A new study from Gartner suggests that “Genius†brands are more effective at Martech stack utilization
New insights released by Gartner suggest that by 2022, CMOs who utilize 70% of their Martech stack’s capabilities will achieve 20% better marketing ROI than peers. In a new report titled “Marketing Technology Drivers of Genius Brand Performance,†Gartner examines the key drivers of extraordinary brand performance with respect to organizations’ marketing technology stack. The report, which studies over 2000 products employed by 500 brands and their measured digital benchmarks, found that marketers must improve their utilization of these solutions to realize optimal benefits of their Martech stack.
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Here’s a look at each of these drivers in greater detail.
Marketers Need To Integrate Suite Solutions With Point Solutions
In its dataset of over 500 brands, Gartner found that brands that simply adopt more technology across their entire business tend to outperform their competition. “Genius brands average 64 deployed technologies, twice as many as Gifted brands (32) and nearly five times as many as Feeble brands (14).â€
However, this doesn’t imply that the deployment of a larger number of technologies will guarantee performance. Beyond the challenges associated with managing a wider Martech stack, some capabilities adopted by leading brands may not fit a marketer’s business strategy at all.
A common theme in Gartner’s inquiries about marketing technology strategy is the decision to pursue a best-of-breed or integrated suite approach to vendor selection. This question arises in the context of the Martech strategy or selecting vendors that can help to execute that strategy. Many large marketing technology vendors have a wide breadth of offerings available to suit a multitude of marketing capabilities.
Also read: You Choose: In-House Or SaaS Martech Solutions?
Exceptional brands or Genius brands (as Gartner calls them) employ a mix of point solutions and integrated suites, where point solutions nearly comprise 2/3rds of the Martech stack. By comparison, less-savvy brands have a greater share of products from these larger Martech vendors among their portfolios.
This aligns with Gartner’s 2019 Marketing Technology Survey findings, which found integration to be among the top three challenges to marketing technology effectiveness. Further, while there are a number of technologies that are most widely deployed, Gartner’s analysis suggests that acquiring all essential components of a Martech stack from a single vendor is uncommon.
When the data shows pairs of brands that achieve differential outcomes even though they have similar vendors, the role of marketing strategy and technology utilization comes into view. Gartner found that the difference between Genius and Average brands links to utilization and effectiveness.
Successful Brands Leverage More Technology but Simplify Martech Complexity
Gartner has repeatedly found that there is no correlation between the size of marketing technology budgets and the effectiveness of the marketing technology stack. Gaining the benefits of marketing technology is more nuanced than simply making a purchase decision. Relevant factors before and after technology acquisition include appropriately collecting and documenting the use cases for marketing technology and the successful deployment and adoption of marketing technology to impact company revenue.
Also read: Make Sure Your Martech Contributes to ROI
The study reaffirms this belief and finds that the size of the Martech stack will not necessarily determine marketing success. 18% of brands whose performance correlates with their stack’s complexity have successfully added relevant technology that supports their digital excellence.
Complimentary Technologies Enable High-Performance Brands To Overcome Complexity
Several combinations of technology products adopted by high-performing brands demonstrate that Genius brands don’t just adopt the technology. They fully understand it and extend it with complementary tools and build capabilities that advance their maturity. This combination of tools and work processes is what we believe explains the outsized returns of brands with greater digital intelligence. Among the technologies with the largest differences in adoption between Genius/Gifted brands and the rest of the pack are analytics and business intelligence, data science, API and developer tools, mobile marketing platforms, email marketing, demand-side platforms, and social media.
Genius and Gifted brands adopt substantially more products that enable the management of complex advertising strategies (such as demand-side platforms and data management platforms) and pair those with the tools to synthesize large volumes of data into insights. As brands increasingly seek to use their first-party data in programmatic advertising, activation systems such as data management platforms (DMPs) often are not set up for analytics exploration and insight production.