white paper



Why ‘no code’ is a must for martech

If anyone asks you if a piece of tech does something ‘out of the box’, you know they’re asking the wrong question.

It represents an old-fashioned way of thinking, where tech is coded to perform specific tasks in a fixed and generic way, and you’re jackpot-level lucky if you find something that does exactly what you want it to do – in exactly the way you want it to.

It reflects an approach to tech development where everything is hard-coded and any changes you’d like to the software – to better suit your specific way of working – require bespoke and expensive recoding.

In marketing, where every company has a unique set of needs, this is not good enough. Marketers need ‘no code’ solutions, where the martech can be configured to your exact requirements without the need for additional developer time.

The good old days

Coding a platform from scratch to meet the needs of every team, country and channel could take years and cost a small planet to implement. The opposite – opting for an off-the-shelf platform – is way too generic and unsophisticated for something as important as managing a global marketing operation.

Interestingly, this wasn’t always the case. Back in 2010, my company developed a pretty good (for 2010) marketing resource management (MRM) platform, and we were supplying it to global clients who were happy with what they could do with the system.

It provided clients with huge efficiencies, automating content workflows (mostly for the then-dominant print channels), storing assets with intelligent search, managing stock and store allocations, with some useful reporting thrown in for good measure.

There were a variety of implementation options, but anything too far from the core functionality had to be coded at our development centre. In 2010, this wasn’t really an issue. Marketing was a simpler world, and a largely generic platform was good enough for companies that were planning their marketing on a quarterly basis using tried-and-tested channels.

Infinite configurability

As time went on, each new client wanted more additional or tailored features than the last. The number of channels and customer touchpoints was increasing rapidly, and there was a need to be far more reactive to engage with customers exactly where and when they wanted to engage. Marketing got a lot more complicated.

Only technology could meet the needs of this marketing complexity, but every company had a different approach and different priorities, and generic, hard-coded software wasn’t looking good enough for the task any more.

Around the middle of the decade, it was clear that a complete rethink was required. If martech was going to meet the specific needs of every client, it had to be far more flexible and not reliant on bespoke coding.

The holy grail was infinite configurability. The ability to configure every element of our technology to the specific needs of each client by (in overly simple terms) switching options on and off, rather than by changing the core code.

The right software enables more efficient working processes. As part of our software implementation, our transition team develops a three-phase proof of concept: capture current processes; define new processes; play back recommendations. As soon as the new way of working is signed off, the software is fully configured for the new process.

As a very simple example, take those briefing and approval workflows. In the days when campaigns were less complex, a small number of generic briefing forms was sufficient. Now, every client needs a unique set of briefing forms – and tailored approval workflows – to meet the needs of every global team. With no-code configuration, every unique workflow can be quickly and simply configured.

Who should configure the platform?

With simple software, such as basic web design platforms, no-code often means the end user can configure all the required elements. No input from WordPress or Wix is required to help the home or small business user create their basic website.

With our martech, anyone with appropriate admin rights can configure any part of the platform, but this isn’t typically how it works. Global businesses tend not to want all their employees to be able to change higher-level functionality that has had a good deal of planning and thought put into it.

Instead, the software comes with a hierarchy of permission levels, with different levels of admin user able to configure more of the platform’s functionality. Clients can have superusers with no limits on what they can configure in the system. Other clients put some limits on all internal users and opt to leave some functionality in the hands of our configurators. It is entirely up to the individual company. 

Real ‘out-of-the-box’

Configuring the system to the unique needs of each client is a far quicker and easier process when no coding is involved. All martech will be no code eventually, but not all systems are currently. If you’re investigating any martech platforms, make sure you add coding vs configuration to your list of questions.

So, if people ask me now whether our platform does something-or-other ‘out of the box’, I say yes. Because it does. It does everything out of the box – without the need for additional coding.



It just has to go through a simple process of no-code configuration to meet your unique and exacting needs before we put it ‘in the box’.