Over the past three years we have seen a great deal of movement in the martech sector, with technologies being acquired and clients taking the opportunity to re-evaluate the way they implement the martech stack.  

We have seen lots of technology acquisitions (Bloomreach with Exponea), mergers (Twillo, Sendgrid, Segment), IPO’s (Braze) and in some cases decommissioning (BlueVenn). For our clients this brings both opportunity and worry; for example, if you are currently a BlueVenn user, you now have less than 12 months to re-platform before the software goes offline. For this paper we will focus on customers on these types of platforms and try to offer some insight into what to do next and why. 

What’s happening to cause all this technology movement?

There have been lots of new technologies that have entered the market that have caused disruption, for example Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). CDPs have been disruptive because they have made it much easier for the marketer to integrate data and create a unified view of the customer. Typically, these solutions were development-heavy, with IT teams building marketing databases in Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata, and more recently Azure, AWS and GCP platforms.   

The technical nature of these platforms suited well-established marketing platforms such as HCL Unica (previously owned by IBM), early versions of Adobe Campaign (Previously Neolane) and column-based architectures such as Alterian and BlueVenn (previously Smartfocus). These platforms allowed technical marketers, or martech admins, to import and transform data in complex ways. This led to lots of flexibility, but also introduced the need for lengthy data integrations and a ‘code-based’ way of working. Because the complex data manipulation is being performed in the marketing platform it also takes a lot more time and resources to migrate to a new platform. 

So why should I migrate to a new platform? 

In some cases you have no choice about whether to migrate to a new platform or not - for example, those BlueVenn customers mentioned above will have to migrate. For those customers, the question is now how to approach the migration, which we will explore in the next section. Other customers must ask themselves a few questions: 

• Can I execute on my use cases when I want to, and to all the channels I need? 

• Am I always waiting for campaigns to run or data to be refreshed and is this impacting my agility? 

• Does my current Marketing Platform align to the IT strategy (for example aligning to Azure, AWS, GCP)? 

• Am I too reliant on doing complicated ETL & SQL coding in my marketing automation platform?  

If the answer to any of those questions isn’t the most desirable option, then you should explore what it would take to migrate. 

The latest versions of Adobe, Salesforce, Braze and the CDP vendors mentioned above are all taking the approach of splitting the data from the marketing platform or at least providing the functionality as separate modules.  This removes some of the complexity from day-to-day marketing and allows the marketer to focus instead on building the customer experiences they know their customers are asking for. In some cases, this will mean some data engineering work is required in a cloud platform to get the data into the shape required for the new marketing platform. Pairing a cloud platform with a CDP then allows the marketer to gain access to data and systems in real-time without the need to involve expensive and often fully-utilised IT resources.  

So how do I migrate, and what steps should I take? 

Firstly, it’s important to realise that the platform you are currently using has probably had years of development to make it a fit for your business needs.  That could be by feature requests developed by the software vendor on your behalf, or it could be a customised relational database supporting all your marketing campaigns. Any new platform you see will not have exactly the same functionality you had previously, and you may not be able to customise the database as we described above. 

Step 1:

What’s the outcome(s) you are trying to achieve? Define your business requirements. The way you communicate with your customers today may not be how you want to communicate with them in future. Use this process as an opportunity to define exactly what you want. We have done some of the hard work for you in this area by collating a longlist of business requirements we would expect a new platform to have. 

Step 2:

Define your use cases.  As above, current use case examples may not be optimal as they are right now, so take this opportunity to redefine them. Can your use cases go further or broader? 

Step 3:

Look at the data systems feeding your marketing platform today. Could they be streamlined? Could you change the way your business operates to push some of the data transformation into the data layer? This may mean some business transformation is required and involve a change to the way your teams think about executing marketing campaigns, but remember your goal is to future-proof through this exercise. The data you created or manipulated to run your campaigns previously could now be utilised across the customer experience stack. 

Step 4:

Now you know what you want, it’s time to go to the market to look for alternatives. You may already be aware of some technologies and your team may also have some experience with other platforms. It’s important to be mindful of Step 3 above, as this may change what you look for in a marketing platform. 

Step 5:

Choose the platform and start the migration.  Think about what success looks like, can I get the migration done in phases to help get early value? 

At Merkle we help clients at every stage of the process, which can vary from guidance on software vendors to running the whole process. If this all seems to like a lot to get done in the next 12 months, please get in touch and we can help fast-track your migration.  We have helped clients migrate platforms in as little as three to six months.