Time To Streamline Your MarTech Stack?

There are well over 2,000 marketing technology products, platforms and services out there in the wide world. From CRMs to ad script tools, and the big players like Canva and Adobe. And now of course, there’s Generative AI (GAI) like ChatGPT and Midjourney. Your company may use just a few or, as I often see, more than you realise.

As marketers, we love shiny new objects. Especially if some form of analytics reporting is included. Marketers are by nature, highly social, so add in collaborative features and the ability to integrate with other tools and well, the MarTech stack can get to be the size of a gigantic pancake stack covered in sticky maple syrup. It’s messy, falls over easily and the sticky data syrup might be sweet, but it’s also a trap.

In a year with high economic uncertainty, where marketing budgets are being reduced or flatlined, this is the perfect time to sort out your MarTech stack, streamline your marketing operations and find some savings. It’s also a perfect time to actually reduce much of the analytics tools you rely on and if you’re heavily into digital ad tools and platforms, maybe even trim those down a bit.

When it comes to marketing technologies, the old saying of less is more, can actually be true. Streamlining your MarTech stack, reducing the number of tools, apps and services and asking some really hard questions, may end up with a stronger team and performance.

Reviewing your MarTech stack means you’ll also be looking at workflows and the structure of your marketing team, in other words, marketing operations. This may also be an opportunity to review skill sets and re-align the marketing team. It’s also a great time for innovation with internal processes that benefit the customer and the business as a whole.

The first thing to do when assessing your MarTech stack? Look at the humans. Workflows, how they work, the workarounds they all use because not all tech tools play together well. Remember that information technologies, including MarTech, is all about information management. The better your team is at information management, the better performance you’ll get from technology.

If there’s one thing I see over and over again with marketing departments, it is using more tools than needed and messy information management. This makes getting the right data harder to turn it into information which can then be turned into knowledge.

If you are going to review your MarTech stack and thus, marketing operations, you’ll also need to consider change management. You’ll bee making changes. Humans don’t like change. Workflows and habits will change. Poor or no change management and the result will be a disaster.

So if you’re facing a challenging year for budgets and feel overwhelmed with having to deliver the same or more with less, then this is the year to streamline your MarTech and get your marketing operations in order and updated. You could end up saving money and being a star with finance.