It’s clear the marketing tech stack has grown exponentially over the past decade. As new marketing tools emerge, marketers gain the ability to account for a range of highly specific, niche problems that are unique to individual subcategories of marketing. Although the continued growth of technology allows marketers to solve an increasing number of problems, the high volume of these tools also creates separate offshoot problems such as content stored in disparate systems and platforms that don’t communicate with one another.
According to an April 2017 Netskope report, the average marketing team uses 91 different tools in their marketing tech stacks, most of which organize and store some type of content. With the adoption of all of these tools, content becomes increasingly more difficult to find and access. Ultimately, creating unforeseen Marketing tech stack issues.
Avg. # of Cloud Services Used By Category, Global, April 2017
Source: Netskope 2017 Cloud Report
Lumascape illustrates the outstanding growth of MarTech tools perfectly—the Lumascape chart went public in 2010 as a comprehensive, graphic list to help marketers understand the technology available in a variety of marketing sectors. While this sounds like a simple way to navigate marketing tech, that couldn’t be further from the truth. As of 2019, Lumascape now displays the logos of more than 7,000 different marketing technology companies, and that number has been increasing year after year.
Marketing’s Bloated Tech Stack
Source: chiefmartec.com
While it’s true that the marketing technology industry has grown, Lumascape demonstrates the industry’s bloat. To put this in perspective, when Lumascape first went public the chart only displayed about 35 different technologies in total—despite there being more tools on the market. The chart has since shifted from including only best-of-breed technologies to displaying the many thousands of marketing tools available, and Lumascape has become more of a click-bait report rather than providing actual value. And just like Lumascape’s current lack of clarity, the average marketer’s technology stack lacks clarity and cohesion as well.
It’s critical to note that the problem isn’t necessarily the number of tools, it’s the lack of pre-built integrations with other platforms that exacerbate the issues of growing tech stacks. Marketers tend to have good reasons for adopting new technologies—as new tech gets released, marketers have a desire to integrate them into their workflow. Doing this enables marketers to discover which tools best meet their individual needs, which ultimately contributes to the optimization of their tech stack.
The problem emerges when marketers continuously save new content in dozens of tools each day to execute basic marketing functions. While optimized tech stacks have been shown to increase lead generation, they also waste hundreds of hours in productivity when these platforms don’t share basic data intelligence or functions. Marketers waste hours searching for information and content scattered throughout different tools, and these wasted hours highlight the real problems of a bloated tech stack. Marketing professionals have started to become aware of this issue, but most marketers have no idea how to solve the problem.
Thankfully, the trend in technology is moving towards centralizing content and connecting disparate systems. Today, some functions of a tech stack can be pre-integrated to become cohesive, and several companies have been successful in doing so. Take Microsoft for example. The company features a single login that allows users to log into all of Microsoft’s tools, in addition to outside tools like Slack. This feature works to eliminate the lost productivity involved with searching and resetting passwords.
One Search in Chrome for Files Stored Anywhere
Digitile’s a faster and better way to search and tag files with your Google Chrome browser across your Marketing Tech Stack. As former marketers and salespeople, we have been fully immersed in companies where content was too hard to find. Our goal with Digitile is to contribute to a marketing environment with more pre-built connections to simplify finding files faster.
Automate Workflow in Minutes
Products like Zapier and IFTTT have worked to combat productivity issues by integrating different apps so they can communicate. They do this by allowing users to create custom rules that identify when an action happens, two or three more actions are automatically triggered. For instance, when a file is sent through Gmail, users can create rules that allow these tools to trigger the action of automatically copying the file to Dropbox and alerting the user through Slack that the file was copied.
Final Thoughts: The Unforeseen Marketing Tech Stack Issue
Marketing technology allows professionals to create a powerhouse toolset that can help reach their highly-specific marketing goals. Even though this field of technology has the ability to improve operations on a nearly unlimited scale, it is fully optimized when technologies offer a click to connect integration that expand Marketing use cases and make employees more efficient.
When considering adding new solutions to the Marketing tech stack, the team must evaluate how well their technologies communicate and discover new tools to help centralize search results. The great news is that there are platforms available now that solve the core problems of the current lack of MarTech integrations.
