an all-time low this year with marketing departments
using only 33% of their current capabilities (down from 42% in 2022 and 58% in
2020), according to a Gartner study1.

And it’s a huge drain on their budgets. The same study estimated that MarTech
underutilization could cost companies with a revenue size of $250 million up to
$4 million2 —an extravagance resource-strapped marketing teams cannot afford.

But why is it so hard for marketing departments to leverage the full power of
their MarTech stacks—and what can they do about it?


1. POOR MARTECH INTEGRATION

The explosion of the MarTech landscape in the past decade—starting from just
around 150 MarTech tools in 2011 to nearly 10,000 in 20223 —has fueled a
spending spree among marketers, with the average marketing team employing 20 to
29 MarTech tools today4.

But with every new tool that gets added to the MarTech stack, achieving full
integration is that much more complex. For instance, an organization with over
20 MarTech tools could be looking at upwards of 200 integrations.

Faced with such a complex MarTech ecosystem, many marketers give up on their
integration initiatives altogether. So much so, only 23% of B2B marketers say
they have fully integrated data that flows between systems without manual
input5.

A fragmented MarTech stack ultimately means marketers don’t get a full picture
of their customer’s journey, hampering the effectiveness of their marketing
campaigns over time. And should marketing efforts yield any success, without
integrated systems, reporting and attributing any revenue generated back to
marketing would be difficult.

In fact, 55% of US marketers believe that a poorly integrated MarTech
environment has resulted in loss of revenue for their business6.


2. LACK OF EXPERTISE, TIME, AND CAPACITY

Achieving seamless integration across the MarTech stack requires MOps talent
with a deep understanding of a variety of MarTech tools. Unfortunately, MOps
professionals are in short supply.

According to a report by MarTech Alliance7, 57% of marketers say they find it
challenging when recruiting for talent to work in MarTech or marketing
operations, saying that “the market is lacking marketers with the necessary
MarTech, data or marketing ops skills and knowledge.”

Besides the right expertise, MarTech management also requires dedicated time and
focus. Take for example the process of adopting a new piece of MarTech. Besides
setup and tool exploration, a robust change management plan, where relevant team
members are identified, onboarded, and equipped with the necessary skills, is
crucial to boost user adoption—which can take months.

It doesn’t stop there. Post-integration, your MarTech investments require
continuous testing and upkeep to ensure they’re properly integrated with the
rest of the stack at all times. But as marketing budgets continue to shrink and
B2B marketers have to juggle both core, strategy work and non-core execution
tasks like MarTech management, many resort to half-hearted attempts at adoption.

Beyond MOps talent, buying more MarTech often necessitates buying other types of
talent such as writers, designers, campaign managers and data analysts. For
instance, AI-powered conversational marketing platform Drift not only requires
the expertise of a MOps professional to build and deploy a chatbot to your
website but a writer with the ability to serve website visitors the right
content at the right time to accelerate conversion.


3. MOPS TALENT IS EXPENSIVE

The war for MOps talent is on—and it’s driving up hiring costs.

According to Forrester8, hiring and retaining five in-house marketers dedicated
to running Adobe Marketo Engage alone costs around $880,000 a year. And with an
average of 20 tools in any given MarTech stack, the cost quickly adds up.

The workaround for some B2B companies may be hiring junior-level MOps
professionals instead, but many don’t realize the additional investment required
to get them up to speed. A 2022 study found that companies shelled out around
$36,720 over the first seven months to train a new junior-level MarOps hire9.

Additionally, some 70% said they devoted five hours or more each week for at
least six months to training their new hire. All that time, effort, and
resources spent may not be even worth it, with as many as 72% leaving their
company in less than three years.

And with new trends and technologies introduced to the industry every day, a
piece of MarTech can be easily added or removed from the stack, making
resourcing efforts difficult and unpredictable.




UNIFYING A FRAGMENTED MARTECH STACK IS EASIER WITH MARKETING AS A SERVICE (MAAS)

Achieving full stack integration is time-, cost-, and labor-intensive, but
there’s a better way to go about it: marketing as a service (MaaS).

MaaS brings the concept of managed services—which has been used by a host of
functions including IT, HR, Finance, and Accounting for years—to marketing,
where non-core execution and operational tasks such as MarTech integration and
management are outsourced to extend the capacity of your workforce, while
internal staff focus on the core strategic work that you need to be the best in
the world at.

Clients are equipped with a diverse group of creative, campaign, advertising,
ABM, analytics, and of course, MOps and technology management resources to unify
and leverage the full power of their MarTech stack—among other service
offerings—to create true marketing impact.

