4 Reasons You Must Invest in MarTech (Marketing Technology) This Year

When planning your budget this year, are you contemplating investing in technology that could streamline and improve your marketing and sales efforts? Or are you hesitant to allocate the funds because you’re not sure if you’ll see a solid return on investment?

Naturally, few companies are eager to increase spending in any area, let alone on technology that employees must be trained on in order to incorporate it in their processes. Still, if marketing technology (MarTech) isn’t on your “must invest in” list for this year, your business could suffer. Here’s why.

1. The money you’re “saving” is money you’re lose in productivity

Sure, if you don’t budget specifically for MarTech this year, you have money to allocate elsewhere in your business. But if you look at the big picture, your marketing and sales team won’t be as productive as they would be if you gave them access to the right marketing automation tools.

Essentially, by not giving your staff tools to make them more efficient, you’re paying too much for them to complete their sales and marketing tasks. But with the right technology solutions in place, the same employees could be faster and more productive.

Let’s say you’re considering investing in automated email marketing software, but are hesitant to pull the trigger. So your marketing or salesperson (or worse, you) continues to manually send emails to leads. This eats up a lot of time that could be put toward other activities like closing sales.

2. There’s now a MarTech tool for every task

Email marketing is far from the only marketing tool businesses can leverage these days. There are over 5,000 platforms and software solutions available today. You can get tools specifically for:

Advertising
Email marketing
Content marketing
Social media
Customer relationship management (CRM)
Sales
Data management

Implementing technology in the area that gives your sales and marketing team the biggest headaches can give you a sense of how MarTech could benefit your business. Once you see a positive ROI, move on to another category. Or choose a single platform (such as HubSpot) with the broad functionality to solve as many of your pain points as possible.

3. What you’re doing today isn’t working

While it’s a slim margin, 7% of companies have no technology in place at all to help with marketing and sales. That makes it challenging to compete against your competitors who do invest in marketing technology.

But not every business invests smartly: 42% of marketers say the technology they use is fragmented or piecemeal. So you might have email marketing, social media management, and CRM solutions in place, but because these separate components don’t communicate with one another, your productivity gains are negated by the time you must spend figuring out the big picture. While it might cost more, better to invest in a system that let’s you manage everything via one robust, easy-to-use platform.

4. Integration and adoption is easier than you think

If your argument is that you can’t afford to take your marketing and sales staff offline for hours or days while you implement new solutions, those days are long gone. Now most MarTech solutions can be seamlessly integrated with what you’re already using. In addition, many tools are web-based and very simple to use.

Technology in marketing isn’t the future—it’s the present. Without it, you can’t hope to compete against leaders in your industry. A little investment in the right tools can go a long way.

This post was originally posted on AllBusiness.com.