A new Gartner survey has found that marketers are only using 42 percent of the capabilities available in their marketing tech stack, down from 58 percent in 2020.
The results show that the sprawl of tools from vendors like Salesforce, HubSpot, Adobe, and others is starting to prove too much for time- and cash-strapped companies, many of which have begun to batten down the hatches as consumer demand drops and the economy falters.
“CMOs reported allocating a quarter of their entire marketing expense budgets to marketing technologies in 2022,” said Benjamin Bloom, VP Analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice.
“Despite turbulent budgets in previous years and current economic headwinds, tech investments are a priority for CMOs and proving their ROI is more crucial than ever,” Bloom said.
“Yet the challenges associated with martech underutilization, such as new business models and disrupted customer journeys, are making it difficult for marketers to demonstrate technology's value.”
Indeed, a shift to cloud-based operations for customer experience has seen many buyers move away from legacy vendors offering cumbersome solutions. Instead, tech vendors have reported their customers’ preference for streamlined tools that leverage AI and automation to deliver savings and efficiencies.
Salesforce, for example, just introduced its Genie platform, which brings together all elements of the customer journey and feeds AI-powered insights to customer-facing roles. Dialpad and Genesys have also bet heavily on AI as the future of CX.
Gartner further said that the 16 percentage point drop in overall martech utilization in the past two years can be attributed to a significant amount of overlap among marketing technology solutions (30% of respondents), difficulty identifying and recruiting talent to drive adoption/utilization (28%), and complexity/sprawl of the marketing technology ecosystem (27%).