Gartner’s recent “Recession Playbook for Marketing Leaders” called out the need
to “fundamentally rethink” the marketing organization’s operating model,
particularly around how an enterprise leverages talent and labor, whether
in-house, outsourced, part time, or full time.

The MaaS model provides an access lane to a readily available, fully-trained and
certified workforce of marketing technologists to bring:

Increased impact: Being able to split core, strategic work from non-core
execution tasks will improve the quality of programs and their outcomes—more
engagement, more activation, more pipeline, more revenue, and better marketing
ROI. Moreover, specialized focus with a dedicated team to deliver on the variety
of dimensions within one campaign will elevate marketing maturity and extract
every ounce of potential from your MarTech stack.

Best-practice processes: Standardization drives efficiency and scale, so having
a dedicated vendor team contracted to support a process—especially when the
provider is in the business of providing services around it—will yield higher
effectiveness. In addition, knowing productivity metrics, unit-cost economics,
and utilization and capacity levels provides the foundation for predictable
scale.

Stability: Having a degree of flexibility if your MarTech stack changes ensures
brand and operational stability. The dynamic market requires the ability to
scale up and down, as well as the expertise to navigate the skill changes of new
technology, which is hard to do with large teams of internal FTEs.

Focus: By outsourcing execution-oriented, high-volume tasks from your senior
staff in established marketing teams, your marketers can focus on being
marketers again. It could even provide a path to management for high-potential
employees by allowing them to manage a vendor and learn other new skills to
advance in the organization.


WHAT PARTNERING WITH 2X LOOKS LIKE: KEY TAKEAWAYS

Challenge #1
Poor MarTech integration
Solution
We run a sustainable integration initiative for you. This includes identifying
and integrating siloed MarTech tools, testing regularly to ensure data
synchronicity, troubleshooting integration issues, ensuring full adoption of new
MarTech, and more.
Challenge #2
Lack of expertise, time, and capacity
Solution
We provide a pool of certified, ready-to-work MOps professionals who possess
both the know-how and real-world experience needed to manage your MarTech stack
and drive results—with the option to increase capacity and cater to expanded
marketing priorities.
Challenge #3
MOps talent is expensive. Hiring and retaining a team of five in-house marketers
dedicated to running Adobe Marketo Engage, for instance, costs around $880,000 a
year.
Solution
Our offshore delivery model works to your advantage. As a comparison, five
certified Adobe Marketo Engage FTEs typically cost our clients less than
$350,000 a year.


MAXIMIZE ROI ON YOUR MARTECH INVESTMENTS WITH 2X TODAY

Powered by our Revenue Marketing Resource Center (MRC)—comprising over 600
world-class marketers based in our delivery center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia—2X
has spent years helping marketing organizations run, integrate, and optimize
their MarTech stacks to deliver marketing impact and ultimately, drive business
outcomes.

And with the help of our 2X COE Lab—a proprietary incubator that constantly
stress-tests the latest tools and solutions, developing benchmarks and best
practices—2X has secured official MarTech partnerships with 6sense (Tier 1
Service Partner), Adobe Marketo Engage, Pardot, HubSpot, Drift, WP Engine, and
more.

Interested to learn more? Discover our MOps capabilities or contact us today for
a free consultation.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1 ‘Gartner Survey Finds 63% of Marketing Leaders Plan to Invest in Generative AI
in the Next 24 Months’, Gartner, August 23, 2023

2 Torres, Jennifer, ‘Martech Stack Underutilization Is a Big Problem’, CMSWire

3 Brinkler, Scott, ‘Marketing Technology Landscape 2022’, chiefmartec, May, 2022

4 Brinkler, Scott, ‘Wait, more martech tools create more manual
tasks?!’, chiefmartec, 2021

5 Kashyap, Karthik, ‘Comprehensive Data Strategy and Integrated Martech Stack
Pay Big Dividends’, Spice Works, September 29, 2022

6 ‘Independent Study Reveals Almost Half of Marketers Do Not Trust the
Reliability of Their Data Due to Fragmented Tools and Poor Integration’, Zeta
Global, July 11, 2023

7 ‘Skills Gaps Continue to Plague MarTech Capabilities’, Marketing Charts,
December 13, 2021

8 ‘The Total Economic Impact™ Of Marketo Engage’, Forrester, July 2020

9 Davis, Kim, ‘Marketing Operations Talent Is Suffering Burnout and
Turnover’, MarTech.org, Last Modified May 20, 2022

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