A research team at Airtable recently published the Airtable Marketing Trends Report based on a survey of 300 marketing leaders. Here is their general summary:
Despite investing in tools and processes, marketers are spending hours every day on manual work. So the question is: Why does this happen? And more importantly: How can we fix it?
I was struck by a few of the stats in their report. First, the chart at the top of this post: the percentage of marketers’ work week spent on manual, operational tasks. On average: marketing leaders spend 30% to 39% of their time on these types of tasks.
Here's another statistic I found interesting: how many marketing tools does a typical marketing team use on a regular basis? Average: 20 to 29.
But here's what has surprised me – at least so far:
Are Marketing teams using more tools actually spending more time on manual tasks? The problem is that too many Martech tools are not yet integrated with each other. Or, many of them are “integrated,” but they are superficially integrated rather than deeply integrated.
When you use Martech tools that aren’t deeply integrated, you’re the one doing the integration work – cutting and pasting data and content, mapping definitions from one tool to another, and figuring out how to connect them together. This is manual, time-consuming, difficult to maintain, and especially prone to errors.
One solution that I’m sure many critics in the marketing technology scene will immediately come up with: use fewer tools! It’s the concept of “optimizing your Martech tools.” Use as few tools as possible to achieve your goals – but don’t use less.
A more valuable solution is better integration. The martech industry is moving in this direction. But we still have a long way to go. The best thing marketers can do moving forward is to emphasize better integration when evaluating martech tools before purchasing (or renewing) them.
But will better integrations actually reduce manual, operational work? Some additional data from Airtable’s research suggests that it will.
Marketing leaders, with automated data synchronization across tools, will spend less time on such tasks. Now, the workload has dropped from 35% to 32%, which is not a huge amount. But remember that data synchronization is only the foundation in the career of integrating Martech tools.
The right tools, deeply integrated together. That's the key to the digital age ahead.
Article link: https://chiefmartec.com/2021/04/martech-tools-manual-tasks/
