• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, December 17, 2020

There’s nothing mysterious about the challenges facing companies when implementing marketing technology. 

Many are hobbled by budget issues, plain and simple, and by other practical problems, according to Marketing Technology Implementation: Strategies, Tactics & Trends, a study by Ascend2.

Among the challenges are: 

Budget constraints — 45%

Executing a strategy — 43% 

Determining appropriate technologies — 38% 

Training staff — 35% 

Integration with existing stack — 28% 

Organizational buy-in — 28% 

Internal adoption — 28% 

Attribution — 11% 

Despite these challenges, 69% are increasing their new technology budgets in 2021, 19% significantly and 50% moderately. Another 20% are maintaining the existing budget, and 11% foresee decreases.  

A whopping 96% of firms attempting this are successful at it, and 42% are very successful, or best in class. 

The main technologies — those likely to have the most impact next year — are: 

Real-time marketing — 43%

Analytics — 36%

Artificial intelligence — 36%

Customer Data Platforms (CDP) — 34% 

Data consolidation — 30% 

Programmatic — 22%

Multi-touch attribution — 20%

Voice search — 16%

Blockchain — 12% 

Why do firms invest in new technology? Their goals are:

Improving marketing efficiency — 50%

Improving customer journey — 45%

Improving data quality — 38% 

Increasing ROI — 31%

Streamlining workflows — 26%

Accommodating a new product or service — 26%

Improving marketing attribution — 22% 

Integrating data — 20%

Removing redundancies — 10% 

How do they know whether they are achieving these ends? This requires constant evaluation.

Of those polled, 43% say marketing technology performance should be evaluated at least quarterly, while 29% say at least monthly; 17%, twice annually or more; 9%, once annually; and 2%, other. 

What are the top areas for evaluation? They are:

Ease of use — 55%

Associated costs — 37%

Ability to customize — 36% 

Insights and analysis — 35%

Ability to automate — 30% 

Ability to integrate with existing stock — 28% 

Scalability — 23%

Data governance — 17%

Dashboards and visualization — 12%

Marketers seek a single view: 87% agree that a technology that consolidates multiple tools into a single platform appeals to them, and 38% say it appeals very much. Another 9% are neutral, and 2% actually disagree.

Eighty-nine percent desire ease of implementation, and 45% strongly agreeing with this. Strangely, 5% disagree.

Ascend 2 and its Research Partners surveyed 270 marketers. Of those, 31% were in B2B, 43% in B2C and 26% were in both equally.