Use of Marketing and Communications Technology Excellence

The winner of this category is Wells Fargo for Leveraging technology to power 'next best conversations'.

Wells Fargo tackled the complexity of digital banking journeys with a Customer Engagement Engine, Audience Manager, and Clickstream Data Products. The Engagement Engine makes 5 billion decisions monthly, optimizing conversations from a library of 160 options. The Audience Manager centralizes audience management with cross-channel activation, while Clickstream products ensure real-time relevance by avoiding redundant promotions. This strategy, an excellent example of success in a martech award category, increased revenue fivefold in two years, aiming for tenfold in five years. Judges hailed this as a groundbreaking marketing marvel, highlighting the initiative's transparency tool and the impressive effort and knowledge invested in creating one of the most remarkable marketing tools.

Watch their video now to learn more! 

Gartner’s Marketing Technology Survey reveals that martech utilization has plummeted to 33%, creating risk and drawing CMOs into a choice of how to respond. CMOs must balance their pursuit of AI in marketing with maximizing returns on their existing martech implementation.

Download our eBook, “4 Actions to Improve Martech ROI,” and discover martech best practices on how to:

  • Get the most value from martech tools

  • Improve the IT-marketing partnership

  • Set a firm foundation for AI innovation

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    Q&A with Gartner Expert on Marketing Technology

    Gartner experts address some common and pressing questions about marketing technology that are most relevant to CMOs and other marketing and communications leaders today. Read through to navigate this ever-evolving landscape effectively.

    Martech awards, and comms tech awards, recognize outstanding achievements and innovation in marketing and communications technology solutions. Winning these awards can benefit a company by boosting its credibility, increasing industry visibility, attracting new clients, and validating the effectiveness of its marketing or communications technology products or services.

    Judges were looking for marketing and communications teams who had used technology to transform how they engage with both internal and external audiences, achieving greater relevance and impact. However, our top submissions will have shown examples of innovation in technological capabilities, as well as strategic approaches that drive user adoption and manage total cost of ownership in a budget-conscious setting.

    Marketing technology is collection of software and platforms that supports, manages, optimizes and orchestrates marketing's online and offline campaigns and customer experiences.

    A successful marketing technology roadmap takes into consideration the current state of existing martech investments, the marketing goals and objectives of the organization, the team's capacity and skillsets to use and adopt new investment, and where the marketing function plans to go into the future. Martech roadmaps are not a one and done project, but rather a continuous effort to evolve the tech stack to match market dynamics and new technology. CMOs and martech leaders should revisit their roadmaps at least quarterly to ensure they can adapt and evolve to market and organizational shifts.

    There are a few essential steps to take to assess the health of your marketing technology stack.

    1. Revisit the original use cases and/or outcomes determined behind the reason why you procured a technology solution.
    2. Assess if the tool did not meet, has met or exceeded your pre-determined goals. Determine if the current capabilities of your martech stack can achieve the martech use cases you have defined.
    3. Conduct an internal team pulse check to understand how they're using the technology, how often and the purposes behind the use - positive or negative (lack of use).
    4. Review current marketing objectives and future plans and ask if the current state of your technology can evolve/grow with the future state and/or goals marketing and the enterprise has.

    CMOs and marketing technology leaders should ask themselves:

    Is the current level of martech utilization sufficient? Martech teams report utilizing just 33% of their martech capability on average, which makes it harder for efforts to raise productivity and impact to overcome the complexity, sprawl, and overlapping capabilities and functions.

    An under-utilized stack is also a cost optimization opportunity. Compare the costs between the solutions, and consider the costs of maintaining the existing environment or if there will be any cost savings by consolidating. Costs include the technology, support, time, user adoption, implementation, and/or migration needs.

    Although martech teams are divided as to whether a ""best of breed"" or “integrated suite” approach is the best way to view their martech stack, we are seeing greater levels of integration between the martech stack and IT's investments in cloud-based data warehouses become top of mind. The answer will vary across organization but the most common factors CMOs and marketing technology (martech) leaders should consider are the following:

    • Will you have a dedicated, centralized team that can support multiple regions - both for training, time zones and cultural dynamics?
    • Will you have a regional martech advisory council that brings martech leaders and/or relevant leaders from your regions together to assess current and future martech investments?
    • What level of appetite do your teams have for change? How will you bring and include those who are more resistant to change leaders into the fold?
    • To what extent does your martech stack integrate with your existing enterprise data ecosystem and cloud-based data warehouses?