When you look at the growing value and ROI of marketing technology (Martech), only 18% of brands have mastered their extensive Martech stack to produce a “gifted” or “genius-level” of marketing performance*, according to Gartner. This number is likely to drop even further when technologies in your MarTech stack do not function at optimal levels.

Translating marketing technology into business effectiveness is correlated with martech utilization, according to the Gartner researchers. In other words, how effectively you use your martech stack will influence your business effectiveness. This is why, marketing teams must spend their energy focusing on “becoming more agile — putting extra emphasis on training, talent and system integration.” Skill and capability development should be major considerations in the martech roadmap, according to the Gartner researchers.

Let’s break this down further.

How often have you heard that your website is slow? If it is indeed slow, you know it directly has a revenue impact. This is a common occurrence in most organizations. But it’s just not your website’s speed that impacts your business. Every single MarTech platform’s speed impacts your business. The situation becomes even more complicated when there are multiple systems that are all integrated together, into the equation.

Speed is actually more important than accuracy. That is one of our firm beliefs -that agility is more important in marketing than accuracy, as you cannot achieve 100% accurate targeting. To ensure agility, MarTech platforms need to be in a highly optimal state all the time.

However, not every marketer is ready to tackle this.

Source: Ascend2

Depending on the type of MarTech platforms used, the definition of agility changes.

For example, when it comes to CMS, even a delay of a few microseconds has a great impact on customer experience and agility. But when it comes to statistical modeling platforms, even a few minutes or hours of delay won’t have a significant impact.

Here are some of the reasons why your MarTech platforms are slow.

1. Your internet bandwidth and latency is not within recommended levels
2. The computation speed of your computer is insufficient, possibly because of temporary files
3. You have stored too much data on the local machine on which the platform is accessed
4. You are using more concurrent operations
5. You are using an older version of the platform
6. You are using an older version of the Operating System on which the platform runs.
7. You are using an older version of the database that your platforms are using
8. The load on the platform is beyond the limit
9. The hardware configuration is insufficient

Performance issues in your marketing technologies due to points 1 to 4 are mostly temporary and can be fixed instantly.

However, performance issues due to 5-9 require serious attention.

Once you spot a performance issue, it is important for you to fix it at once as you don’t know when the system will lay flat, and start impacting marketing velocity.

For a large Indian private bank,  we had been providing campaign management services for over a decade. About three years after starting our engagement, we realized the amount of time taken to execute a campaign was constantly on the rise. This never used to be an issue in the past and we were not sure where the problem lay. But we were cognizant of the fact that if we allowed the campaigns to keep taking more time, we were headed for trouble. Even before our client realized this, we did a study to identify the root cause and concluded that the performance issue was because of the recent upgrade of the campaign management platform.  We also found out that with the up-gradation of Hardware, Operating systems, and Databases, things will go back to normal. We communicated this to our client and got the buy-in. While upgrading one at a time is the conventional solution, we were bold enough to upgrade all three at the same time with zero business impact. Post-up-gradation, the campaign execution time was brought down by 73%.

To ensure your MarTech platforms are always working at optimal levels, here are some recommendations that we make –

1. Ensure sufficient hardware is available as recommended by the product vendor.
2. Ensure the platform, OS, and Databases are up to date with all patches included.
3. Constantly monitor the health of the application, ensure the logs are captured and retained for the future. resolution.
4. Document best practices / DIY fixes for instant speed up of your applications such as clearing temporary files, restarting applications/servers, and closing hung-up processes, etc.

A high level of marketing efficiency comes when the team is able to optimally run their martech stacks. Any glitch can slow things down considerably. At the end of the day, it is all about efficient martech management.

Tell us how you use technology and software to automate and power your marketing efforts and how those collaborations work. Write to us at marketingfolks@xerago.com