The MarTech Festival was, once again, full of fascinating insight and future gazing from some of the industry’s best and brightest. For me, it’s always an annual reminder of the speed of change in our industry: the growth of the landscape, the continual emergence of new players, and the constantly shifting demands for the tech of tomorrow.

Reflecting on this year’s Festival, and against this backdrop of constant change, one thing has stuck with me: the urgent need to improve marketing enablement.

Marketing enablement is about setting up marketing teams with the skills, knowledge and tools they need to build and run the most effective and impactful martech ecosystem for their business. It means empowering marketers to drive the greatest value from their martech investment, in collaboration with the rest of the business.

The need is clear – and the skills shortage among marketers well-documented. With the exponential growth of the sector, 22% of marketing spend is now dedicated to martech. But a remarkable 66% of marketers don’t think they have the skills to make the most of these new technologies.

Scott Brinker, the brain behind the martech landscape visualisation, talked passionately about the need for better marketing enablement at the Festival.

He describes the idea of marketing enablement as the ‘democratisation of technology’ – empowering non-technical marketers to build apps, analyse data, and integrate new technologies without needing to pick up the phone to IT.

To get there, he thinks the idea of marketing enablement needs to catch up with the ubiquity of sales enablement. There’s clearly a lot of work to do.

So what steps do businesses need to take to get marketing enablement right? I think there are four priorities:

1) Platform training: comprehensive training programmes for all new technologies, to get teams up to speed with the full capabilities of their martech ecosystem.

2) Broader training: a programme to develop broader tech skills, covering subjects like data analysis and the basics of coding and app development.

3) Industry knowledge: education to help marketers better understand the landscape, and how different martech vendors can solve key challenges for their business.

4) Better collaboration: introducing new ways-of-working to drive better collaboration between teams across the business, and drive more value from martech investment

While most have a way to go, some businesses are already doing a brilliant job with marketing enablement. Airbnb is one of those leading the way. With a commitment to informing every decision with data, they recognised it wasn’t possible to have a data scientist in every room. So they launched Data University. It offers data education to every employee, democratising data science across their whole business.

Following the leadership of the likes of Airbnb, marketing enablement should be near the top of the CMOs priorities list as we move towards 2019. It makes sense for your marketing teams who will grow their skill-sets and improve performance. It makes sense for your customers who will reap the rewards of smarter, more relevant communication. And it makes sense for your business as your martech strategies start returning a greater ROI.

I hope to hear all about the brilliant results of new and innovative marketing enablement programmes at next year’s Martech Festival.

If you’d like to talk through how Boxever can help you in your personalisation strategy or how technology can enable you to harness data that actually serves customers, drop us a line at [email protected] or on Twitter – we’d love to chat.