What’s Your MarTech Backup Plan?

Cold open originally featured in the January 27, 2021 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2021/01/in-the-headlights-january-27-2021-martech-backups-federal-reserve-bank-data-seo-for-customer-retention/

What’s Your MarTech Backup Plan?

I’ve noticed with an alarming increase in frequency in the last few months that some of the major cloud infrastructure providers – Amazon’s AWS and Google Cloud chief among them – have been having more interruptions. We don’t see those interruptions necessarily on the services themselves, but we experience them as customers when everything built atop these massive providers breaks.

Messages in Slack or Discord load more slowly, if at all. Gmail stops working. File sharing and uploads break on popular websites. Websites themselves get slower to load. Even marketing automation tools and software slow down or outright shatter, like a tower of blocks built on a shaking table.

What we don’t realize, as business professionals, is just how dependent so many of our marketing technology tools are on just a handful of large technology platforms. We don’t see the interdependencies until things break, and then we see breakage showing up everywhere.

So here’s the million-dollar question: what’s your MarTech backup plan? What backups do you have in place so that you have at least some digital marketing business continuity if a major set of services are taken down?

For example, we’ve advocated that anyone using WordPress install the simple, free, open-source analytics system Matomo for WordPress. It’s local analytics – not as robust as Google Analytics, not as feature-rich, but it runs entirely and only on your website. There’s no cost other than your web hosting, and if the day ever comes when Google Analytics goes away, you’ll still have your data.

What about your marketing automation system? At Trust Insights, we use a free, open-source product called Mautic and host it on a VPS server. It’s no Hubspot or Pardot, but you could easily set it up in parallel with one of the SaaS services as a backup – and if that service ever goes down hard or experiences a substantial outage, you still have the ability to get email campaigns and nurture programs out the door.

The ideal with any kind of backup system is that you never have to use it, but given the macro perspective – that cyberwarfare is the new battlefield – I’d strongly recommend you develop a marketing technology business continuity plan and put all the pieces in place for when the next, inevitable service interruption happens. As the cliche goes, you never need a backup until you REALLY need a backup.