From Investment to Impact: Five Strategies to Maximize ROI with Marketing Technology

As the economy continues to slow and consumer preferences fluctuate, marketers are forced to find creative solutions to make the most of their budgets. A recent Gartner survey reveals that 71% of CMOs feel they are lacking sufficient budget to fully execute their marketing strategies in 2023. In response to these constraints, marketers are searching for ways to optimize their resources and generate a better return on their technology investments.

However, to achieve maximum ROI, it’s essential for marketers to assess their entire tech stack rather than focusing on individual features and functionality. Understanding the technical debt involved and potential infrastructure issues when purchasing a new platform or implementing a new point solution is crucial. By adopting a holistic and strategic view of their tech stacks, organizations can reduce complexity and streamline operations, enabling them to do more with less, while also building exceptional customer experiences.

This blog will explore five effective strategies to help marketers fine tune their technology investments for ROI and thrive even amidst economic headwinds.

1. Invest in Flexible Integration

First and foremost, you need to prioritize flexible data integration. By enabling a seamless flow of data across your disparate systems and platforms, you ensure that information can be easily shared and synced between different tools. This not only eliminates data silos and improves data accuracy but also creates a comprehensive view of the customer, leading to better decision making and more robust customer experiences.

Moreover, investing in flexible integration allows companies to adapt and scale their marketing technology stack as their business needs evolve. According to a recent report conducted by Forrester and commissioned by Zeta, a well-integrated data and technology environment yields immediate, far-reaching benefits including:

• Improved brand reputation (68%)
• A revenue advantage through increased speed to market (68%)
• Improved internal collaboration, allowing teams to access and share information seamlessly (61%)
• Ability to analyze data in the application enabling real-time insights and empowering data-driven decision-making (59%)

It’s important to note that embracing a single platform (rather than relying on the integration of multiple costly point solutions) increases efficiency and future proofs your martech ecosystem.

2. Centralize Your Data

Many companies often find themselves grappling with data silos and fragmentation that obstruct a clear understanding of their customers. In the Forrester report commissioned by Zeta, an overwhelming 84% of companies employ 10 or more customer experience tools, highlighting the need for a centralized approach.

By consolidating data from these disparate systems into a holistic view of customer behavior and preferences, marketers can uncover valuable patterns and trends that foster increased engagement and incremental revenue growth.

Centralizing your data also streamlines operations, making information more accessible and actionable for marketing teams. This translates to faster campaign creation, more accurate audiences, better analytics, and more effective marketing.

3. Prioritize Environment Stability

As teams add new point solutions to your environment to meet specific goals, the potential for compatibility issues among various datasets increases. To navigate these challenges, finding a reliable technology partner becomes essential. This partner can help streamline and rationalize your tech stack while efficiently managing a deluge of data.

By teaming up with a single trusted partner to create a lean and well-organized stack, you gain the advantage of data sharing within a centralized hub, allowing you to leverage valuable insights across your entire audience. This centralized approach simplifies collaboration and ensures a unified view of your operations.

Moreover, with a well-optimized technology ecosystem, you can better capitalize on your technology investment and drive the launch of more impactful campaigns. The result? A significant boost in effectiveness, leading to better outcomes and increased revenue generation.

4. Employ Low-Code Applications

Technical roadblocks can make it difficult to adapt quickly to changing goals and industry trends. Traditional applications that necessitate developer or engineer assistance not only consume valuable resources but also create bottlenecks, diverting attention away from other critical projects.

By embracing low-code applications, marketers are empowered to build campaigns, modify elements, conduct tests, and adjust strategies without relying on development or engineering support.

This autonomy leads to significant time and resource savings on campaign creation and management, enabling marketers to maximize efficiency and focus more on driving profits and achieving more meaningful ROI.

5. Make it Easy to Adopt Technology

A well-optimized technology ecosystem provides a cohesive and integrated user experience, incentivizing employees to make use of it. By centralizing and simplifying your technology infrastructure, end users can easily understand and navigate the tools available to them, reducing the learning curve and eliminating barriers to adoption.

With a unified platform, employees no longer need to juggle multiple point solutions or learn different interfaces, which saves time and alleviates frustration. It also encourages cross-functional collaboration and fosters knowledge sharing, as employees can easily understand how the technology applies to their respective roles.

Keep in mind that when selecting a platform, it’s critical to pay careful attention to licensing requirements to ensure scalability and widespread adoption across the organization. Certain platforms may hinder broad adoption due to restrictive licensing practices, which can cause frustration and waste resources.

Minimize Technical Debt and Maximize ROI with Zeta

As we’ve uncovered, adopting technology that minimizes technical debt and maximizes ROI is crucial to compete in today’s complex and dynamic marketplace. Zeta’s AI-Powered Marketing Cloud offers a unified platform that empowers marketers to streamline and centralize data with minimal resources. By consolidating disparate data sources into a single, cohesive hub, Zeta eliminates data silos, enhances data accuracy, and provides a comprehensive view of customers—enabling individualized experiences and informed decision making.

Low-code applications give marketers autonomy, reducing dependence on technical resources and expediting campaign creation and optimization. With user-friendly interfaces and drag-and-drop functionality, Zeta facilitates the delivery of targeted campaigns at scale.

Committed to continuous innovation and AI-driven tools, Zeta ensures businesses can stay ahead of the curve, unlocking the full potential of their marketing technology investments. By partnering with Zeta, organizations can minimize technical debt, maximize ROI, and set themselves up for success in the face of an uncertain economy.