Large enterprises have more resources and personnel, but are often hamstrung by organizational complexity, making the need for a single, smarter solution all the more valuable.
The media landscape has transformed into an impossibly complex network of consumer and engagement channels, and naturally, marketing has followed suit. There is no shortage of debate over how best to manage the changes affecting the marketing industry, which have brought with them an unprecedented amount of data to analyze, as well as a similarly mind-boggling number of corresponding tools with with to leverage it.
For many large enterprises, the answer has simply been to expand their marketing strategies, creating new teams and complicated marketing stacks to accommodate evolving consumer demands — demands that necessitate increasingly personalized and tailored messaging. Ultimately, this serves only to further fragment an already complicated problem, one that has always cried out for a single, simple solution.
Dozens of Tools
An IAB-sponsored white paper highlights the extent to which enterprise marketers are grasping for ways to cope with so much customer data. According to the white paper, “on average, enterprise marketers today are leveraging upwards of a dozen distinct toolsets to support their aggregation, onboarding, management and deployment of customer data — with a small (but not insignificant) subset working with more than 30 tools on a regular basis.”
With the bandwidth and number of resources required to manage up to 30 tools at any given time, it’s no wonder marketing has become so fragmented and challenging. It’s also not surprising that this complex ecosystem of tools that must be managed are preventing companies from integrating efforts across the marketing department. Only 30% of companies report having a dedicated team of cross-silo teams to facilitate effectively integrated campaigns, according to MarTech.
Why All the Complexity?
So why do companies continue to add more tools, even as it becomes clear that they don’t produce a viable solution? In many cases, it may seem like the only answer, given the ever-growing amount of data businesses must process in order to keep up.
One anonymous digital marketing program manager from a large insurance provider summed it up perfectly in an interview for the IAB white paper: “right now, frankly we’re just getting all our digital data wrangled together into one place. There’s value in us getting that house in order, while separately there’s a broader enterprise big data initiative. The amount of data we have is massive. It’s ridiculous.”
It’s not surprising, then, that enterprises are taking extreme measures to wrangle the ridiculous amount of data (like implementing 30 or more toolsets). Too frequently, however, companies choose to implement a different tool for every different problem — whether it’s for media buying, analytics, email optimization, social advertising, attribution, or dozens of other tools often included in a single stack — without considering how well these tools will work together as a long-term, holistic solution. In other words, they are adopted only as a quick fix — considering how rapidly the digital landscape changes, that’s a strategy that’s doomed to cause problems.
A Solution That Learns
Artificial intelligence-based marketing platforms completely eliminate the need for such complexity, especially for large enterprises operating on such massive scales. Machine learning can be used to monitor and independently alter every campaign across every channel, eliminating the need for channel-dedicated teams, and channel-based systems.
Rather than having “around 10 different technologies in total” that provide “very unique data sets,” as one vice president of marketing put it, you would only need one high-powered tool to execute, test and optimize, and analyze/measure performance. Put this solution on top of your CRM/customer database, CMS and web analytics tools, E-commerce platform and product inventory data, you no longer need all the solutions across the various Lumascapes.
Regardless of which tack organizations take, the current approach simply can’t continue as digital media continues to fragment and advance. Marketers must find some way to unite the disparate channels on which they operate in order to deliver better experiences to consumers and to restore sanity to the marketing world.
