4 Ways to Make the Most of Your MarTech Stack

For most marketing teams today, no matter what organisations and brands you work for, having an effective MarTech stack is essential to getting the job done.

Your MarTech stack is the collection of software applications and technologies that you use to plan, execute, and report on your marketing programs. Whether that’s creating email campaigns, managing social media, monitoring website traffic, or analysing customer data, it’s hard to find a marketing team out there that isn’t using a MarTech stack of some sort.?

So, here’s 4 things you should consider to get the most out of it.

1) Choose the right tool for the job.

Possibly the most important decision you’ll make regarding your MarTech stack is choosing the right tool for the job. While there are thousands of individual digital marketing solutions on the market, in an ideal world you’ll be looking for an all-in-one digital marketing platform, and that narrows the field quite considerably.

It’s easy to think that going for one of the market leaders (Salesforce, Adobe, etc.) is the way to go, and for some teams that is the right decision. However, even if you have the budget, I’ve seen and experienced the situation where teams underestimate the time, skills, and resourcing required to successfully implement and then extract value from one of these systems.

I think the key to choosing the right tool for you is matching the size, scale and cost of the system to the size, capabilities, resourcing, and requirements of your team. While most of us dream of having a great Salesforce or Adobe setup, many marketing teams out there will be better off choosing a mid-tier option and would benefit from having an agency or implementation partner that specialises in their chosen system.

2) Consolidate, consolidate, consolidate.

No-one wants a spaghetti mess of disparate marketing technology systems, where a range of software and tools are used, each put in place to do a particular task, but all essentially separate from each other.

Sure, there are powerful, often custom integration options available today to connect data and workflows across systems, and there are good arguments for not changing a tech ecosystem that is doing its job, but in the end you are probably operating quite inefficiently, and missing out on some key advantages.

Consider this:

• You are more than likely doubling up on managing the risks of privacy and data security across different systems.
• You will likely have multiple licences and system vendors to manage.
• You are also probably dealing with the management of user accounts and access across each platform.

It’s almost certain that you are also doubling up somewhere in terms of system capabilities, and who wants to be paying for several tools that do the same thing.

In a world where most marketing teams (and IT teams as well) are being asked to do more with less – the cost and efficiency gains alone of consolidating your MarTech stack often make it more than worthwhile.

Now let’s consider the benefits.

Consolidating your digital tools down to ideally an all-in-one digital marketing platform will reduce operational and data silos, while enabling better end-to-end visibility, workflows, automation and reporting, without having to build custom APIs to connect all your applications. It will also decrease the time it takes to solve issues, and likely reduce your costs.

Your team will appreciate no longer having to juggle multiple tools, and eliminating the need to switch between platforms and decipher scattered data points will also mean faster and more effective campaign execution (and more time for strategic thinking!).

3) Understand what you are consolidating towards.

Unless you’re a start up, you are likely to be working with existing systems and processes in place in your organisation today. Sometimes you’ll need to keep some of them, in rare cases you can replace them all. The ones you need to keep are the systems you should consolidate towards.

Ask yourself: are there core processes, databases, or perhaps legacy systems that you must keep? If so, you’ll need to explore and understand the full capabilities of these systems first and aim to fold other systems into them. For example, in one of my organisations we had a custom sales workflow built into the CRM. As this had to stay, we explored the additional sales and marketing capabilities available through the CRM and the other extension applications offered by the same provider. Over time we were able to consolidate almost all our separate marketing tech solutions into the existing platform.

4) Collaborate and work together.

I really can’t emphasise enough how important it is to work together with your IT, Operations, and Risk teams when going through a MarTech consolidation process. If you’re doing things right, you’re going to need them.

The partnership with IT is one of the most important relationships for marketers today, and depending on what industry and organisation you’re in, your relationship with your risk team will be equally important. Working together proactively makes the processes faster, smoother and generally more enjoyable for everyone. Together, these teams are going to be much more effective at managing risk and implementing systems than if you’re trying to go it on your own.

What do you think?

These are 4 simple (and kind of obvious) rules to follow, but you’d be surprised how often teams can’t tick all 4 boxes.

I’d love to know what you think of my advice.

Can you relate to some of these situations? Do you have some tips of your own to share? Are you from Risk, IT, or Operations and have a view? ?

Please comment and let me know!