arTech is a pretty well-known concept now. It’s no secret that marketing and technology are like coffee and cookies (or bread & butter perhaps!). We mean, they are a duo. Paired together, marketing and technology have the potential to enhance customer experiences.
In the current market, it is nearly impossible to survive without having the right marketing tools in your arsenal. The marketing environment is constantly evolving and thousands of brands are at war to grab customer attention.
Intimidated already? Well, no worries!
All you need to do is have the apt tools to market your brand. Once you have the tools, you can manage your campaigns, automate repetitive tasks, and simplify all your marketing efforts!
Now, to get started, let’s give you all the essential information that you will need down the MarTech road to success.
What is MarTech Stack?
MarTech stack is essentially a marketing jargon for a cluster of tech-based tools. These tools are meant for marketers to ease their efforts in marketing a brand. Building a marketing technology stack makes using the tools simpler.
A stack of integrated MarTech tools works better than individual tools working in isolation for different purposes.
With the right MarTech stack, you can create seamless customer connections across several platforms. Not only will it ensure smoother marketing, but also will impact your activities ensuring higher efficiency.
Ask These 5 Questions Before Building your MarTech Stack
As tech evolved, the number of marketing tools increased. Thus, choosing the right tools became a challenge.
The new-age marketers demand advanced solutions to their marketing problems. With the use of more marketing technology, you’ll either solve your issues or end up making simple processes complicated. Hence, to ensure that the latter doesn’t happen to select the right marketing technology is essential.
Most marketers look at the price, features of marketing technology solutions. But now there is an array of factors that you can consider when selecting the MarTech tools.
Answer these five questions👇 before you can buy your next marketing tool.
Is All that Glitters Gold?
Make sure you are out of your Shiny Object Syndrome (if you have it) when buying a marketing tool. Just because it’s trending, new, or seems exciting, the tool might not be right for your brand. Instead, evaluate the tools that you already have in your MarTech stack.
Can you reach your goals without the new, trending tool? If yes, use your existing tools and make the best out of them.
Adding more tools to your MarTech stack might create stress and waste resources. So, ensure that you use your tools efficiently. And remember, more tools do not always produce better results!
FYI, Shiny Object Syndrome or SOS is a pop-culture, psychological concept where people with SOS focus on new, trendy, or latest concepts.
Is my research sufficient?
When you are building your MarTech stack, research is a must. You might come across a tool that ticks all the boxes but consider other options as well. Check out online reviews and dig deeper. There are a lot of marketing technology tools in the market – though you might find a few good ones, some of the best might still be out there!
Does this fulfill my integration requirement?
Integration is the main element in a MarTech stack. It Is only after integrating the tools that you can expect promising results. Without proper integration, your MarTech tool might simply eat at your money without producing any result.
Take, for example, a new website management tool that promises to double the number of leads you generate. But this tool does not integrate with your CRM software. This results in four people moving leading from one system to another. This immediately reduces productivity. Plus, with manual data entries, your marketing database becomes a mess. Hence, you need to add one more database maintenance tool to your tech stack.
Do I have enough team members to operate the system?
MarTech tools are meant to make your marketing efforts easier and more efficient. If you choose a sophisticated tool operating it might be a full-time job. So, it makes sense to go for the simpler marketing technology solutions that will help achieve your targets without too much focus.
Consider the example of AI chatbots – an important MarTech tool. Complex coding platforms would have made creating and using AI bots seem like rocket science. But no-code bot-building platforms like Konverse make it super easy for everyone to build a bot, use, tweak, and implement it across platforms.
Should I take inputs from other departments for buying MarTech tools?
Whether a small business or enterprise, the best practice is to share resources and information across departments. So, to make an educated purchase, ensure taking opinions and inputs from every stakeholder involved.
The Must-Have Elements in a Successful MarTech Stack
When you are building a MarTech stack, you cannot use the one size fits all strategy. There are different tools that you can use for your brand. For B2B and D2C brands, the marketing tools are quite different. So, consider your target audience, the nature of the business, and several other factors.
Here’s a list of marketing technologies that are necessary for creating a strong MarTech stack. But you can always choose the best-suited ones for your brand.
1. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRMs track your customer relationships. Especially beneficial for B2B brands, CRM can be a great marketing technology solution in your stack helping your sales force. Having a CRM tool in your stack means you get deeper insights into how your marketing efforts are creating an impact on your sales funnel.
