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If you work in marketing, perhaps you’ve heard the news your department’s spending will pass IT’s spending on technology in the next year or so. Gartner’s analyst, Laura McLellanImage may be NSFW.
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, also staked the claim last year, and we’re still feeling it in the beginning of 2013.
So why does this tech-happy spending matter?
Marketers love proving their work, making fancy reporting and nurturing tech tools look really attractive. As a marketer myself, the thought of adding more tech into my job conjures up images of myself as the Wizard of Oz more than images of Bill Gates.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I want to sound all great and powerful and kick the wicked witch competitors off my turf, but I would rather do it with crushing skills than smoke and mirrors. Marketing technology is grand, and we have the opportunity to make everything peachy on our proving grounds, but we first have to figure out how to utilize this rush of tech before we make a fool of ourselves.
The real question is, how do you make technology more than merely smoke and mirrors?
First and foremost, figure out what fits best in your market. Have a unique market? Make sure you express that and present the challenge when you talk with a company about using their SaaS or product in your company. Drill them! Don’t just sign up for it because every Sally and Joe are saying it’s the next best thing to sliced bread.
Once you’ve decided, take them one at a time. Don’t overwhelm yourself or your team with a gaggle of fancy new tools or services. Taking the time to train in advance means less time wasted during the day and saves you money on a tool that could otherwise go unutilized.
If you can’t learn the tool, hire someone who can. That can mean hiring someone internally, or outsourcing to someone else. If you hire someone internally, make sure to cross-check your resources with people who may already be running the program. Make sure you are hiring the right person with the right qualifications. If you don’t want to take that risk, outsource the practice. Whether it’s operating a lead nurturing campaign through marketing automation or running a data dashboard, there’s always an agency for that.
In real talk, no one wants to be the dude stuck with a ton of technology and no idea how to use it for a real advantage. Decking out your sales or marketing department in dashboards, devices, and data organizers won’t make you more efficient. You make your department more efficient.
