About to start building your martech stack? Here's everything you need to know!
What is martech?
Marketing technology, also known as martech, is essentially the technology that marketers use to attract and retain customers for the business. These tools are generally used to automate and streamline processes, thus saving a lot of time and effort for your marketing team.
The tools can even help your marketers crunch numbers and analyze the success of their marketing campaigns and efforts.
It pretty much includes all the technology that your marketers make use of, even if they are not using it for digital marketing. Marketing technology is the software that assists in accomplishing your marketing goals or objectives.
It involves employing technology for the purpose of planning, executing, measuring, and optimizing your marketing campaigns. Martech tools make life easier for your team, helping them plan, execute, and analyze campaigns in a faster, more effective manner, without wasting any time at all.
The number of tools available for marketing organizations has gone up exponentially over the past few years, going from around 150 options in 2011, to upwards of 5000 tools in 2017.
What is a martech stack?
Your martech stack is the collection of tools and technologies that your marketing team makes use of to carry out the various aspects of your marketing campaigns - everything from lead generation to search engine optimization. You could consider it to be a set of systems that your business makes use of in order to build relationships with your audience, prospects, and users at various stages of their marketing journey.
On their own, these tools could have some degree of effectiveness. But when you pair the right tools together into a stack, their power gets amplified and your stack becomes more than just the sum of its parts.
When your marketing tools are stacked in a logical and functional format, you’ll be creating a seamless user experience for your marketing team and allowing them to carry out their operations with a greater degree of efficiency. However, if you want that to happen, you need to make sure that all your tools play well together when you build your martech stack.
What are the key components of a martech stack?
There are various tools and systems that are included in a market technology stack. Here are some of the tools that are critical for your business:
Your CRM (customer relationship management) system allows you to employ user data from past customer interactions in order to improve your customer experience, strengthen relationships, and increase customer loyalty.
A content management system allows your business to manage different types of content. This content could include blogs, case studies, website content, eBooks, and more.
You need to have systems in place that allow you to interact with your customers at scale. This includes your email marketing automation systems as well as your AI-powered chatbots. These bots can handle around 80% of your inbound customer queries, making it possible for your live chat agents to tackle the complex queries in detail.
The importance of a martech stack
The main purpose that your martech stack serves is to simplify, scale, and automate your marketing efforts. It is extremely useful for both your marketing as well as your sales team.
Your stack even empowers your marketing team to create, manage and track all their marketing activities. At this point, marketing technology is pretty much essential for modern marketing teams. It helps brands keep up with the way in which their customer journeys are evolving and getting fragmented.
Building a marketing technology stack and using it right allows you to scale your marketing efforts in a holistic manner by allowing you to get a comprehensive view of your marketing efforts and customer journey, allowing you to understand it from start to finish, and enabling you to detect areas for optimization.
What are the benefits of having a martech stack?
By streamlining and automating your processes, your marketing technology stack helps you save time on a lot of your activities. These tools take care of repetitive and time-consuming tasks like pulling data, converting file formats, and finding assets, allowing your team to focus on more important tasks and helping you get more done in less time.
These tools allow your teams to communicate openly about things like project status and team goals, thus increasing transparency, improving tracking, and providing your entire team with full visibility to progress.
Through the use of analytics tools you’ll be able to understand your customers’ interests and you’ll be able to create content that is more relevant to your audience. You’ll also be able to target your customers according to demographics, affinities, and many other factors.
When you use tools like AI-powered chatbots to interact with your customers on their preferred channels, in their own languages and create an omnichannel experience by pulling together context from all the conversations that took place across all channels, you’ll be able to strengthen your relationships with your customers and make them feel like you really know and understand them.
How do you make a martech stack?
Here are the steps involved in building a martech stack:
Before you pick the marketing tools to include in your stack, you need to decide the goals that you want to achieve and the strategies that you intend to use in order to achieve these goals. You should also look at the existing strategies that your team is following so that you can figure out what improvements need to be made.
Talk to your team and ask them about the challenges that they face while performing their tasks, see what factors increase the time that it takes to complete a task, and what makes their job tougher to pull off.
Look at the tools that you’re already using and analyze them. Check with your team to see if the tools are outdated, need improvements, or just hold your team up when they’re trying to do their job. You don’t need to replace all your tools, some of them might just need upgrades while others might be perfectly fine to continue using.
Without setting a budget, you might end up building the most powerful martech stack ever… in your mind. You need to set a budget so that you’re realistic about what tools you can use and which ones aren’t worth it for you (at least not yet). If you’re looking at tools that you haven’t used before, you might want to consider setting a monthly budget so that you can opt-in for the monthly pricing models and switch tools easily if they don’t work for you.
Now that you’ve got your goals, strategies, and budget established, it’s time for you to actually research the tools that you will include in your martech stack. You could even let individual team members research the tools that they would be using and shortlist the ones that they think are best for your team.
Compile all the data that you need to transfer from your legacy systems into your new tools. You can even split this task up across your team.
Now it’s time for you to use the tool and see how it works for you. See if it helps you get your work done in a faster and more effective manner. If it doesn’t, circle back to step 5 and try again.
