Budgeting for ongoing MarTech success

Following on from our new CEO, Timothy Biddiscombe’s recent blog on maximising your MarTech migration investment , Purple Square CX’s Darren Webb outlines planning and budgeting tips to help your marketing tech continue to deliver for years to come.

Your team may have previously set out a vision for CX and marketing success in line with the adoption of a CRM or MarTech platform or the migration to a new one, but beyond major change projects, when was the last time you reviewed – or even looked at – your business’s marketing technology strategy?

Details matter when it comes to ensuring that your aims remain relevant and aligned to the needs of your customers and business, but it’s easy for these to get lost in the buzz of day to day campaign deadlines and delivery. Even if you do have a current roadmap in place to keep things on track, it is important to review it regularly. Your team needs access to the right knowledge, technology, support and – most importantly – budget to meet their targets and keep things moving forward.

Thinking ahead

All too often, businesses don’t allocate enough time or resources year on year to support the ongoing upkeep and evolution of their technology investments and the teams that rely on them. As a result, roadmaps can shift from carefully laid out plans to wish lists of projects that fall short due to a lack of resources.

It sounds obvious, but it’s important to think and plan ahead when it comes to all aspects of the business. This includes identifying the resources you need to win new clients as well as translating repeat customers into loyal advocates for your products or services. Lay out and prioritise the short and long term aims you want to achieve, remembering to allocate enough funds to cover the ongoing costs relating to the people, processes and technology you’ll need to achieve them.

Don’t forget to look outward as well as inward

Keeping an eye on developments and trends in your industry and advancements in technology will help alert you to any upcoming changes, such as new rules and regulations to comply with, new marketing channels or even economic slowdowns. Being aware of these make it easier for your team to plan ahead, prepare and budget for change – helping to avoid unexpected surprises to keep your customers on side and stay ahead of the competition.

Setting aside the time to follow and learn about market trends can also allow you to effectively manage your applications and avoid knee-jerk investments. Not every new ‘must have’ technology app is relevant to your business, for example. Or, if it turns out to be something that can benefit your customers and your business, a little research and forward planning might reveal it is something your current platform already supports, eliminating the need to purchase and integrate a separate solution.

Maintaining performance

Anyone who’s worked through an enterprise-level platform implementation or migration knows how complex and demanding of resources they can be. In addition to setting budget aside for the migration itself, earmarking funds for yearly maintenance and upgrades will help ensure your platform continues to serve you and your team for years to come.

Investing in yearly ‘health checks’ can keep your MarTech platform running smoothly by flagging up any issues that may slow down your systems, cause problems and incur greater costs if left unchecked. For example, keeping your data clean and in order not only makes targeting and personalising marketing campaigns more effective, but can save the company a fortune by avoiding the need for paying upwards of £20,000 per year in additional data storage and archival costs.

Don’t forget your team…

Remember to check in with your internal team and any external partners you may be working with, as well. Do they have the skills and training they need? Are they getting the right support to generate value for your customers? The small investment required to implement and run an ongoing training programme will yield large rewards, including a faster, more effective and productive team. Training and knowledge sharing also builds confidence and increases job satisfaction, which results in a happier, more productive workforce. Satisfied employees also stay in post longer, which reduces the need for resource-heavy recruitment and on-boarding.

Developing good documentation for knowledge transfer and investing in campaign delivery backfill will help business and delivery to continue as usual, even in cases when core team members are unavailable. This may include training up interim employees or other team members to cover for maternity or sickness leave, or engaging trusted outside partners to provide temporary resource while you adjust to personnel changes, whatever their cause. Regularly assessing and setting aside budget to support your backfill plan can also help you to stay ahead of the curve and ensure that your internal or external team members are prepared step in if they are needed.

…and operations

Your operations and workflows should keep things running smoothly. Reviewing these as part of your health checks helps to ensure that they align, not only with your teams’ skills, but with the functionality of your technology stack. Make sure the quality assurance (QA) measures you have in place are working effectively to minimise errors, mitigate risks and maximise the benefits of your investments.

Testing and learning is often ignored, but is essential to avoid making costly mistakes or wrong decisions. Building in time, budget and workflows to test messages and their responses help you to understand the results of your mailings and ensure you’re getting a balanced return. For example, channels like SMS can prove costly if they aren’t resonating with customers. By analysing the results of their SMS campaigns, a client learned they were getting virtually no responses or engagement . When combined with the realisation that they were under-utilising the available channel capacity, this translated to a £3-£4 cost per message. After further tests and review they determined the channel was too costly to continue.

Implementing testing and QA measures may be met with resistance, with clients or team members arguing they are a drain on time and costs. Sending the wrong message at the wrong time or to the wrong recipient, however, can damage customer trust or even render an entire campaign useless.

A colleague shared her experience with an insurance company who sent her a carefully targeted renewal campaign with a reminder of her policy renewal and a tailored offer.  Unfortunately, it was delivered a month after her policies expired. It turns out she was not the only one – the time setting meant this same belated email was sent to huge numbers of their policy holders. Tight QA measures and testing would have flagged this issue from the start, saving time, money, resource – and customers!

Securing future investment

Done properly, regular ‘MOTs’, checks and maintenance can help to lower your running costs and bring down the total cost of ownership of your marketing technology platform – provided they are acted upon and not ignored. In addition to flagging issues to remedy, they can also open up opportunities to increase your revenue by identifying new functionality or upgrades that can support new revenue streams.

Depending on the size of your business, you’ll likely need to build a business case that illustrates ROI to secure budget approval for these new opportunities. KPIs that align with your vision and support your roadmap as well as small, regular investments in maintenance and health checks show long term thinking and prove that you’re making the most of what you have, which will help you to secure resource ahead of other departments when further investment is needed. Don’t forget to keep track of your company’s budget cycles, though – missing the deadline means you’ll have to wait up to a full year to get the resources you need.

There is no magic formula to pinpoint exactly how much you need to budget for each year to ensure your MarTech continues to support your marketing vision and roadmap. Planning ahead, being diligent and allocating a small proportion of your resources to regular maintenance will help to maximise your team’s – and technology platform’s – performance for years to come.