This article from Marketingland.com provides an insightful look into the overall landscape of marketing technology for businesses, and the challenges every one of them faces in today’s ever-expanding digital age. The growth of social networking and mobile internet access has led to an explosion of technologies that monetize on these social transformations. Navigating this ocean of opportunity can be a real challenge for marketers, especially as new trends and apps seem to emerge daily.
Businesses that are equipped with the right people and talent to overcome these new challenges will find themselves in a competitive advantage over their less modernized counterparts. Now is a great time to get ahead!
While some marketers struggle to keep up, others are re-imagining what’s possible for their careers and companies. Prototype marketers are becoming marketing-technology hybrids. They have insatiable appetites for tech industry knowledge, and they are constantly testing and integrating new solutions to gain an edge in efficiency and performance.
So what are the common marketing technology challenges marketers must overcome?
1. Change Velocity
The rate of change is accelerating, and shows no signs of slowing. High-performing companies constantly adapt as new technologies and opportunities emerge. This agile approach requires someone to own marketing technology. For large enterprises, that position is likely a chief marketing technologist or someone with a similar title, while for small-to-midsize businesses the responsibilities may fall to the most tech-savvy marketer or possibly an outside consultant.
2. Talent
Demand is growing for tech-savvy marketers, but there’s a shortage of talent. Capgemini Consulting reports in its Digital Talent Gap study that 90 percent of companies lack necessary digital skills in key areas of social media, mobile, internal social networks, process automation, and performance monitoring and analysis.
3. Complacency
Complacency is bred by a lack of will and vision, conservative cultures, stagnant leadership and internal politics that lead to inertia over innovation. In Embracing Digital Technology, MIT Sloan Management Review and Capgemini Consulting researchers found that while 78 percent of respondents indicated that digital transformation will be critical to their organizations within the next two years, 63 percent felt the pace of change in their organizations was too slow.
As forward-thinking executives and marketers accelerate digital transformation, businesses that are too slow to evolve and too afraid to take chances will be left behind.
4. Redundancy
With thousands of marketing technologies to choose from, and new products and features emerging daily, redundancy within your marketing technology stack is inevitable. However, marketers need to take a strategic approach to avoiding it whenever possible.
For some marketing teams, a dedicated content marketing solution is precisely what’s needed. For others, common features such as calendars, project management, analytics dashboards, and document editing and storage will be redundant to existing marketing automation and project management solutions. Every organization is different.
5. Integration
The challenge for marketers is to figure out the right solutions for their businesses, and integrate technologies by all means necessary. The startup ecosystem is producing a steady stream of products that solve niche digital marketing challenges. The good news is that core marketing technology platforms are increasingly open and can be integrated with more specialized solutions.
Read more on marketingland.com
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