“How to build a Marketing stack”

What is Martech?

?A marketing technology stack is the collection of technologies that marketers use to optimize and augment their marketing processes throughout the customer life cycle.?In the most basic terms, any business’?Mar Tech?Stack is a selection of tools chosen to make marketing operations and processes more effective and efficient.

Tools can incorporate?SaaS?platforms, social media tools, content management systems, analytics tools and many other types, dependent on the business in question.

Building a?Mar-tech?stack

Mar Tech?stack is unique and specific for every business basis their use cases and objectives but more or less the end to end customer journey will have 3 broad phases.

• Phase 1: Attract through awareness
• Phase 2: Engage with relevance
• Phase 3: Analyze and optimize

Phase 1: Attract through awareness

Making your customers both existing and potential aware about your product is very important and challenging at the same time. Adding more and more people in the top funnel is the first step towards increasing the business.

Certain important tools which should be part of your Mar tech stack to enable awareness about your brand and products are listed below.

-??????????SEO tool to generate traffic on your website with relevant keywords

-??????????Ad tech for publishing Google display ads and videos

-??????????Social media tools to expand and optimize your presence over social platforms

-??????????Lead generation tools with capability of segregating good and junk leads

One of the biggest issue in this phase is that website traffic is anonymous but today there are tools available which can identify them basis?their IP address to detect information like location, industry and company. Brands can then customize their communication for each individual basis this information and avoid those spray-and-pray tactics from years gone by.

Phase 2: Engage with relevance

Once the customer has been acquired, now it’s time to foster the relationship to make him loyal to the brand. The overall objective of retention marketing is to increase the transaction frequency not by giving discounts but by being relevant. Customer retention is one of the key parameter which can help in reducing acquisition cost and strengthening the bottom line.

Below tools can be handy in managing and improving customer retention.

-???Customer Data Platform to ingest and standardize the data from multiple sources and getting unified view.

-???CRM platform which will keep a track of all the activities which customer has done with the brand – Purchase, complaint, query etc.

-???Marketing automation tools for reaching out to your customers through multiple channels and creating brand recall.

-???CMS to generate relevant content for different personas and segments.

In today’s era technology is considered to be backbone of every industry and investing in new age technology and tools is not “good to have” but “Must have”. These new age agile marketing automation tools helps the brands to automate their marketing strategy and communication through smart segmentation, personalizing content and seamless roll out.

The cost of acquiring new customers is the tax you pay for not retaining and growing the value of the existing customers” hence investing in technology to enhance your retention strategy is essential.

Phase 3: Analyze and optimize

There is a common saying “You can only manage if you can measure”, hence building a robust tracking mechanism to evaluate the health of the business along with identifying the trend and opportunities is of utmost importance.

If we specifically talk about Customer Analytics it is a combination of activities which includes Collection of data, standardizing the date to make it uniform and easy to read, slicing and dicing of the data by using advanced statistical or tech tools to get some meaningful insights out of that and then finally using that data to see the impact.

The most essential part of Customer Analytics is Descriptive Analytics which means interpreting the customer data by looking at the trends and pattern to assess what’s working or what are the opportunity areas where the business should focus on.

Key tools and platforms which should be part of your tech stack and can enable data driven decision making and marketing strategies are listed below.

-???Web Analytics tool which provides data around your web traffic like visitors, demographics and overall website performance.

-???CRM tool to measure key performance indicators like retention rate, CLTV, ticket value and other micro\macro level numbers.

-???E-mail performance tool to evaluate the traction and visibility of marketing campaigns by measuring parameters like deliverability rate, Open rate, CTR, un-subscription and conversion rate.

-???Data visualization tools to enable easy and simplified consumption of data and metrics for larger diversified audience.

Good balance is key to a successful?Mar Tech?stack and its always recommended to have a single platform having maximum features else delayed and broken integration will put all your efforts in the wrong direction.