How service design helps marketing technology perform better

Marketing technology (martech) is everywhere. But, martech ecosystems often remain bloated, outdated and poorly configured.

In short, they often fail to meet all of the needs marketing teams have. Given this, and with marketing under pressure to improve performance and account for every penny, the relationship between marketing and those responsible for martech ecosystems, such as IT, needs to change.

As technology and our reliance on it evolves, it isn’t surprising to hear that the martech sector is growing fast and is anticipated to expand by an average of 19.8% per year from 2023 to 2030. But, with many thousands of products out there, the main challenges lie in integration. Not simply from a technical perspective – for example, to allow systems to talk with one another and centralise data for downstream use cases – but also from a business perspective – that is to align with long-term business objectives and support evolving organisational needs.

To address this, these systems must be intentional in their design and silos must be broken. This involves understanding the systems, the people who use them and the desired outcomes they need. A shared vision will help improve the performance of marketing campaigns and other omnichannel activities as well as elevating creativity.

Martech can only achieve greatness when properly aligned to customer and employee experience

Technological advancements are revolutionising the world of martech, and features like hyper-personalised content are increasingly becoming a reality. But as more tools get introduced, integrating these with one another to unlock better customer experiences becomes ever more important – and complex.

With this in mind, businesses need to ensure that their martech investments not only improve operational efficiency but also deliver exceptional experiences for customers and employees alike. This synergy between technology and experience is the key to thriving in today's competitive landscape.

Three challenges across the martech space of today

The data challenge

We often see martech positioned at isolated moments of the customer journey. Pain points tend to revolve around the poor integration of existing data, rigid integration constraints, difficulties in cleaning and organising data, understanding biased data and patterns and disjointed systems for data cleansing, storage and security. However, internal changes often don’t help, we see revolving CIO and CMOs who arrive with different solutions, mindsets and tools. This leads to a lack of defined and aligned culture establishing itself when it comes to treating data correctly.

For marketing to accurately use data to report on performance and improve future planning, a framework must be designed to define how to access and collect the right data from the appropriate sources including; how to organise it to enhance its quality into cohesive datasets; how to harness data pattern detection automations; how to create engaged audiences and how to activate them across different channels.

Creating a data lake, providing a unified source to power segments and streamline data management across marketing and technology teams, is a starting point. But without a clear strategy and structure to organise data streams, it’s difficult to leverage data lakes to accurately use the data to report on performance and improve future planning. This reality hampers an organisation’s ability to democratise their data, by making data accessible and understandable to large audiences.

Shared ways of working

Outdated, siloed and rigid workflows that cannot scale to meet evolving customer needs, lead to delays in campaign execution and reduced responsiveness to topical events – a key ingredient in the marketing mix.

We see lengthy and confusing approval processes, often involving multiple rounds of feedback from decision-makers, extending campaign launch timelines. Communication barriers, exacerbated by outsourcing marketing functions to third parties, result in miscommunication, lack of trust, inefficiencies and errors.

Limited autonomy and a lack of collaboration hinder marketing teams when it comes to making quick changes and accessing data, slowing response times and reducing agility in campaign management.

Crucially, a lack of cross-functional alignment between marketing and technology leads to inconsistent customer and employee experiences due to a lack of end-to-end ownership of the customer journey resulting in no clear ownership and accountability for the success of marketing efforts.

Unaligned with business strategy

When a martech stack fails to align with an organisation's desired business outcomes and strategy, it leads to inefficiency and ineffectiveness.

This manifests itself in people spending time on technologies that do not contribute to desired outcomes, underutilisation of martech tools due to a lack of strategic alignment and difficulties integrating data and processes organisation wide.

Poor customer experiences may also arise if the martech stack doesn't support effective engagement strategies, impacting satisfaction and retention – i.e. if your martech system does not allow you to keep pace with the campaign or creative output of your competition.

Therefore, martech should ideally be an arm of product strategy not kept apart from it. This approach promotes organisational alignment and offers businesses a greater chance of achieving their business objectives and delivering value to customers effectively.

As with any project, clarity on the business goals must be the starting point. As obvious as that sounds it often just isn’t so. Every single martech project or platform must be helping drive business aims and objectives.

How service design can help better design martech ecosystems

Like any other system, marketing processes and martech tools within those, benefit from a design-led approach. We often use service design to help our clients solve this challenge, as it takes a holistic approach that covers the entire cycle from wider strategy to actual implementation, considering all “frontstage” user-visible touchpoints as well as the “backstage” system and process enablers.

Let’s take an employee-side example of “being able to track all customer interactions in one place”; or an end-user example of “receiving personalised and meaningful offers, to improve my health”. When considering these examples you need to ask:

• How and where do the martech tools sit to enable users to achieve their goals?

• How do the systems talk to one another and where do they sit within the wider IT ecosystem?

• How does the data flow between them?

• How do the business metrics and the organisational structure and culture support or obstruct the overall experience?

Service design helps answer these questions by analysing and integrating people, processes and technology. It aims to create seamless and meaningful interactions across all touchpoints, ensuring services meet customer and employee needs and business objectives effectively. Service design helps teams across businesses clarify the way forward with maps and models that transform abstract complex thoughts into tangible structured visions.

In this way, Service Designers reduce complexity and make it easier to think and talk clearly about the problems that need solving.

Service design fosters cross-departmental collaboration by bringing people together in discovery and playbacks, ensuring alignment and action towards achieving shared objectives. Service Design is not simply about planning tools such as service blueprints, rather it’s outputs are about delivery and iteration and improvement.

By promoting iterative improvement, better understanding across departments, and shared ways of working, service design can allow for agile adjustments to martech strategies in response to evolving market trends and customer expectations. Simultaneously, the creative thinking and problem-solving inherent in service design can lead to fresh approaches, products, and services.

This business and customer-centric approach means that technology investments effectively enhance customer interactions, leading to improved efficiency, enhanced collaboration, sustainable growth, and strategic alignment with organisational goals and vision.

What's the process for auditing martech with service design?

Service design follows typical user-centred processes, where the initial focus is on discovering the current state of things. Service Designers identify opportunities for improving things by first understanding the existing context, rather than just asking people outright about it. This also sets realistic objectives for a future ideal state, by uncovering technical or organisational constraints.

The process often involves conducting stakeholder interviews and workshops with key teams such as marketing, IT, sales, customer service and end-users to grasp their needs and expectations from martech tools. In short, service design ensures that each group with a stake in the martech ecosystem is consulted and catered for while tempering this insight with factual realities about the business.

Service design is a strategic activity

It should be made clear that service design is not just about talking and drawing fancy maps. It’s as much about strategic thinking as it is about execution. After having examined current processes and identified inefficiencies, to-be maps are designed, prototyped and tested with real users in real-world scenarios. This phase provides further insights into martech tools usage and their impact on employees as well how they will support business outcomes, enabling continuous improvement through feedback loops.

This approach creates artefacts summarising how martech tools integrate with each other and business systems, and realistic plans and workflows to simplify the ecosystem, reduce redundancies and improve efficiency. This provides a shared point of reference across all teams, meaning communications can be streamlined due to having these shared assets.

It also includes change management strategies to support the adoption of new or enhanced martech tools, which align with business goals, ongoing monitoring needs and roadmaps for the implementation and optimisation of tools.

Finally, it provides a solid strategic foundation to evolve martech stack in accordance with business needs and technological advancements – because the whole business was involved in the process.