Marketing’s Biggest Challenges in 2023

March 14, 2023 | Blog,

Maximizing Value From MarTech Investments

Marketers today have more information than ever before. As best practices continue to change, leveraging that information to meet the moving target of customer needs is imperative. Both Adobe and Salesforce proved this to be true in separate surveys of thousands of marketers across the globe. The correlation between Adobe’s findings on the challenges facing marketers and Salesforce’s ranking of top priorities is high, making one thing abundantly clear: marketers must determine how to overcome technology adoption challenges to drive expected benefits. Across the board, effective and efficient use of technology is identified as both a priority and a challenge.

We would be remiss to think it’s just about technology; the way we work as marketers continues to rapidly evolve. If we think about technology as what we use to accomplish work and our processes as how we get that work done, we get a complete picture of the challenges facing marketing teams today. With increasingly powerful technology at our fingertips, ensuring teams can take full advantage of how to use these solutions—as prescribed by your work processes—can mean the difference between efficiently achieving outcomes and outright failure to maximize the value of technology investments.

So, what can you do to enable your team to stay at the forefront of modern work? 

Open the enablement aperture so teams can learn, adopt and adapt faster. 

This evolving state of marketing calls for an evolutionary approach to continual user enablement. Digital adoption platforms are an increasingly common solution to this challenge, but throwing another technology at that challenge can compound issues. Below, we’ve outlined critical items to consider when evaluating both adoption technology and your approach to long-lasting enablement. 

Often, when we think about enabling digital adoption, we focus on new users and new technology. While new user onboarding is key to minimizing the time it takes to derive value from technology investments, it’s dangerous to assume that adoption stops after a new user is trained. Without question, marketing teams are working in an ever-evolving landscape, which means our technology, processes and teams are also in a constant state of evolution. Consider an expanded view of enablement and adoption across your potential use cases.

Generalist vs. Specialist: Knowledge of Marketing and MarTech Are Essential

Most digital adoption platforms are blank slates, requiring herculean efforts to integrate with existing technology and create the content (guides, instructions, videos, etc.) that will help users maximize their use of the software. Let’s face it, marketers cited a ‘lack of time for creative work’ and ‘gap in digital skills’ as two of the top five challenges facing their teams today. Selecting a digital adoption platform that requires already-stretched marketing and IT teams to both implement and create adoption content will further frustrate teams and impact employee productivity. Generally, we expect the following benefits from any digital adoption platform: 

• Improve time-to-value for both new technologies and new users of existing technologies
• Increase employee focus, performance and satisfaction
• Drive a stronger competitive posture through more efficient and effective use of critical software
• Decrease the time required to train, enable and support users
• Reduce support tickets and cost to support technology

Realizing these benefits is difficult if marketing teams are starting from a blank slate. Consider providers and partners that have already embedded and integrated adoption platforms into the technology you use. Let’s explore this idea through an example: leveraging JumpSeat to increase the realized value of industry-leading work management platform Adobe Workfront. 

Workfront enables marketers by centralizing the increasingly complex tasks their job requires and facilitating project management through fully customizable and transparent workflows. As such, it’s important that Workfront users take advantage of all the features and benefits the platform offers; reducing redundant meetings, simplifying projects from the “idea” stage through to completion and ultimately helping maximizing ROI. At the most foundational level, Adobe Workfront makes marketing teams more efficient—an advantage they can’t afford to lose because of poor adoption. 

This is where JumpSeat comes in. JumpSeat is a digital adoption platform that exists to help marketing teams accelerate adoption and enablement for the long-term—that’s why JumpSeat is embedded in Adobe Workfront. 

Built for marketing teams, JumpSeat delivers users the knowledge, support and step-by-step guidance in real-time, with no technical integration required. JumpSeat wayfinders embed video, enablement assets and essential context directly into Adobe Workfront. 

JumpSeat guides, workflows and adoption content was developed by a team of the world’s top Workfront implementation, configuration and administration consultants. 40+ expertly curated guides lead users step-by-step through simple navigation as well as complex processes. All of this is supported by analytics which track user, process and application adoption, delivering complete visibility into how your team uses Adobe Workfront. 

FINAL THOUGHTS

Bottom line: realization of the full potential of your technology investment and maximizing the productivity of your marketing organization demands adoption software that is designed for how you work and the tools you use to get work done. 

It’s a new day for marketers and the opportunities are limitless. Marketing teams are in the hotseat to deliver both exceptional customer and employee experiences. The call for innovation and change is clear. Contact the JumpSeat team today to see how you can unlock the full potential of your marketing organization.