Maximising your investment: The missing use cases

Every significant investment in marketing or data technology begins with use cases. They represent the business value proposition - the reason you're making the investment in the first place. Without compelling use cases, it's nearly impossible to secure buy-in from stakeholders or confidently prioritise your technology investments.

But not all use cases are easy to identify or quantify upfront. Having guided dozens of organisations through major technology transformations, we've observed a common pattern: the post-implementation difference between modest returns and exceptional ROI is often driven by how comprehensively you've defined your use cases.

Through our extensive experience, we've identified four distinct categories of use cases:

Type 1: Standard use case – Addressing known gaps

These are the pain points your team is already acutely aware of - the frustrations, inefficiencies, and limitations that come up in regular discussions. They're often the primary motivation for seeking a new solution in the first place.

Type 2: Standard use case – Improving existing activities

These use cases focus on enhancing what you're already doing. You're not starting from scratch; you're looking to do current activities better, faster, or more efficiently.

Most organisations do a solid job of identifying these first two categories. Your marketing experts live and breathe these challenges daily, so they naturally have strong opinions about what needs fixing and improving. These use cases typically come with high confidence in the expected benefits.

Type 3: Advanced use case – Doing something completely new

This is where things get more complex. These are new unfamiliar capabilities, requiring new ways of working and cross-team delivery; much lower confidence on effectiveness alongside potential risks impact on BAU.

Type 4: Rare use case – Uplift from general process improvements

This is the broad, systemic improvements that lift the performance of everything else. They're not specific to a single activity but rather enhance your entire marketing ecosystem.

The last two categories - new capabilities and process improvements - often represent the largest potential sources of value. Yet they're frequently the most difficult for internal teams to identify and define. Missing these opportunities can lead to misaligned investment decisions, delivery complications, and significant missed opportunities.

Capturing Value from New Capabilities

To successfully identify and implement entirely new capabilities (Type 3 use cases), organisations need to:

• Bridge the knowledge gap between technology teams (who understand what the technology can do) and marketing teams (who understand what will deliver business value)
• Bring in fresh perspectives from outside the organisation to introduce new thinking and external learnings‍
• Map end-to-end solutions to build confidence that these new capabilities can be successfully implemented
• Understand integration points with existing marketing activities to ensure cohesive execution

Without dedicated attention to these areas, businesses risk implementing powerful new technologies without fully leveraging their transformative potential.

The Hidden Gold Mine: Process Improvements

In our experience, the most significant and enduring benefits often come from the fourth use case type - the systemic process improvements that remove constraints imposed by legacy systems. These improvements enable marketing teams to:

• Move faster
• Test ideas at scale
• See and understand the impact more clearly and quickly
• Focus on strategic work rather than tactical execution

The cumulative impact of these improvements can be immense. While they may be difficult to quantify precisely (and we generally don't recommend including them in formal benefit targets), concerted effort to design process improvement into the delivery plan can add up to 50% on top of the direct use case benefits.

The result? Happier teams, stronger momentum, and significantly more positive progress updates to executives.

The Path Forward

As you prepare for your next technology investment, we encourage you to take a fresh look at how you build your use cases. Challenge yourself to go beyond the standard to identify transformative new capabilities and system-wide process enhancements.

Stay tuned for the next blog in our series, where we'll explore how aggregating use cases based on common enabling capabilities can transform delivery planning and prioritisation – drastically accelerating benefit, especially in year 1.

Need help identifying and maximising the value of your technology use cases? Contact our team of expert consultants today.