MarTech: Key Components For World Class Tech Stack
Each year we often find ourselves in the same place – increased annual targets and internal pressure for more leads, greater sales pipeline and ultimately more revenue. However often I hear clients’ concern with meeting revenue goals without a robust MarTech to support organizational needs. According to Hubspot, most organization on average have >31 tools to manage data and marketing campaigns. More tools typically results in more chaos, and challenges around:
- Data integrity and inter-operability
- Integration and workflow between existing tools
- Accurate and better analytics
- Experienced practitioners to lead efforts
With so many options, where should you start?
Over the last six years, marketing tech landscape has grown exponentially from 150 companies in 2011, to over 5,000 companies exiting 2017. No wonder things can get a bit confusing!
With a short runway to show results, many companies choose to either stay with existing stack or blindly adopt the “latest and greatest” technology, regardless if it’s the right fit for their needs.
With abundance in new technology, it is easy to get distracted. However understanding and aligning goals with a solid strategy will allow you to select the best solution for your needs.
4 Ways to Ensure Your MarTech Stacks Up
1. Define Business Strategy and Goals
Prior to evaluating your tech stack its important to clearly define goals and objectives. What are you looking to accomplish? Are you looking to accurately capture and store data, comprehensively profile prospects and customers or score behavior? List and prioritize the "must-haves" versus "nice-to-haves."
2. Recognize Your Current Tech Stack
Next step is to evaluate existing infrastructure to ensure you have the right systems to attract, engage and convert prospects. Are you able to identify and profile anonymous visitors on your website? Do you have the right CRM in place to capture and prioritize leads? Does the CRM comprehensively integrates with your marketing automation platform (MAP) for targeted campaigns? These are just a few questions to ask during the technical evaluation phase.
3. Map Tech Stack to Business Goals
While there are many ways to map your existing infrastructure to business goals, many businesses generally complete category and revenue mapping. Based on Scott Brinker’s landscape category mapping, companies review systems according to the following components:
- Advertising and Promotion
- Content Delivery and Personalization
- Social Insights
- Commerce and Sales
- Data Management
- Reporting and Analytics
Here is a great example from Trust Radius:
Second part of the exercise is to complete revenue-mapping to ensure MarTech tools align to the buyer’s journey. The goal is to ensure all of the right tools are in place to attract, engage and convert prospects from top-of-the-funnel (ToFU) to bottom-of-the-funnel (BoFU). Couple of things to consider during this phase include capture, automation and distribution of leads through the buyer’s journey.
Here is a good example from Allocadia:
4. Reduce White Space and Identify Owners
By completing these exercises, you will be able to identify + reduce white space and select the right tech stack for your specific business objectives. Additionally it is best practice to identify dedicated owners to manage implementation, integrations and on-going operation + optimization of tools. The goal is to maintain seamless synchronization of systems and utilize to full potential.
Conclusion
Ultimately, building a solid marketing tech stack is tough and takes a lot of time. Often due to budget constraints and lack of specialized resources, organizations fail to assess, diagnose and implement appropriate tools. However if done correctly, a strong MarTech will optimize omni-channel marketing tactics, provide consistent visibility into KPIs and enhance the buyer's journey. This enhanced journey will drive stronger engagement, which will ultimately drive more leads, stronger pipeline integrity and increase conversion rates.
