Senior marketers often tell me they want to be more data-driven in their marketing approaches and business decisions. At the same time, washing their hands of the current issue because they “don’t have access to the right data”.

The problem with the “I’ll be more data-driven when I have access to the data” attitude, is it assumes a martech platform will instantly solve all issues. In reality, all it does is shift the focus to the IT team, kick the can down the road, and allow the marketing team to delay the internal cultural transformation required to become a data-driven organisation.

The 2022 State of Martech report, undertaken by Clevertouch, suggests this is exactly the case in most marketing organisations today. Fully 44 per cent of respondents said their martech platforms remain largely unused, 50 per cent said they’re overwhelmed by it, and a whopping 75 per cent admit to not having the technical ability to achieve their digital ambitions. Despite this, 90 per cent of marketers continue to prioritise their technology investments, while only 10 per cent are focused on talent management and organisational development.

The uncomfortable truth for marketers is that technology will not solve your problems. People will.

Always on learning

We all know stories of organisations that have spent millions of dollars over multiple years implementing technology, only to find themselves no better than when they started and reluctant to admit it. This is because no one is ever ready for new technologies, so they end up doing what they were doing before – just with a different and often pricey tool.

The effectiveness of these martech platforms is intrinsically linked to the maturity of the data culture within the teams utilising it. Fortunately, creating this culture of data isn’t dependent on the completion of large-scale, multi-year, tech implementations to begin. It can start today.

Doing so requires organisations to first understand that every output released into the market is an opportunity to gather data back, effectively creating zero-party data through a process that turns every interaction into a learning.

Data culture = martech success

I regularly talk to CMOs and CDOs about commencing this cultural shift and behavioural change. At the heart it requires a very different type of content production and audience activation so every consumer pathway, creative campaign, media activation or piece of content is crafted to contribute to a single-view-of-the customer that can be utilised in subsequent campaigns and activations.

Taking this approach, brands need to work out what data we need from our audiences to be able to be effective and view every interaction as an opportunity to create this data. It necessitates a CX-driven approach to understand audience needs, a creative focus on making things that people actually want to interact with and a media approach that facilitates a genuine two-way conversation. Brands can then orchestrate every pathway to enable this value exchange.

This approach a) gathers data that is actually useful and b) helps marketing teams get used to thinking in a tech and data-enabled way, kickstarting their data culture journey so they are ready and able to utilise new martech platforms in the future.

Design for user, by users

For that approach to work, it's critical that the end users of martech platforms are part of the design process.

Martech platforms are generic by nature. They must work across a wide spectrum of industry verticals and different business sizes with varying maturity levels. They cannot be implemented in a universal way and require input from the end users of the tech to ensure integration into existing systems and business processes to achieve overall adoption within the organisation.

This starts with assessing the current marketing objectives and customer experience opportunities to define the purpose and use cases of the platform, prioritised into success milestones as the organisation builds maturity over time.

It's not everything or nothing. The objective is to build a flexible system where features or platforms can be turned on when the organisation is ready to use them, not buying technology today for what you may use in the future. Taking logical, progressive steps ensures there is always an increasing value from martech investments over time.

Ultimately, martech transformation is about culture transformation. If you plan to invest more in martech, it’s critical that you begin your data culture journey today.