Is Your MarTech Stack Truly Optimized? Uncover The Guide To Build Your Perfect Stack!

As another year closes and Marketers everywhere are starting to put their plans into action, now is the time to assess your three big levers available: people, programs, and technology.? Today, I will tackle the world of Marketing Technologies (MarTech).? There is a reason for the immense growth of MarTech over the past 10 years. It provides much value. However, your stack has a wide range of choices for each major category. Compounding the large array of options are vendors’ claims of incorporating AI into their solution, which makes the selection even more confusing.? Rather than discussing each solution’s merits, I will share the framework I use in assessing my MarTech stack. I’m a fan of demand generation and will draw from the framework demandgen.com has published in the past.

In my experience, my MarTech stack consists of the following core components. This is not to say that if you have a solution for each of the ten areas, you are done, but you should start with these and add solutions depending on your company’s individual needs.

The amount of budget allocated to MarTech varies from company to company, but I found that they generally ranged from 10% to 30% of the total budget. For my budget, the total for MarTech mainly varied depending on the salaries of my team. If my team were based in countries with high salaries, my MarTech budget would be relatively high as I would use automation to gain efficiencies and make the most of my team’s skillsets. In countries where my team was located in lower-cost countries, I didn’t spend as much on MarTech because my team could provide a more personalized and, therefore, more effective marketing. Of course, other reasons would affect budget allocation for MarTech, such as the characteristics of the target segment and the number of countries and industries we are targeting. The more complex the sale, the number of buyer segments, and the more sophisticated the buying group, the more technologies are utilized. Also, if your company’s GTM motion is product-led (vs. sales-led), you will generally have a greater investment in your MarTech.

In terms of evaluating the MarTech stack, I use five different criteria to evaluate each technology:

1. Utilization -? How much time and resources are spent using a particular technology?
2. Impact - What is the impact of a particular technology in helping the company meet its marketing objectives?
3. Integration - The holy grail of making sure time is not spent porting data from one technology to another is important, so assess how well is a particular technology integrated with other technologies in your stack.
4. Adoption - How well does the team leverage the technology’s capabilities? Is it just 1-2 users, or do others also find it useful?
5. Investment - How much are you spending on a particular technology, and what percent of your budget does it occupy?

The above criteria will help you obtain the insights you need to decide which technologies are worth keeping, which ones should be divested, and which ones need changes to obtain better value from it. Ideally, you perform this assessment regularly (semi-annual, at a minimum) and ahead of the contract renewal date so you are adequately prepared for negotiations. An assessment also helps you save your budget, especially if you can remove tools that are no longer being used.

You can also map out your tools using the graph below, which plots the impact vs. investment.? The goal is to keep the tools high in impact and, ideally, low in investment.? Tools with a low impact should be reconsidered regardless of the investment amount.??

That said, you want a complete martech stack so if you remove a low-performing tool, say a video editing tool but have no other alternative, you’ll want to search for another that is, ideally, well situated when they are evaluated against the five criteria described earlier.?

One last piece of advice, many vendors are incorporating Generative AI into their offerings. Given the fast pace of innovation in this area, it is best to sign a one-year contract and not a longer one.?

With the availability of so many tools for each need, a Marketer can build the perfect tech stack to maximize their effectiveness.