In today’s world where technology is an integral part of our everyday lives, marketing has become as much about technology as it is about creativity. At the Pitch CMO Summit Mumbai held on March 24, Mirum India EVP Mihir Karkare spoke about the learnings from the Mirum India Martech Report 2023. Mirum, a part of WPP, is a full service digital and MarTech agency.

 The report, which was released during the summit, is based on insights garnered from more than 200 marketing decision-makers and marketing leaders spread across multiple industries in the country, including BFSI, e-commerce, FMCG, retail, hospitality, real estate, automobile, healthcare and consumer durables, to name a few. During his session titled ‘Rise of the MarTech explorers & insights from the state of MarTech in India’. Karkare also shared a glimpse of the methodology and extensive work that went into putting together the third edition of the report.

Another aspect that stood out, said Karkare, was that most of these companies were looking at hardcore business results as objectives from their MarTech spends, which can drive leads and sales.

So while lead generation, customer engagement, and brand building  were counted as the top four objectives to be achieved using MarTech last year as well as this year, this was the first time that ‘driving sales’ made it as one of the top four business goals achieved using MarTech, said Karkare.

Karkare also shed light on some of the biggest challenges that marketers faced in adopting or using MarTech tools. The organizations that refrain from using MarTech tools, cite that the biggest hindrance is being unable to measure ROI. The other challenge that companies encountered are the complexity in setting up or implementation of the MarTech tools. Companies also found the process of choosing Martech tools as too complex.

Some of the hindrances that respondents have shared include not having the required skill sets to use MarTech, their audience not being digital-first, and their partners not having the required skill sets to use MarTech. Another stumbling block that marketers faced was being unable to convince the decision makers.

There is also a marked difference in the approaches of CEOs and CMOs in an organisation when it comes to the adoption of MarTech tools, and how an organisation perceive and use customer data. CEOs tended to be more critical of their organisation’s data maturity and capability, as compared to CMOs. This critical approach taken by CEOs on customer data unification will ensure a significant top-down push for adoption of marketing technologies like CDP in the immediate future, said Karkare. The duo also differed on their viewpoints on the preferred MarTech team skill sets: where CEOs tended to follow a more holistic and broad-based approach when it came to their MarTech’s team skill sets, CMOs tended to prefer some specific skills far more than others. 71% of CMOs cited data and analytics as their most preferred skill in the team, and this is reflected in their approach for executing marketing campaigns.

Significantly, when it came to the preparedness of an organisation for new and emerging technologies like Web 3.0, metaverse, blockchain and so on, a vast majority of respondents claimed that their organisation was unaware about the implications of these technologies. Another set of respondents shared that the awareness about them was sparse and that there was no systemic way to address these changes, according to Karkare.

With the advent of Web3.0, and the movement towards a cookie-less world, rethinking marketing strategy is on the cards for most organizations. However, not everybody seems to be prepared for this change, noted Karkare.