Ongoing market uncertainty is affecting every industry and impacting companies around the world. With that uncertainty comes the need to maximize resources and simply do more with less.
We’ve put together an ongoing series covering a range of topics related to doing more with less, starting with combatting the hidden costs of layoffs. Next up, consolidating your martech stack.
It’s budgeting 101 advice: if you’re looking to cut costs, stop spending money on things you don’t need. You’ll usually hear this advice from personal budget experts, who help individuals put money away for a mortgage or boost their retirement savings. But cutting subscriptions or services you don’t need applies to marketing companies as well.
Marketing companies and departments are on the front lines of the “Do More With Less” battlefield, and it’s no small task to trim just the right elements to maintain productivity and meet budget requirements. One of the key places to start? Your martech stack. That’s because marketers only use about 58% of their martech stack’s potential, according to Gartner.
Our Chief Marketing Officer, Esther Flammer, penned a two-part series on top priorities for marketing success in a recessionary climate, detailing her expert advice on how to make your marketing department a primary driver of business, as well as recommendations for how marketers can adjust to changing consumer behavior.
In an effort to maximize resources as a copywriter, I’ve also examined my own martech usage. I attend a lot of meetings, but I don’t host very many. And when I do, they’re not very long. So when I was asked if I needed a full Zoom membership with no 40-minute limit, the answer was an easy “No.” There are other ways you can critically look at your martech stack to eliminate waste you might not be aware of as well.
Of course, saving money is only one element to consolidate your martech stack. Another key consideration is how to consolidate your martech stack so that your team gains productivity.
First, let’s consider what marketers are working with every day.
Damage caused by inefficient martech stacks
As ambassadors for productivity, we spend a lot of time researching how we can help our clients eliminate wasted time. That’s why we undertook a groundbreaking study on the Dark Matter of Work last year, to determine just how much time knowledge workers are wasting — and how they can get it back.
The report confirmed what we already suspected: marketers are wasting valuable time switching between an average of 14 apps every day. In fact, knowledge workers lose over 13 hours of work every week due to a combination of ineffective meetings, duplicated admin tasks, and juggling too many apps. That cumulative wasted time costs companies an average of $16,000 every year for a single worker, adding up to an average of $52 million wasted every year.
Using so many apps every day means at least some work likely needs to be duplicated across them. Picture this: you update stakeholders in one app, then switch tabs to log into another app to update your sales team and confirm the client has approved the project plans. That means doubling up on work and wasting valuable time.
Switching apps also increases burnout for knowledge workers, including marketers, because they consistently report needing to do more, but having less time to tackle the work that matters most.
Here are a few other ways martech inefficiency can wreak havoc for marketers:
- Siloed information: With a bloated martech stack, your marketing team is likely to be working in silos on various projects. This can significantly impact your team’s ability to collaborate effectively and creatively. If certain teams don’t have access to certain software, you’re unwittingly eliminating a point where teams could bring their ideas together.
- Lowered visibility: Similarly, using too many martech tools means teams don’t have visibility across the information they need to get work done, which can stall productivity. If they have to ask other teams for data, that wastes time and energy.
- Wasted resources: Many martech platforms require training, which uses up valuable time for users. Training for martech platforms is one of the major reasons martech stacks aren’t effective. According to Gartner, 29% of marketing leaders list this as the reason for martech ineffectiveness.
- Increased costs: If you have martech tools you aren’t using or you aren’t using to their maximum potential, you’re wasting money. Many marketers also need to view results in different places, making it difficult to determine whether efforts are actually driving business outcomes.
6 steps to consolidate your martech stack
So, now you know the pitfalls of working with an inefficient martech stack. But what can you do about it? The answer is consolidation.
Consolidating your martech stack might seem like a daunting prospect, but we’ve broken it down into six easy steps. Check out the infographic below:
What to look for in marketing technology
Once you’ve determined what’s not working in your martech stack, you want to make choices for technology that works best for you. So what should you look for in marketing technology? Here are a few tips:
- Apps that work together: Apps that can connect with each other in order to eliminate duplicate work are martech stack gold. You want to look for software that automatically syncs without you having to manually bring work across.
- Software that’s easy to use: Marketers need software that’s easy to start using quickly, without lengthy onboarding processes. Because training and onboarding are major barriers to entry to marketers actually using software, look for apps with a simple user interface.
- Unified work management: An umbrella work management platform can bring all of those disparate data sources, pieces of information, and lone apps into a single location, saving you time and energy — and increasing productivity and collaboration.
If you’re looking for ways to consolidate your martech stack and bring your most used apps into a single platform for ease of use, look no further than Wrike.
Wrike has all the marketing features you need, including:
Heres a brief overview of our most popular marketing features:
Put simply, consolidation doesn’t mean cutting out marketing features your team actually needs. You just need to be smart about the software you choose — and there’s no smarter option than Wrike.
Start your free two-week trial and learn how Wrike can help you do more with less.
