How would you characterize the strength and effectiveness of your marketing organization? Do you have the right talent, martech tools and focused strategy required to compete at the level necessary to grow within your industry?

If you are feeling like your marketing organization hasn’t quite pulled it all together, you’re not alone. According to a recent CMO survey by Duke University, Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, less than half (48.4%) of marketing leaders rate their company’s marketing excellence as strong or excellent.

One reason for this may be the relentless pace of marketing technology innovation, which requires marketers to evaluate, integrate, learn and manage an ever-increasing number of martech solutions.

CMOs just might be at a breaking point when it comes to martech adoption. Marketers have become burdened – both operationally and economically – with integrating hundreds of point solutions. This will lead 20 percent of large enterprise CMOs to consolidate their marketing technology infrastructure this year, according to IDC’s Futurescape: Worldwide Chief Marketing Officer Advisory 2016 Predictions.

CMOs will increasingly look to single-source vendors to make this happen. And vendors are stepping up, building marketing cloud platforms with greater integration capabilities. The end result, predicts IDC’s analysts, is that marketers will “strive to lower costs, increase effectiveness, and rebalance staff allocations from martech back to marketing.”

Marketers seeking a more effective balance across marketing strategy, martech and marketing operations staff, can start by looking for “opportunity areas” internally that are in need of a reset. Where is the focus of your staff straying from marketing? Martech and administrative execution are two key areas to consider.

Martech: Consolidate and Future-Proof Your Infrastructure

How much of marketing staff time is devoted to the technical and operational administration of marketing technology? Consider the staff time invested in systems administration, user administration, reporting, and managing and adding marketing assets, including content, to martech systems.

And what happens if your internal technical experts leave the team or the company?

One solution to the challenges and risks associated with martech adoption is to outsource operational administration activities to a marketing as a service (MaaS) partner. Outsourcing tech-driven marketing functions and execution services will allow you to re-focus your staff on the strategic marketing activities for which they were hired.

MaaS also eliminates the need to hire for technology, which reduces the risks associated with tech obsolescence and attrition of trained staff.

Shift Administrative Execution to Appropriate Resources

Administrative functions related to marketing execution can rob your staff of time and focus. We previously posted about some of the warning signs of a marketing team that is bogged down in marketing minutia. Red flags to look for: if your team isn’t coming up with big ideas and can’t focus on strategy, or you have high turnover on the marketing team.

Everyday tasks can keep us from planning, innovating and creating powerful new campaigns including things like managing revisions and approvals, tracking down logos or existing marketing materials, managing mailing lists, local customization and managing custom requests, ad resizing, assembling and distributing local kits, and reporting.

Franchise marketers may get bogged down in activities like executing electronic newsletters at the local level, updating, printing, and distributing marketing playbooks, managing franchisee store profiles (needs based on their store type), and managing participation in corporate campaigns.

Bank marketers also have a unique set of administrative activities that can steal time from strategic marketing, such as ensuring regulatory compliance, preparing for audits, managing field requests (e.g., sponsorships, memberships, reimbursements, logos, advertising, co-branding and more), and managing budgets.

Among the risks associated with these challenges are:

• Losing ground to competition. Is the competition being more proactive than you? Are you able to proactively grow the business?
• Staff turnover. Will you experience turnover because highly talented staff are not flexing their marketing talent?
• Costly inefficiency. Are you utilizing high-paid staff for low-level administrative functions?

Many administrative execution challenges can be solved with automation, internal redistribution of tasks, or outsourcing to an MaaS partner. Automation can facilitate self-service by local staff, like finding and accessing marketing materials and local customization of templated materials. You can further free up senior marketing team members by redistributing administrative tasks to field teams and junior staff members. And the right MaaS partner will allow you to offload even more routine administrative tasks with confidence.

Marketing Infrastructure as a Point of Competitive Differentiation

Marketing organizations that rebalance staff allocations and recalibrate their focus from martech and administrative execution back to marketing often discover they become more adaptive and agile, which positions them to be more competitive.

A commitment to agility can put an organization on a path to greater profitability. McKinsey reported that many companies using agile techniques have grown revenues by as much as 4X across the segment offerings and product lines that have been optimized. And even the most digitally savvy marketing organizations, with limited room for improvement, have experienced revenue increases of 20 to 40 percent.

A rebalanced, more agile marketing staff can compete more effectively, regardless of the pace of change and innovation in martech.