The marketing tech space is growing at an astounding rate. In fact, that just might be the understatement of the year. Back in 2011, there were somewhere in the range of 150 companies engaged in marketing tech. As of 2016, that number had exploded, with close to four thousand companies having some sort of investment in the “martech” space.

Marketing software spending is also projected to top $32 billion by 2018, and your average marketing team is exposed to (and potentially uses) myriad marketing apps every day. Here are just a few:

• Enterprise Collaboration and Social Media Marketing platforms (think Slack and Salesforce).
• Content Management and Data Analytics systems (think WordPress and Kissmetrics).
• Customer Relationship Management and SEO tools (think HubSpot and Moz).
• To Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing technology (think Marketo and Mail Chimp).

The goal for any organization is, of course, to have all of these systems streamlined to complement and interact with one another.

Enter the strategically built, finely-tuned-to-your-needs marketing tech stack. Your team’s marketing tech stack will help reduce redundancies, increase efficiency, and ensure everyone is on the same page, right?

Well, maybe.

How Big Data Can Defeat the Marketing Tech Stack

With non-stop tech innovation and new applications hitting the market almost daily, our tech driven world has facilitated a never-before-seen explosion of data. A staggering ninety percent of the world’s data has been generated over the last two years alone.

It’s no wonder that some days it feels like all we do is gather, parse, analyze, distribute, and search for data. We do! And the numbers bear that out:

• Knowledge professionals spend up to 50 percent of their time looking for information.
• Forty-four percent of the time, employees can’t find the information they need to do their jobs.
• As a result, a typical enterprise with 1,000 knowledge workers wastes $2.5 million to $3.5 million per year because staff are searching for nonexistent information, failing to find existing information, and/or recreating information that can’t be found.

Like many things in life, innovation and rapid change can be both a blessing and a curse. We can market to today’s digitally savvy and mobile-friendly consumers with near laser accuracy. But the enterprise is quite literally drowning in a sea of data.

The Savior of the Marketing Stack? Search.

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, with the majority of enterprise data falling in the unstructured category—that is, data that isn’t stored in already-connected databases—having specialized content search tools at your employees’ fingertips is vitally important.

To make the most of that beautiful marketing tech stack, marketers also need to make sure they have tools in place to find information. The right search platform should:

• Use machine intelligence and an up-to-date user experience to enable searches across all cloud data platforms, for example Salesforce, Slack, and Dropbox.
• Be mobile friendly, as many employees today are working virtually from coffee shops and home offices.
• Understand human speech patterns, and include filters to encourage users to drill deeper into their search efforts to snag exactly what they’re looking for.
• Come with built-in functions like autocomplete, spelling correction, typo tolerance, analytics, real-time search capacity, data protection, scalability, as well as state-of-the-art encryption and security capabilities.

We’ve definitely all been spoiled by the immediacy and relative accuracy of internet search. And frustrated employees waste precious time (and money!)—even lose business deals—because of ineffective or nonexistent enterprise level search.

Your marketing tech stack might be the best of the best—the most strategically structured stack in your entire industry—but if the right information can’t be found at the exact moment it’s needed, businesses will continue to take a financial hit.

Don’t want to be a statistic? You can learn more about search can help you gain control of your tech stack here.