Steering marketing operations: essential steps to keep ahead of marketing AI technology changes and Thrive

Chasefive Management

As recently as 2022, the yearly Martech Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic revealed over nine thousand marketing software products across over twenty categories. These categories include Marketing Analytics Software, Marketing Attribution, Social Media Management, and more. 

Anyone working in marketing is familiar with the marketing technology landscape and constant growth in the number and scope of software solutions. 


According to a recent update by Martech.org, a whopping 2,042 new martech tools were introduced in the second half of 2023. Interestingly, 73% of these new tools were powered by artificial intelligence, bringing the total number of software applications for marketing to over thirteen thousand. Without a doubt, the recent surge in artificial intelligence has brought the issue of martech management to the forefront for marketing teams worldwide once again.


Essential Steps to Keep Ahead of AI Technology Changes and Thrive


In such rapidly evolving technology landscape, marketing management faces the critical task of staying ahead of technological advancements to drive business growth and maintain a competitive edge. As new marketing technologies (martech) continue to emerge, it becomes essential for marketers to navigate the changing landscape effectively.


This article will explore the key steps marketing professionals can take to understand and leverage new martech opportunities, assess their impact on marketing operations, adapt tactical plans, and successfully implement marketing changes.

1. Understand Tech Opportunities for Marketing: The first step in steering marketing operations towards success is to understand the potential opportunities presented by new technologies. Keeping a pulse on the latest martech trends and innovations allows marketing teams to identify tools and platforms to enhance their strategies and streamline their processes. It involves continuous learning, attending industry events, exploring case studies, and engaging with industry thought leaders. By staying informed, marketers can uncover new channels, data analytics tools, automation platforms, and customer engagement solutions that can drive better results.


2.Assess Impact on Marketing Operation: Once marketers identify promising martech opportunities, the next crucial step is to assess their impact on the existing marketing operation. This involves evaluating the compatibility of new technologies with the current infrastructure, resources, and processes. Conducting a comprehensive analysis helps determine the potential benefits, challenges, and implementation requirements associated with adopting new martech solutions. Considering the cost, scalability, integration capabilities, and alignment with business objectives is essential. By conducting a thorough assessment, marketing teams can make informed decisions about which technologies are most suitable for their organization.


3.Adapt Your Tactical Plans: With a clear understanding of the tech opportunities and their impact, marketers can now adapt their tactical plans to incorporate the new martech solutions. This step involves aligning marketing strategies and objectives with the capabilities offered by the selected technologies. It requires revisiting and refining marketing campaigns, content strategies, customer segmentation, and targeting approaches. By leveraging the power of new martech tools, marketers can enhance customer experiences, personalize messaging, optimize conversions, and improve overall marketing performance. It is crucial to create a roadmap for implementation, set realistic goals, allocate resources, and establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of these adapted plans.


4.Implement Marketing Change: The final step in steering marketing operations towards success is implementing marketing changes enabled by new martech solutions. This involves careful planning, seamless integration, and proactive change management. It is essential to communicate the benefits and objectives of the latest technologies to all stakeholders, including marketing teams, executives, and other relevant departments. Training and upskilling programs should be provided to ensure that employees have the necessary skills to leverage the new martech tools effectively. Additionally, ongoing monitoring, analysis, and marketing optimization are vital to ensure that the implemented changes align with the desired outcomes and deliver the expected results.


In the fast-paced world of marketing, staying ahead of technology changes is a prerequisite for success. By following the essential steps of understanding tech opportunities, assessing their impact, adapting tactical plans, and effectively implementing marketing changes, marketing management can drive growth, improve performance, and thrive in the ever-evolving landscape. Embracing new martech solutions empowers marketers to optimize their operations, enhance customer experiences, and achieve their business objectives. With a proactive approach to technology adoption, marketing teams can navigate the digital revolution and maintain their competitive edge in the dynamic marketing world.

 

If you're ready to steer your marketing operations towards success and embrace the power of new martech solutions, we invite you to contact us at ai@chasefive.com for a no-obligation consultation.


Understanding the Marketing KPI Divide: Why Production-Level Metrics Don’t Translate for Business Leaders

By Chasefive Management • October 30, 2025
The modern marketing landscape is rich with data. Teams can track campaign clicks, bounce rates, and email opens with precision; yet business leaders still question whether marketing truly drives growth. This disconnect often stems from a gap between production-level KPIs, granular measures used by marketing teams, and business leadership metrics, which focus on strategy, commercial outcomes, and long-term impact. The Leadership Challenge: Relevancy in Marketing KPIs Problems arise when senior leadership misinterprets or undervalues marketing KPIs . Executives often want to see how marketing contributes to strategic goals, but when presented with overly granular metrics, they disengage. Misalignment of Metric Relevance Leadership Focus: The C-suite prioritizes impact metrics such as customer lifetime value, market share growth, or marketing ROI. Marketer Focus: Teams look at tactical measures like CPC, bounce rates, and engagement. The Result: When operational data is given to executives expecting strategic insight, clarity is lost. CPC means little to a CFO concerned with revenue growth. Lack of Trust and Strategic Disconnect Mistrust at the Top: Studies show that nearly 80% of CEOs lack trust in their marketing departments. Much of this distrust comes from poor alignment in metrics. Structural Failures: If strategic goals are not translated into meaningful KPIs, marketing execution becomes scattered. Resource Misallocation: Marketers waste an average of 26% of budgets on ineffective channels when metrics fail to reflect business priorities. The FAPI Marketing Framework stresses tailored reporting, ensuring that each stakeholder, whether CEO, manager, or executive, receives metrics aligned with their role and level of decision-making.  Management vs. Production Metrics: A Dual-Lane View To clarify this divide, the FAPI Framework illustrates how management-level metrics differ from production-level metrics and why both are essential.

