What the SaaS?!? Why your MarTech SaaS Symphony Needs a Maestro More than Ever

Today’s typical enterprise has between 91 and 189 Marketing & CRM SaaS Tools (instruments) to manage day–to–day messaging, promotions and advertising campaigns across channels. Depending on who you ask, these numbers may vary by a few, but the most commonly referenced research cited by those of us in the industry is from Netskope. Their survey research details that there are 69 CRM related and 120 marketing–related SaaS tools in use on average at the enterprise.  

This may sound manageable at first, but consider that each of these tools requires all users to have an annual subscription and secure connections to and from the enterprise. Add to this, the lifespan of a SaaS application is only two years and you get a great deal of churn and skill challenges that make staffing, training and management of any marketing team extremely challenging.  

Today, the demands of CMO’s are more robust than ever. They not only manage the company’s brand strategy and messaging, but also have the added responsibility of selecting from the gaggle of technologies available to execute the marketing tasks.  

Each year, the famously referenced chiefmartec infographic gets published to showcase the many SaaS options and innovations available to choose from in the world. This year the count topped out at 8,000. 

Given that marketing teams across the world are using 100+ tools to do their daily work and spending on SaaS continues to grow year over year; it’s no wonder that ROI for these investments becomes difficult to prove or visualize. True performance metrics, as to what’s working and what’s not, remain elusive or just plain mind–boggling to string together.  

With all the technical innovation in MarTech and AdTech, in addition to the easy adoption of these tools because of SaaS, the questions are:  

1. Have the efforts to manage brand communications across the modern, digital touchpoints and traditional channels become better managed or more chaotic? 
2. Is it time to finally bridge and orchestrate the performance of these many tools? 

The answers are:  

1. Both are true.
2. Yes, it’s time!  

It is fair to say that brand marketing has improved, but the promise of the technology is still yet to be fully realized, in terms of making a positive impact on the lives of both marketing practitioner and CMO. One of my colleagues politely refers to the challenges that marketers face, when analyzing and connecting disparate SaaS tools, as “Olympic style gymnastics”. It’s an appropriate description for what most marketers just refer to as maddening. Making it easier to bridge the many MarTech and AdTech tools to finally give the marketing teams the ability to see what is and what is not “moving the needle” on a daily basis, is the missing key ingredient.  

I submit to you that it’s high time to connect it all up! As a marketer and brand strategy advisor, I love SaaS. It’s easy to quickly sign–up and use for basic things. I also love the ability to control my own destiny. But since SaaS tools come and go, it becomes critical to be able to extract and then maintain the data associated to each particular customer activity or behavior. No marketing organization can afford to lose essential data just because they sunset a tool. 

Based on projections from the IDC, worldwide spending on public cloud services and infrastructure is forecast to double over the next five years. Driven by a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR). It appears that the promise of SaaS lowering TCO and Daily OpEx at companies as well as removing the complexity is not exactly panning out.   

What you trade in hardware end of life hassles for the underlying on–premise software is a whole new set of security and integration challenges that require significant oversight and attention. Private Cloud is also an option with some solutions (Unica J). The takeaway from all this is simple: the CMO of every organization has never needed a stronger and more united relationship with her/his CIO counterpart than ever before.   

While SaaS has a clear role in bringing new marketing and Ad Tech innovations to market faster; some sense of organization and security is required.  The larger marketing department operation needs visibility to manage and track performance to the goals. Enter Unica, the most integrated marketing platform in the world; a cloud–native, private option, to centralize all your customer data and information without handcuffs to multi-tenant SaaS… and built especially for Goal-Based Marketing.  

Unica is the bridge to and from your SaaS tools and enterprise operations making precision marketing at scale possible across many channels and SaaS systems to the most important people: your customers.  

Goal–based marketing has always been critical to successful brands.  

Fragmentation and competition for human attention have increased to the point of a blur.  As messages and offers go out or get presented to customers on multiple of the various methods available, the clutter of these messages piles up on the humans. The end customer can only absorb so much.  

Similarly, the SaaS race for mindshare of marketers in the MarTech and AdTech tool space keeps moving forward. New tools are consistently coming to marketing that enable more and more specialized things; fragmenting the daily work tasks of marketers even further. More ways for the marketing team to “do something new” continue to come on the scene year after year. 
 
For every CMO and the marketing practitioner team, it’s a struggle to keep pace and keep skilled in the use of these many SaaS tools. Adopting these SaaS instruments means being innovative to their company. It means winning or losing in the marketplace for them. And this also means an ever-increasing expenditure/budget to manage. SaaS was initially adopted under the promise of low costs and simplicity. The multi-tenant model for SaaS and the easy interfaces of web-based tools were the alluring promise to marketers of all shapes and sizes.  

The wonderful days when the marketing team’s biggest challenge was coming up with the next killer creative for the company ad campaign, brand promotion or super bowl commercial are, sadly, gone. Oh, but wait… you still need a killer creative campaign, but you also need 100+ instruments to deliver it in a symphonic fashion to customers on every channel in your particular media mix. Delivering a great brand experience was never so complicated.  

Orchestrating personalized offers, in the right channel (on and offline), to the right person(s) where and when it’s needed is what UNICA does for brands. Banks, retailers, telecoms, insurance and first responders all use UNICA to deliver not only brand–focused messages but also vital or time–sensitive messaging to their customers. Unica is more than marketing; it’s essential.  

Unica is central and imperative to business Communications.  

Born from MIT Mathematicians, Unica is engineered for the future. With 15+ years of dedicated experience & development, Unica has been and continues to be, THE communications technology of choice by the world’s BEST companies and most trusted brands.  

For the better half of two decades, Unica has quietly been playing maestro to the world’s biggest brands and orchestrating campaigns across traditional and digital channels. All done with confidence with the highest levels of security and significant scale. Our clients are industry giants and innovators who continue to rely on Unica to make sure the right message, gets to the right customer, at the right time, in the right medium, every time.  

Unica is known for precision marketing at scale – across instruments (SaaS tools) and systems and data warehouses and media channels.  

Get in touch with us today and learn more about how Unica can help you manage your SaaS orchestra of instruments.