Over the past year and a half, the way marketing teams work has changed significantly. The pivot to completely remote work meant marketing leaders were more reliant on their tech stacks than ever before, and for those without a frictionless, integrated internal system, it was challenging to meet rising user expectations.

Teams that leveraged and improved their Martech stacks over the course of the pandemic were able to build more insightful campaigns, support digital growth, and enhance internal communication. On June 22nd, Adobe Workfront spoke with experts in the digital marketing, marketing operations, and transformation space about what their teams have learned and implemented since March 2020.

Melissa Harvey, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Adobe, led the virtual panel discussion. The conversation during the event, titled Digital Workplace Resilience: Improving Your Martech Stack for Greater Insights, also emphasized the importance of preparing for disruption and determining critical metrics for measuring success.

Melissa kicked off the talk by asking the panelists about their collaboration tools, and how their Martech stacks have changed over the past 15 months specifically.

Naomi Liu, Director of Global Marketing Operations at EFI, pointed to the importance of having streamlined communication channels. “We really distilled it down,” she said, and now the majority of internal communications take place solely on Microsoft Teams.

Valerie Jones, Vice President of Marketing at Broadridge, shared that her organization made improving collaboration a priority during the early days of the pandemic. “Once people use [tools], they stick with the ones that work best for them,” she said, “Workfront is our steady tool that never fails us.”

Digital transformation, however, is more than just the technology that teams rely on. Melissa next asked the panel to elaborate on their “digital transformation roadmaps” over the past year or so.

Valerie championed integrations, citing that the integration between Eloqua and Salesforce allows her to show the sales teams what marketing is working on and to prioritize projects based on revenue opportunity.

Naomi said that her team started looking specifically for tools that could integrate seamlessly into their demand gen processes that will carry over when they resume in-person tradeshows and office work.

“Equipping our teams with the tools alone was not enough,” said Lynn Teo, VP (CMO), Head of Global Marketing & Customer Experience at Wolters Kluwer. “They really needed support in terms of how best to derive maximum value from the tools.”

Lynn shared that one of her biggest lessons learned from 2020 was the importance of a virtual training program. To optimize success, marketing teams need to understand how to best use technology to their purposes, and they need leaders to encourage an innovative mindset. Introducing tools and then leaving teams to interpret them isn’t a viable option.

“If I could do over 2020, I would have come up with a much more aggressive training schedule,” said Lynn. According to her, not mandating training “leaves too much to chance.”

One essential part of developing a roadmap for digital transformation is determining how best to measure success. Critical metrics are different for every organization, but the panelists shared some tips for how they identified what mattered most to measure.

Valerie shared that her team is newly focused on contribution to pipeline. This has been essential to demonstrate a return on marketing investment and prove the team’s value to the organization as a whole.

Lynn cautioned against data overload. “We have all elements of data at our disposal,” she said, “You have to be judicious about the elements of data that matter, that support targeting, for example.” Every piece of data the marketing team evaluates should serve a purpose, whether that be to improve a campaign, evaluate a platform, or discern patterns in staff performance.

To conclude the panel, Melissa asked what teams are doing to prepare for inevitable future disruption.

Lynn pointed to internal data as the key to unlocking success. “Being able to hone in on what your true capacity is, what functional areas you need to dial up,... you can’t make those decisions until you have the tools to give you the visibility,” she shared.

“Your tools are only as good as your people,” said Naomi. Investing in continuing education and training for employees is so important, especially as no tool is going to be a “silver bullet” on its own.

As marketers move into the second half of 2021, having an effective Martech stack is essential to scaling and supporting organizational growth. By focusing on patterns in the data, investing in employees, and creating seamless integrations, marketing teams can optimize their workflows for success.