There are a lot of tools, systems, and technologies at the disposal of marketing professionals. In fact, there are more than 5,000 options that marketing professionals can utilize to make their campaigns more effective and efficient.
These tools are often grouped together and referred to as a MarTech stack, but let’s look a little closer at what this actually involves.
What is a MarTech Stack?
The main goal of a MarTech stack is to provide a single, unified view of the customer journey from the marketing professional’s perspective.
These tools will help allow marketers to:
- Define, implement, and measure programs
- Build better workflows with an automated lead lifecycle
- Understand where your leads are in the funnel, and help nurture the lead through to the next phase.
- Distribute and manage your content.
- Foster relationships with your customers and prospects.
As a rule, the two systems that create the foundation of a MarTech stack are:
- A customer relationship management (CRM), such as SalesForce or ZenDesk
- Marketing automation solution, such as HubSpot or Marketo
These two systems should not only talk to each other, they should connect seamlessly to your website, knowledge base, and social media platforms.
What should a MarTech Stack include?
Once you have your basic systems, the first thing you should do is hook them up to Google Analytics. This will give you a world of free information, and you can use these three tools to:
- Build and run programs
- Route leads to sales
- Measure performance
Once you have the basics working, you may choose to supplement your MarTech stack with tools specific to different types of marketing campaigns, such as:
- Video marketing
- Content marketing
- Personalization
- Advertising
- Social media influencers
- Affiliate marketing
- Reputation monitoring
- Public relationships
Some companies also take advantage of business intelligence (BI) solutions to specifically help collect, aggregate, manage, analyze, and understand data.
If you want to see all of the options available to you, go to martech5000.com.
How do you build your MarTech Stack?
You don’t need five thousand tools, but you do need to think about your overall programs and company goals to ensure what you have is adequate.
It’s worth mentioning that a huge chunk of your overall marketing budget will go to your technology, from licenses to implementation to maintenance. So, if you are going to spend that kind of money, you should ensure you have the right tools in place and that they are set up to support the marketing department effectively.
Here’s a hint: If you want the system to work for marketing, marketing has to be involved in the selection and implementation of the system. While it may seem convenient to ask the IT team to take care of this for you, IT folks will use the system differently than marketing folks. You have to make sure that the programs are set up to support users at their skill level.
Think of it this way: a system may have the potential to produce amazing data, but if the people in the marketing department don’t know how to access that data, the system isn’t actually helping you.
No two companies will utilize the same group of tools, as it will vary based on your industry, as well as the kinds of programs and channels you focus on. But if you want to dig a little deeper, consider reading my book, Sway. I have an entire chapter dedicated to how to put together a MarTech stack.
