The Shifting Costs Of Martech and Why They Matter

When it comes to marketing, it's all about ROI. Return on investment. What you're reaping from your marketing campaigns. Are they resulting in new leads? Sales? Engagement with customers? More than ever before, marketers are under pressure to justify their spending, especially when it comes to technology, and that has led marketing technology vendors (martech) to think about adjusting their pricing structure as a result.

Marketing cloud vendors like Oracle and Marketo are rethinking their pricing models, specifically honing their approaches to be more performance-based or usage-based. Marketo, for example, currently has an annual fee based on database size, but is now also offering license agreements. It's all about giving marketing departments a tangible way to calculate the ROI of their efforts.

But, what would that look like?

Take email marketing, which is a typical way companies in all sectors of business begin a marketing campaign. A martech vendor might disrupt the marketplace by charging based on clicks or opens, not on how many emails were sent overall. That approach would seem to give marketing departments a clear-cut path to tracking ROI — "we spent X dollars on this email campaign and X people opened the emails" — but it's not without its critics.

Measuring how many people opened your email in any given campaign is all well and good, but that's not the whole picture. It's about the entire journey of customer engagement, not just whether an individual customer opened one individual email message.

The shifting cost of martech matters because it speaks to the ups and downs of the industry, and how it may be worth it for larger companies to centralize their martech efforts or even bring them in-house via custom platforms to better track and understand ROI. Data orchestration is one way to do that. It allows marketers to aggregate, organize, interpret and activate data to achieve centralized cross-channel audience insights.

Getting marketing ROI not only gives you information about how your campaigns are working with your customers so you can see the success (or lack thereof) of your marketing spend, but it also gives you a roadmap to create new campaigns in the future, either on the same path or a different one, depending on engagement.

If you want to learn more about how Data orchestration can help with that, contact us for a free evaluation..