What marketers want (from MarTech)

While conversations around the importance of MarTech have gained momentum internationally and in India, there were some questions that weren’t being explored enough: are marketers ready for the MarTech revolution? What are their apprehensions? What kind of organizational shifts did they expect MarTech to bring about? It was hard to find a definite source that answered these questions, in a way that made it easy for marketers and their communication partners - agencies like us - to chart out better ways to utilize MarTech solutions. This information gap was our motivation to build the first edition of the MarTech India report a couple of years back. Additionally, as an organization that puts technology at the core of its business, it only seemed fitting to build content that adds to the agile marketing conversation. 

With its recently launched third edition, we’re proud to have navigated the questions above and more, to pave a better understanding of the MarTech landscape and MarTech preparedness in India. Having covered pretty much every industry with 200+ marketing decision makers responding to this survey across India and some insightful conversations from a select few marketing leaders, this report is our attempt to answer What Marketers Want (from MarTech).

We believe this is a great insight into what marketing decision-makers think about MarTech and where it is headed. While the report has a whole lot of interesting data points and can be downloaded from www.mirumindia.com, here are a few select insights that give a deeper sense of how the ecosystem is progressing and marketers should not miss. 

1. India remains behind global averages when it comes to the percentage of marketing budgets being spent on MarTech, indicating a large headroom for growth

In India, 2 out of 3 respondents spend less than 15% of their marketing budget on MarTech, while globally*, MarTech spends are estimated to be 25.4% of the average marketing budget

*Source: The State of Marketing Budget and Strategy 2022 by Gartner

2. MarTech EXPLORERS emerges as the largest cohort in the Mirum MarTech Quadrant

MarTech EXPLORERS are the organizations that have sometimes, rarely, or never used MarTech tools, but will increase their spending substantially or somewhat in the next three years.

3. MarTech is now expected to drive sales!

While lead generation, customer engagement, and brand building are present in the top four objectives to be achieved using MarTech last year as well as this year, sales enter the top four for the first time this year

4. The organizations who refrain from using MarTech tools cite that the biggest hindrance is being unable to measure ROI, followed by complexity in Implementing or setting up MarTech, and finding the process of choosing MarTech tools too complex

5. CEOs tend to prefer long-term planning over short-term gains

Among respondents, CEOs believe that brand building is their top business objective that MarTech will help drive

6. MarTech HEROES drive effectiveness from a significantly wider range of technologies compared to other cohorts 

MarTech HEROES, apart from driving effectiveness from personalization and CRM, are cautiously experimenting with new-age technologies which MarTech STAGNANTS seem to be missing

7. The critical approach taken by CEOs on customer data unification will ensure a significant top-down push for CDP adoption in the immediate future

8. CEOs tend to expect their MarTech team to have a broader set of skills, whereas CMOs tend to prefer some skills far more than others 

CEOs follow a more holistic approach to preferred skill sets in the MarTech team, whereas 71% of CMOs cite data and analytics as their most preferred skill in a team

9. Preference for a wide range of skills that marketing decision-makers want in their MarTech team is reflected in their approach for executing marketing campaigns

7 out of 10 respondents prefer some or all their campaign execution with support from an external partner, perhaps because external partners can fill in the skills gap, if any

• With the advent of Web3, and the movement towards a cookie-less world, rethinking marketing strategy is on the cards for most organizations. However, not everybody seems to be prepared for this change

(This is advertorial content curated by partner team)