Explore: HubSpot CRM, Salesforce
2. Content Management System (CMS)
An important element of your stack, whether you are a B2B brand or B2C CMS is something you’ll always need. This marketing technology powers up your website, landing pages, blogs, and other content. Since these aspects are the customer engagement points, keeping them powerful is immensely necessary.
Explore: HubSpot, WordPress
3. Social Media
Do we even need to explain social media?
Of course, being present across social media platforms has become essential. But you need the right marketing technologies to manage your social media efforts. These technologies assist you in lining up social media posts, curating content, monitoring conversations, etc. So, once you are active on social media, your social media technologies are going to help you a lot.
Explore: Hootsuite, Canva
4. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation technologies can reduce your stress and your workload. If you automate most of the standard or repetitive marketing efforts, you can focus on complex issues and strategies. Tools like AI Chatbots are great for automation. Bots can engage customers, respond to queries, represent your brand 24/7, and so much more. You can also use bots to automate email marketing.
Explore: Konverse AI, HubSpot
5. Advertising and SEO
This element is as vast as the sea. There is so much to know about these technologies. Advertising and SEO or search engine optimization is the key to customer acquisition. No matter what business you run, these elements make you visible to your target audience, drive organic traffic, and help in lead conversion.
Explore: SEMrush, Google Ads
6. Analysis & Reporting
Regardless of the marketing technologies in your stack, you must always have the access to measure your marketing efforts. You must find out what’s working and what’s not. So, using analytics can help you understand your position in marketing strategies. You can understand which strategies have paid off well and what needs improvement.
Explore: SEMrush, Google Analytics
7. Collaboration
Well, information sharing is a must, and to share information you need a strong and easy-to-use collaboration platform. Collaboration is such an element that’s often missed out when talking of MarTech stack. But free flow communication within a team is necessary. There are amazing tools that can help you communicate better, collaborate over projects, ideas, and strategies.
Explore: Slack, Trello
Guess what? We have compiled a list of the Top 16 MarTech tools that are a must for professional marketers. Read it here.
Build the Right MarTech Stack with These Tips
Before you start building your lego tower, you must keep a few tips handy. So, here are a few tips on building the ultimate MarTech stack.
Perform a Gap Analysis
Thousands of marketing technology tools are out there. So, we thought of telling you in this MarTech guide about performing a gap analysis.
Understand your starting point and ending point first – the needs and the goals. Then, fill in the gaps. It is through a proper understanding of the goals that you can ensure a powerful MarTech guide.
Perform gap analysis, identify opportunities and improvement areas. Involve various stakeholders and take their opinions on the matter. Having a clear understanding of the business goals helps you build a stack of the right marketing technology solutions that offer optimal benefits.
Check What You Have
What does your current MarTech stack look like?
Answer this question before building a new stack. Assess what tools you currently have, take inventory of the existing technologies, pinpoint redundancies, and identify what integrations will be helpful.
You can also use free tools to identify possible technologies used on specific websites and how well they work with each other.
Observe the Buyer’s Journey
The main goal behind building your MarTech stack is to engage customers at every stage of your buying journey. So, it is important to map the buyer’s journey first.
Further, it will also be easier to find the tools aligned with the customer touchpoints. Hence, you will have the framework and of course, the right tools.
Manage data
A MarTech stack stands on shared data. So, make sure that your data is collected properly. Then, assess the data and invest in a data management plan. Clean your outbound and inbound data. Get them analyzed and validated. Since data is the very foundation of your marketing campaigns, take time to sort and segment the data before you get on with building the MarTech stack.
Curate & Manage Content
Content is what engages your customers, leads a prospect, and helps in conversion. So, high-quality content is primary to your MarTech stack.
Map out a content management plan, check out what content is available, what can be up-cycled into infographics or videos, and what more can be created from the scratch.
Be Agile & Flexible
Building a MarTech stack does not mean you can sit back. It is necessary to keep a track of, how the tools are performing, is your brand progressing towards the business goals, and how is the market changing. Customer expectations are constantly evolving. Hence, you have to be flexible enough to align your MarTech stack with the changing times. Keep making improvements, and keep the content flowing.
Can we Help in Building the Blocks?
Marketing technology matters and it is here to stay. MarTech will be a forever part of the evolving marketing landscape. MarTech tools will continue to grow and you will need to keep assessing the new tools to find out the best one for your brand.
Using MarTech helps you gain better insights on customer expectations, their buying patterns, and hence, you can build a better connection with them. So, get a good head start with your MarTech stack, choose the right tools, and make sure to remain flexible.
Konverse AI can be one of the building blocks of your MarTech stack. We recommend exploring the platform and reach us out for more information.
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