Beside your MarTech stack, MarTech adoption is a critical factor in driving success and high return on investment (ROI). Hence enabling MarTech skills and regular use of those skills is a critical first step. Skills come primarily from training and that needs resources especially investment of money.
After spending a lot of $$ on procuring MarTech, resources for training become a luxury that we cannot afford. Failure to train marketing teams on MarTech skills will create a huge barrier to MarTech adoption. If you are not planning to invest in MarTech training you are starting with a poor ROI from the beginning. I caution you against that and I hope you have both training and onboarding as part of MarTech strategy and investment plan.
“Organizations that invest in acquiring and maintaining MarTech skills are eight times more likely to also experience good or very good ROI.”
– A study I read few years ago.
Key Metrics to track MarTech Adoption
Some of the key metrics that come to my mind to measure MarTech adoption and ROI are:
- Volume metrics: Measure things like impression, leads, form fills, product views etc.
- Financial metrics: Measure things like opportunities created, revenue generated, revenue influenced or ROI. You need a stack that has data well connected for your insights team to calculate these.
- NPS of Customer Zero: This is an ongoing tracking of satisfaction across your internal users. I have found this to be an important metric for MarTech adoption.
- Productivity metrics: Measure things like time saved or requests handled, adherence to SLAs, time saved, the velocity of deals, speed to lead etc.
- Stack Complexity/Retire Legacy assets: How many technologies that can be consolidated as we move from a disconnected MarTech stack with redundant technologies to a MarTech stack that is connected like a platform.
You may argue that first two are marketing metrics. MarTech teams should co-own these metrics as this ensures investments in solutions that enable business outcomes. This will also motivate your MarTech teams to integrate across technologies. Integration and Data are two key aspects in the evolution of MarTech maturity. I will be sharing industries’ first MarTech Maturity Model built with over 30 years of collective MarTech experience in the next few weeks. You will be able to use it as a framework to evolve your MarTech program.
Ideas to enable MarTech adoption
Here are some of the ideas that I have used or plan to use in the future to enable MarTech adoption and Marketing enablement:
- As part of MarTech governance ensure your marketing stakeholder(s) are part of prioritization. They should also share responsibility for enabling ROI. Do this before you decide to invest in that MarTech solution.
- Involve key marketing stakeholders in vendor selection, implementation and onboarding as a responsible party.
- As soon as the marketing team onboards on MarTech solution, start creating monthly reports that use 2 or more metrics mentioned above to track MarTech adoption.
- Roll out onboarding sessions followed by on-going training.
- Track MarTech adoption with the help of the vendor and report out on a quarterly basis. Have a north star for adoption and request the vendor to come with recommendations to achieve it.
- Roll-out a full-service digital marketing academy that works round the clock to enable. I will attribute the success of our MarTech program at McKesson to the Digital Marketing Academy. Here are some of the focus areas I recommend for a MarTech or Digital Marketing Academy:
- On-going training on essential and emerging technologies
- Certifications
- Sharing of Best practices (internal and external)
- Awards for best work in various categories
- Opportunities to network across division if you are in a large enterprise
- Have fun included in your program, so that various teams can bond across team silos
I hope this helps and I will love to be part of your MarTech adoption and Marketing transformation journey. Feel free to share your experience on the topic of MarTech adoption and Marketing Enablement.
Feel free to reach out if you need guidance on putting together MarTech adoption strategy or establishing a Digital Marketing Academy.