How to make creativity operational within a performance-driven marketing framework

By Chasefive Management • October 19, 2025
In modern marketing, creativity and performance often seem at odds — one thrives on freedom, the other demands structure. Yet within the FAPI Marketing Framework , these two forces are intentionally designed to coexist. The Plan Master — the central leadership role in FAPI — is responsible for integrating creativity and innovation within a structured, data-driven system. This means ensuring that imaginative thinking is encouraged, but also anchored to commercial and strategic outcomes. In practice, the Production Executives (the creative and technical professionals who execute campaigns) must receive a clear and structured creative brief that defines the strategic intent, boundaries, and success metrics for their work. In FAPI terms, creativity doesn’t operate in chaos — it flourishes within a defined frame.

From Reporting to Prescriptive Analysis: Climbing the Marketing Intelligence Ladder

By Chasefive Management • October 3, 2025
Modern marketing teams sit on a mountain of data, yet turning that data into meaningful decisions remains a challenge. The FAPI Marketing Framework™ offers a clear path: move step by step from operational reporting to strategic prescriptive insights. The diagram below illustrates this progression, showing how marketing intelligence evolves in both complexity and value . The two axes of marketing intelligence The diagram is built on two dimensions: Vertical axis – Human vs. Automation: At the base, processes like reporting are automated and mechanical. As you climb, the need for human interpretation and judgment grows. Horizontal axis – Marketing Value: On the left, activities deliver limited business value by describing the past. Moving right, value increases as insights guide real-time actions and future strategy. Together, these axes show how marketing analysis matures from descriptive outputs to strategic decision-making tools .

Preparing Marketing Data for Decision Making

By Chasefive Management • September 24, 2025
In modern marketing, data is everywhere. But without structure and purpose, data is just noise. The real value comes when data is prepared in a way that makes it actionable, contextual, and aligned with responsibilities . As part of the Insights Module in the FAPI Marketing Framework , preparing marketing data for decision making ensures that teams move beyond collection and reporting, and instead focus on clarity, consistency, and meaning. Why data preparation matters. ensuring reliability and integrity The primary goal of marketing data preparation (covered in the Data Acquisition component of the Insights Module) is to ensure the marketing team has access to the right data, organized and ready for analysis. This is a critical leadership responsibility. Within the FAPI Marketing Framework, this responsibility falls to the Plan Master, who must establish benchmarks and key performance indicators (KPIs) and clearly explain their purpose before execution begins. Getting this right avoids costly misalignment. When teams rely on inaccurate or poorly defined data, they risk making the wrong decisions and allocating resources inefficiently.

Marketing production hierarchy diagram, synchronising marketing execution through operational stages

By Chasefive Management • September 11, 2025
The FAPI Marketing Framework defines a clear hierarchy of terms, particularly regarding the relationship between the user journey, campaigns, and activities, ensuring a structured approach from strategic planning to tactical execution. This hierarchy is crucial for maintaining alignment between marketing efforts and overarching business strategy. 1. User Journey (Phases) The user journey (also called the user lifecycle) is the end-to-end path a person follows as they discover a product, service, or brand. It’s a foundational concept in the Architecture Module. Each company defines where the journey starts and ends, which affects how activities are built and monitored across the experience. Common phases used are: Awareness (or Reach): Getting the brand noticed. Validation (or Engage): Users validate claims and develop curiosity. Consideration: Users seek detailed information and explanations. Intent (or Engage): Users are motivated to take action. Commitment (or Conversion): Users make a purchase or tangible investment. Activation & Growth (or Nurture): Retain customers, drive repeat business, and increase lifetime 2. Campaigns Campaigns represent coordinated activities centred around a single concept and theme to form an integrated marketing communication. They sit within the user journey phases. In the FAPI Marketing Framework, "primary campaigns" are considered strategic and are defined in the Frame Module, making them mission-critical, non-negotiable, and long-term. Examples include Black Friday or Christmas campaigns for an e-commerce business, which are crucial for a large percentage of revenue. A campaign delivers a message created to communicate with potential customers at each phase of the customer journey. Production teams and agencies do not create these strategic campaigns; they receive campaign briefs from the strategic marketing leadership team . Campaigns are conceived at the strategy level, and a campaign conceived wrongly at this stage cannot be redeemed later.

Marketing Performance Leverage Effect. Modeling Synergy Across Marketing Channels

By Chasefive Management • September 3, 2025
The FAPI Marketing Framework—a comprehensive methodology for strategic marketing deployment—culminates in the Insights Module, which focuses on data-driven decision-making and continuous optimization. A critical concept in this module is the Marketing Leverage Effect , first introduced in the Architecture Module for forecasting campaign outcomes. The Leverage Effect highlights how multiple marketing activities across diverse channels interact and influence one another, producing a collective output greater than the sum of individual efforts. In the Insights Module, understanding the Leverage Effect is essential for accurately interpreting actual campaign performance, especially when assessing correlations between user-journey stages. By analyzing these interactions, organizations move beyond isolated metrics and derive actionable recommendations from a holistic view of how marketing investments work together. 
More posts