Building your marketing technology stack – the complete picture
To architect a high-performance growth engine, companies have to invest in marketing technology. It’s a maze that can take years to figure the right set of tools that work for your needs. But when done right, it can prove to be that one tool chest to win all marketing challenges. In this post, I share my experience building these stacks for startups, high-growth, and large organizations.
Every company is a software company – is a well-established cliché. Although hidden, the software runs everything from procurement to delivery and everything in between and beyond. In the past, to get better efficiencies in delivering superior customer experience (and cutting cost), companies started to invest in software solutions to manage and optimize their business processes. As other business functions were evaluating the use of software for their specific needs, marketing quickly became a hotbed for innovation and experiments as marketers were tuned differently to take small risks. Marketers started using digital tools to manage customer databases, automating sending emails, personalizing website experiences, managing marketing projects, and more recently the use of AI / ML to learn and assist in delivering relevant and tailored experiences.
As a marketer, very rarely you will get a blank canvas to start architecting your marketing technology (MarTech) stack. Marketers are used to hearing ‘we have a CRM’ in the name of marketing technology. Marketing leaders had to build the supporting tech to power up the company’s growth plans. Today companies are much more informed of the power MarTech stack has to offer to speed up and automate marketing processes. All marketing has some layer of digital involved and the marketing technology stack is its foundation.
However, trust and budget are always in short supply. This is truer for marketing than any other business function.
Marketers that build strong brands aim at long-term growth. But they also have to deliver results every quarter. Metrics that affect a company in the long run, are equally as important as low-hanging fruits (short-term spurts) are. That’s how successful brands can reduce marketing spending relative to their scale of operations over time. Moreover, with the frequently changing Martech landscape and the high mortality rate of marketers, it’s hard to solve this Rubik’s cube successfully (see MarTech Landscape below).
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Modern-day customers are more digital-aware. Brand loyalty is limited to the unique experiences and product offerings a brand can introduce from time to time. This new age demands marketers to optimize each touchpoint by executing a full-funnel attack with the help of digital tools.
Building the stack
Now, to make it simple, try and visualize adding tools / utilities / apps for your marketing technology stack under three buckets – Data / Infrastructure, Demand Generation, and Lead Generation. It makes sense as well as there is a logical and in most cases a physical separation between these subfunctions. You can also put a price tag on each marketing sub-function to get a better understanding of the ROI.
The Groundwork
Before you start on this journey, there are a few things to remember. This will set you on the right journey with the right mindset.
- Strong marketing leadership is necessary (as you read you will know why)
- There’s no best-of-breed plug-n-play version of Martech stack
- B2B and B2C can have different Martech priorities
- A good tech stack is a significant, long-term investment
- Strive for a connected ecosystem over silos
- Management buy-in is part of your success
The journey
Practically, you have three distinctive stages before you decide on the tech that will form a part of your rewarding Martech stack. In each stage, you need to answer a few questions. For convenience, I have ordered them as well. This should help as you discover the best-fit solution for the Martech stack made for your brand.
A. Evaluate the fit
1. What goals do you want to achieve? What success looks like?
2. Look at your existing Martech stack. Have you fully utilized the features that come with your CRM / MAP?
3. Are there plugins / add-ons / upgrades to the existing product that can fulfill your existing need? (Salesforce marketplace, etc.)
9. If you must choose a new off-the-shelf product, do your research. Ask your industry peers, present and past colleagues for advice. Compare. Check for compatibility with your core marketing systems (CRM, MAP). What else can the product do?
B. Evaluate support
4. Have you briefed your boss/es of the gap, proposed a few solutions, and sought approval to conduct further research
5. If you are a software development company, can your team on the bench help you build a custom solution or automation that can meet your needs?
6. Do you know of an ongoing software project in your company that is developing a similar solution that can be modified to fit your needs?
7. Look for other departments that can benefit from this solution (Sales HR, Ops, Finance). Meet the heads and propose a joint purchase
10. Do they offer product support? How many hours of free training (on-site / online)? What is the TAT for support requests?
13. Update the stakeholders and teams of your discovery – a brief report will help and seek approval from the process owners
C. Evaluate the cost
8. Prepare a new software requisition / change proposal based on your situation. Ensure you identify gaps, possible internal solutions you explored, your research outcome, potential vendors, cost-benefit, duration to hit a positive ROI, and more.
11. Does your solution need specialized skills to be hired / acquired through training? What’s the lead time on that? Have you budgeted that in?
12. How flexible are their licensing terms? Is there a trial?
Once you have satisfactorily answered these questions, you will start to see the complete picture. At each stage document your learning and version them. It’s a keeper! Invite vendors for demos, quotes, negotiations. Draw an implementation and UAT plan. Document use-case and who your ideal customer is. Have someone on your team partner you as a backup Project Manager. Your Martech stack need not necessarily look like that of your competitor or that in your ‘friends’ company’. It is unique to your needs and growth plans.
Here’s a sample marketing technology stack. This could fit well for a mid-size company with more than 1000 employees. A caveat, I highly recommend you use experienced hands to build and implement a stack that works for you. Our focus is to get the right stack rather than the best.
For the data / marketing infrastructure layer, I’d go with DiscoverOrg for pulling fresh data to enrich your existing database and map the org structure of target accounts. Trello will help in managing your MarkOp and help with implementing Agile frameworks. Shopify if you eCommerce. Google Analytics and Kiss Metrics to read the outcomes. For the Demand Generation / Campaign layer, I chose Marketo to drive all your programs. SEMRush is yet another important inbound marketing and SEO asset. Terminus to drive your ABM campaigns. Hootsuite for scheduling social feeds and GoToWebinar for hosting webinars. For the action layer, SFDC is central. Sales Dialer solution integrates well with SFDC for outbound calling (yes it’s still alive and well!). Drift is the AI-powered chat assistant for your website and has shown results. Einstein Relationship Insights is helpful to strike new conversations with your 2nd and 3rd-degree contacts.
Marketing is a very slow process. Therefore, patience is key.
The adage “slow is fast” is true in marketing. It will take time and training to get the most out of your Martech stack. But when done right, the Martech stack will add efficiency and speed to your marketing efforts. You will be able to prove (with numbers) how the stack you build has helped you reduce Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and your payback period, increase Net Promoter Score (NPS) and grow the Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM). The stack you build will power your growth engine. Have you started building your marketing technology stack? Where are you on this journey?
