Navigating the MarTech world: What actually matters when you choose technology

Have you ever walked into an electronics store only to be intimidated by the sheer number of new gadgets that are ready to improve your life in ways you’ve never thought of? Navigating marketing technology (MarTech) can feel just as bewildering, especially when you’re thinking about getting all those toys to communicate with each other.

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), the explosion of data, and the rising expectations of consumers make choosing the right marketing platform as important as it is daunting.

The stakes are high — if you get the decision right, you could transform your entire business? To help you make the right choice, we’re about to embark on a journey into the belly of the MarTech beast. Along the way, we’ll explore:

The future of content management awaits you, so buckle up!

As our audiences’ habits continue to evolve, every company’s marketing strategy has to include not only innovation but also the technological flexibility that future-proof the business. With the rise of AI and ML, the outside world agrees that advertising must run virtually on autopilot from now on. A 2023 Ascend 2 report showed a significant increase in marketing automation, with email marketing and social media management showing the biggest rise from 2021 to 2023. This often raises the question: When is a new software solution worthwhile?

New solutions provide new opportunities, but they also often create new problems. For example, the multiple data sources and file formats across various channels marketers have to grapple with mean that gaining meaningful intelligence to tailor personalized experiences to a well-thought-out persona can be a huge challenge.

According to Forrester’s 2023 predictions, the biggest challenge for leaders in the near future will be to articulate value, which means insight-driven companies will take the lead. This is not only true for analytical tasks feeding into content strategies, but also for creating a unified experience on multiple platforms.

A lack of reliable data often makes for misdirected or hesitant marketing efforts. Delayed campaign rollouts and slow responses to client preferences can be costly, often due to the limitations of technology editors use to manage seasonal customer experiences across channels.

And if acting on demographic data or customer behavior is challenging for your team now, that problem will only worsen as you scale your business. Once your company grows, those applications that already didn’t deliver their full value will start to cause problems, hindering your growth. Meanwhile, your team is trying to embed the most recent AI evolution into these tools to meet customers' expectations. In doing so, they have to weigh whether they can trust the latest buzz with customer data and which new privacy issues might arise from using it.

If all of these tasks weren’t challenging enough, they need to be balanced with comprehensive sustainability and social responsibility strategies. With all those evolving demands, it’s actually more complex to accurately measure your ROI for each tool or strategy, let alone break it down for clients.

If you’ve been involved in any digital marketing tasks over the last few years, you’ve most likely worked with a CMS solution. Before they simplified the process, marketers had to know their way around HTML and CSS to modify a website.

Organizing and updating content was a pain because you couldn’t rely on templates or work on your site collaboratively. So we’re not here to say that a CMS isn’t helpful, but it’s only the first step in streamlining your digital delivery. With the introduction of mobile platforms and the growing number of marketing channels, marketers faced the new challenge of keeping their messaging consistent across different formats.

To solve these problems, WEM solutions extend the functionality of typical CMS systems. They permitted marketers to adjust their material to cater to the preferences of various demographics and produce individualized outcomes rather than copying uniform content.

A WEM solution offers various advantages compared to traditional CMS systems:

So clearly, a WEM system provides additional capabilities and a more unified perspective on your data than a traditional CMS. That said, they still have their limitations.

For instance, a WEM may lack the seamless integration with enterprise software your team uses behind the scenes, such as a CRM or marketing automation tool. And while they are capable of publishing content across various platforms, they still might not support all channels or offer a truly consistent experience. Depending on the WEM tool you’re using, you may even find that it’s not as future-proof as you’d hoped — either because it doesn’t scale with the increasing volume of data you’re handling or because it doesn’t fully leverage technologies like AI and ML for predictive analytics and automated personalization.

A DXP goes one step further to address all of these issues. It allows you to pull data and content into a single interface to reuse and adapt it to create personalized experiences unique to the channel and persona. Among all MarTech categories, from commerce platforms to data management, digital experience and content platforms saw the largest growth in 2022 at 34%, per a report from chiefmartech.com and MartechTribe, and for good reason.

Let’s break down how a DXP can help your marketing team personalize experiences for each audience segment while adapting to various channels’ formatting requirements and seamlessly integrating with your chosen set of applications.

By connecting your CRM, ecommerce and analytics tools with your multiple marketing automation platforms, a DXP allows you to create personalized digital experiences by leveraging a 360-degree view of the customer, thus driving transparency and inclusivity, according to AdAge.

Deep integration across channels will allow you to adapt to unique customer expectations and various platforms’ formatting needs when working on your marketing collateral. Many WEMs lack the separation of back end and presentation layer that would grant marketers more flexibility. Even if you make the switch to a DXP solution, you may find that you’ve lost some of the versatility you were hoping for because a lot of very different products are collected under the term “DXP.”

To understand this, it’s vital to differentiate between a monolithic DXP suite and a composable DXP. Similar to an office suite, a DXP suite gives you several tools out of one hand. At first glance, it seems like a good idea to use a platform where different applications intertwine seamlessly. However, these suites were generally built through acquisition, meaning they don’t allow for the integration you’re hoping for or interact as “seamlessly” as their salespeople would like you to believe. At the same time, a suite locks you in to use the apps that come with the platform.

Depending on your business, you might value ecommerce integrations over social media features or vice versa, but with a suite, you always get the rigid set of tools. This means some teams might have a market-leading solution while others are stuck with an afterthought. It also means that you’re very likely to be paying for lots of tools you don’t use at all.

There's a certain irony in the fact that marketers, who are expected to create increasingly personalized experiences for their customers, are being forced to work in one-size-fits-all tools. Composable DXPs address this problem, even though the underlying beliefs of each provider will make for different flavors in their approach.

A composable platform allows you to make a tailored tool selection from the best vendors in each category, is adaptable to changes in budget, marketing strategy or new applications, and ensures your solution is always aligned with your current needs while maintaining a consistent and powerful interface for content creators.

With a composable DXP, we have finally come full circle and provide a unified authoring interface to create and manage content across channels and audiences and create great digital experiences.

Here at Magnolia, we want to create solutions that meet real-world challenges. If it doesn’t promote real composability, real collaboration, and real commitment, you won’t find it here.

And if you’d like to learn more about how Magnolia’s composable DXP can help to unlock your marketing team and maximize your budgets, download our recent white paper for more information.