Highlights
- Planning and evaluating a martech stack is crucial but challenging due to the fast-paced tech environment.
- Building a martech stack requires aligning technology with marketing goals, customer needs, and ensuring stakeholder participation.
- Evaluating a martech stack involves identifying gaps, prioritizing integration, and leveraging industry resources and review sites.
In today's data-driven landscape, a well-structured marketing technology stack is no longer a nice-to-have, but a requirement. By leveraging the power of martech, you can revolutionize the way you analyze consumer behavior, personalize content and improve overall performance.
Yet, with over 9,000 martech companies (and counting), each promising to deliver something special and solve all your problems, the ever-growing technology landscape can seem overwhelming—and leave you unsure of where to start. To help navigate this daunting process, we’ve put together some key tips to help you cut through the noise and evaluate your marketing technology stack for greater success.
Understanding marketing technology
Marketing technology, or more commonly known as "martech," refers to a suite of tools, software and platforms designed to streamline and automate your marketing processes. In our bustling B2B market, consider martech as your secret sauce that works across all stages of the customer journey—turning prospects into customers.
However, building a reliable martech strategy comes with a few hurdles. Marketing teams often struggle with the amount of options, the pace of technological advancements and the difficulty in integrating various tools. It's a complex task, but when done right, it can elevate your marketing efforts to new heights and boost your bottom line. Now, let’s get started!
Start building your marketing technology stack
Building a martech stack isn't just about combining technologies, it's about creating a system that supports your entire marketing strategy. Building a stack is like building a house. You start at the foundation. In other words, start with strategy, not technology.
Similar to launching a new campaign, identify your marketing objectives and ideal customer profile first, and then align your technology stack to support these goals and target audiences. Equally important is to consider the entire customer journey. This will ensure your tool suite enables a seamless customer experience from attract to engage to analyze and optimize.
While getting your strategy right is crucial, it's equally important to collect feedback from key stakeholders along the way and ensure that the people involved in the daily grind also have a seat at the table when evaluating and making the decisions.
How to evaluate your marketing tech stack
Evaluating your martech stack can be a daunting task, but it's a crucial step in optimizing your marketing strategy. To get started, assess your current stack to identify any gaps or areas in need of improvement, and determine if you have the tools in place to reach your goals. As you’re researching and testing new tools and platforms, it’s mission critical to prioritize technology that can integrate seamlessly with your existing systems and data sources.
At LoSasso, we use a simple spreadsheet to evaluate each tool based on its features, integration opportunities, ease of use, price and support. We find this helpful to organize feedback as we could be evaluating multiple tools at once and after some time, they start blending together.
Tips for finding new technologies
When it comes to conducting your initial tool research, start by diving into reputable industry resources to discover reliable information about various tools. Attend webinars and conferences to learn and connect with industry experts and peers. And don't forget about business software and services review sites like G2 and Capterra. These sites can offer unbiased opinions and user feedback to help narrow down your options.
To sum it all up
Building a successful martech stack might feel like navigating a complex maze, but with a well-defined strategy, a thorough understanding of your customers, and a robust evaluation process, you can create a powerful tool to drive marketing success. At LoSasso, we're here to help simplify this journey. Don't hesitate to reach out for expert advice and let's together turn your martech complexity into your business opportunity.
