New research has revealed just how much time senior marketers wasted over the past 12 months on sorting out their various martech tools rather than performing strategic marketing activities.
On average, CMOs spent 13.3 hours a month over the past year, more than 21 working days a year, so an entire month, just on troubleshooting their martech. For almost a third (31%), that rose to more than five hours a week on average, equating to more than 34 working days per annum.
The survey was carried out by marketing optimisation and transformation specialists Intermedia Global (IMG). It canvassed 250 UK C-Suite professionals with responsibility for marketing technology in mid-sized enterprises with annual revenues between £100m and £500m.
With more than 15,000 different tools and platforms now available to marketers, the technology underpinning the marketing function has become increasingly unwieldy and complex.
The study also revealed that almost three-quarters of CMOs (71%) say they often lose time set aside for creativity (e.g. a team brainstorm or personal thinking time) because they had to deal with a martech technical support issue. This rises to 95% among those who’ve been in their role for one to two years, just long enough to get to grips with the specific demands of their martech suite.
In fact, a third (34%) of CMOs admit that they lose creative time ‘very often’.
Steve Kemish, CEO of IMG, comments: “People who are spending all their time troubleshooting their tech because tool A doesn’t link with platform B, or because there’s a problem and they don’t know where the responsibility for the tech stack lies, or because their creaking legacy system can’t cope with brand-new AI functionality, aren’t able to be creative and design effective marketing campaigns.
“If CMOs want their martech to actually help them, they need to rationalise and rethink how they approach it.”
The study further highlighted that one in 12 CMOs actually say dealing with martech and data makes marketing less enjoyable for them. In addition, around one in eight (13%) say that despite supposedly saving them time and money and making marketing more efficient, their martech isn’t having a positive impact on team morale and motivation.
Steve Kemish adds: “Martech was designed to make marketers’ lives easier, but all too often it’s having the opposite effect. It’s impossible for CMOs and their teams to focus on customer experience when their own experience is so poor.
“Tech overload is something that hits businesses of all sizes and across all categories, and is significant enough that we developed a specific Marketing Experience (MX) approach to address it. This transforms how marketing teams actually work with their tech, reduce frictions, and reclaims more time for creativity and strategy. When the day-to-day experience improves, so does the output.
“And given the current economic climate, with scrutiny on budgets and headcount, it has never been more vital for CMOs to be able to make the most of their team’s valuable time and resources.”
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