Insider's View: A Q&A with Frans Riemersma on MarTech Strategy and Execution

Marketing campaigns fail for a number of reasons — poor targeting, weak content, misaligned messaging — but one of the most common and least discussed culprits is poor strategy implementation, or the absence of any coherent strategy at all.

Having the right plan, executing it properly, and staying agile enough to adapt are often the difference between a team that produces results and one that spins its wheels. Few people have thought more carefully about this than Frans Riemersma, co-founder of Boardview.io, a tool built to help marketing teams visualize, adapt, and execute their strategies more effectively.

You can connect with Frans on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

1. Can you tell us about your background and expertise in the MarTech industry?

Both marketing and development have always been my passions. Naturally, I ended up at the intersection of the two — optimizing marketing environments. I've been doing that for over 20 years across multiple Fortune 500 companies, and have been involved in more than 200 MarTech projects in total.

My focus has been on redesigning marketing operations processes and implementing the right tools to support them. Together with Romek Jansen, I developed a method for implementing MarTech stacks more quickly and with significantly higher adoption rates.

We documented that approach in a book — Marketing Resource Management; The noble art of getting things done in marketing. Efficiently — published in 2008. It introduces a MarTech canvas for mapping technology stacks across what we called the Ten Functional Areas of Marketing, with the goal of optimizing the overall stack.

2. What specifically does Boardview.io do, and how does it fit into the broader marketing picture?

The core problem it solves is simple: most marketing teams don't have a shared plan. In two decades of working in this field, I've consistently found that strategy documents are either nonexistent or scattered across a collection of disconnected files that no one keeps current.

The consequence is that other departments — sales, finance, the C-suite — have no visibility into what marketing is actually doing or why. It's not hard to see why marketing gets a credibility problem in those environments.

Boardview.io gives marketing teams a visual representation of their strategy. It surfaces the goals they're actively working toward — Content Marketing, Lead Generation, Social Media strategy, and so on — organized as a goal tree. That shift from task-driven to goal-driven thinking changes how teams orient their work.

Goals can be updated quickly during weekly meetings, and progress can be shared across teams via a weekly email infographic. Everyone from the CEO down can see what marketing is doing and how it's contributing to broader company objectives. We've seen that kind of visibility genuinely change the relationship between marketing and the rest of the organization.

Boardview.io also connects with Zapier, which allows teams to integrate task management tools and make strategy directly actionable. Marketing staff can see exactly how each task they're completing maps to a larger strategic goal. The phrase we use is that it connects the boardroom to scrum boards.

3. What have been some of the biggest changes in online marketing over the past five to ten years?

The headline shift is this: enterprise software is out, and MarTech stacks are in.

That transition is more fundamental than it might sound. In marketing technology, user adoption has always been the biggest hurdle — even when a tool has every feature a team could want. There's an instinctive resistance to large, monolithic platforms that are imposed on staff and require extensive training before anyone can use them effectively.

People want to choose their own tools. They want software that fits naturally into how they already work. A B2B tool today needs to be as intuitive as a B2C consumer app — that expectation has shifted dramatically. And integration tools like Zapier and IFTTT have made it much easier to connect the applications people are already comfortable using.

4. Where do marketing teams most often go wrong when developing and executing their strategies?

The first mistake is treating strategy as something fixed. Contrary to how many organizations still operate, a good strategy shouldn't be carved in stone. The old model — a CMO writes an annual plan in Q4 and the team executes it unchanged for the next 12 months — is out of step with how markets actually move. In volatile conditions, the only constant is change, and strategies need to be updated continuously.

The second mistake is a failure to translate strategic goals into something actionable at the team level. Managers set high-level objectives but don't break them down into monthly or weekly targets that staff can actually work with. When that translation doesn't happen, people feel lost, and meetings become long, unfocused, and overcrowded.

Agile goal management addresses both problems. A 30-minute weekly standup focused on strategy progress is often all it takes to keep things on track. Research also supports the value of making goals visible and shared — sending goals and action commitments to another person creates a sense of public commitment that correlates with higher rates of goal achievement.

Agile scrum boards give staff the structure they need to execute without requiring managers to resort to micromanagement by spreadsheet.

5. What MarTech and digital marketing trends were you watching at the time?

One of the more important shifts was the move toward managing marketing software like an ecosystem rather than a fixed stack.

MarTech stacks give teams the flexibility to swap tools in and out as needs change — sometimes even on a per-campaign basis. As best practices emerge and get shared across organizations, SaaS developers respond by improving their products to match those standards. It creates a feedback loop that raises the quality of the entire ecosystem over time, which is ultimately a win for marketing operations as a discipline.