Real Story Group launches free martech assessment tool

One thing every marketer wants to know is how effective their marketing is. A new, free tool from independent analyst firm Real Story Group is designed to show them just that.

Tony Byrne, president of RSG (and a MarTech contributor), said the tool came about because marketing executives reported getting an increasing number of questions about effectiveness.

“And it’s not just always a simple ROI story like return on ad spend or our ROI of our personalization,” he said. It’s more like, OK, we’ve spent a lot of money building a stack. How optimal is it? Are we actually good in terms of how we actually act? How good are we in terms of executing? I think there’s a rising unease that, to paraphrase something we said in the old ad world days, ‘Half my stack might be wasted. I just don’t know which half.'”

So RSG decided to come up with a more structured way to assess martech and compare it against that of other companies.

Built atop RSG’s “RealScore” platform, the tool is a 15-minute survey for enterprise leaders to quickly self-assess within five key categories: Operations, content, data, decisioning and technology. Users then get a numeric “effectiveness score” within and across those dimensions, as well as comparisons against the industry at large. While it is free for anyone to use, RSG subscribers can further benchmark against industry-sector peers and download the results in PowerPoint format.

Dig deeper: Real Story on MarTech: The new stack

Why we care. A reliable, iterable and free way to assess martech? That seems attractive.

“Effectiveness is an interesting concept because it gets into a lot of issues like, do you have enough resources? Do you have the right resources? Do you have human resources? Do you have technology resources? Do you have experience? Do you have skills, do you have the right strategy and all these sorts of things?” Byrne explained.

Byrne said the questions and scores were based on RSG’s experience with work advising enterprise martech leaders, and checked and improved with the help of the firm’s MarTech Stack Leadership Council. The tool can be found here; no registration required.