Empower Your Team: Why a Powerful Martech Stack Is Crucial for Success

From content management systems to email marketing software, marketing technology is becoming increasingly important for businesses to invest in. Learn what a high-quality marketing technology stack can do for you and some tips on choosing the right technologies to fill it with.

Whether marketing is your primary responsibility, a task you’re involved in at your agency or something you do as part of running a business, you know how time-consuming it can be. But more time spent on marketing doesn’t necessarily equate more money made from your efforts.

The truth is, your marketing technology (martech) stack can make or break your business.

Because of how costly these technologies can be and how time-consuming many of them can be to set up and use, you can’t afford to choose ones that bring little to no return on your investment. So in this post we’re going to look at the benefits of having a powerful martech stack along with some tips for putting one together.

What Is Martech?

Martech is short for “marketing technology.” It refers to all the different types of apps and tools used to plan, implement, manage, test and optimize marketing strategies.

Businesses typically have a collection of technologies they use to manage various components of their marketing campaigns. In short, this is what we refer to as a martech stack.

It usually includes a combination of the following:

• Content management systems (CMS)
• Digital experience platforms (DXP)
• Planning and strategy tools like moodboards, editorial calendars and user research
• Content and design creation tools
• Digital marketing apps for content, social media, email, SEM and SEO
• Customer relationship management (CRM) software
• Analytics monitoring
• Testing tools for A/B testing, user testing, performance testing and more
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools
• Loyalty and retention tools

Which technologies your organization chooses depends on a number of things, like your business goals, budget and target audience.

Regardless of which tools you do use, the primary purpose is to streamline and improve your marketing activities while maximizing your results.

The Benefits of Having an Intuitive Martech Stack

A well-thought-out and intuitive marketing technology stack can do so much for an organization, more than just helping marketers manage various aspects of their work. For example:

Empower Everyone to Contribute

A lot of times, people focus on how powerful and feature-packed they need their martech to be. The thing is, the most powerful martech stack is one that everyone is able to use with ease.

For example, let’s say you’re a marketing manager. You want to spend your time crafting and overseeing your company’s marketing campaigns, not doing the day-to-day implementation.

However, your content writer is struggling with your content management system. No matter how many times you show them how to add new blog posts to the CMS, they mess something up or forget a crucial step, leaving them unable to submit it to you for review. So you end up having to do it for them or outsource it to someone who really shouldn’t be responsible for that task, like your web developer.

By choosing technologies that are universally intuitive, you’ll reduce the learning curve, increase user adoption rates and remove this obstacle from your path.

Improve Productivity Company-wide

Empowering members of other teams to participate in the marketing process is just one way in which intuitive martech improves a company’s productivity. Finding automated solutions will help with this as well.

Think about something like email marketing. Do you really want to be piecing together a newsletter every week for your subscribers? Or manually sending an email sequence to someone who signed up on your landing page?

There are so many other things you should be focused on, like tasks that will directly improve your marketing outcomes. That’s why it’s crucial to find marketing tools that will automate those tedious tasks for you and your team.

Create Better Digital Content and Experiences

Another perk that comes from building a high-quality martech stack is the quality of what you create. While nothing will replace the designers, developers and writers who put together your content, your marketing tools can amplify those results.

For example, let’s say you have a digital experience platform helping you manage your omnichannel marketing experiences. You could have your writer craft a single batch of copy for your website, social media posts, emails, ads and so on. Or you could leverage the data gathered from your DXP, synthesize it with AI and then create personalized content for different users at different points along their journey.

Big data sets don’t have to be a challenge to manage with the right martech stack. What’s more, you don’t have to analyze data platform by platform. With the right solutions, you’ll be able to analyze data from your users as they engage with your brand across various channels.

Improve Marketing ROI

Cost is something you have to consider when creating your martech stack. The more tools you add to the stack, the more it will cost you—not just in terms of dollars spent, but also in terms of time as you move in and out of each tool, managing different aspects of your marketing strategy.

Another reason to think about cost is because you want a good return on your investment (ROI). Sure, the super pricey tools come with all the bells and whistles and allow you to do amazing things. But are the leads and sales you get from them enough to cover those costs?

When you take the time to research the available tools and choose ones that are intuitive and will help you achieve guaranteed outcomes, you’ll enjoy a much greater ROI.

Make Your Marketing Strategy More Adaptive

Digital marketing techniques and trends change frequently. Consider TikTok. The app was launched in 2017 and is now a popular platform for content creators and brands.

What do you think marketers did when that social media platform took off and they realized it could be a boon for business? They likely started to imagine ways to integrate it into their strategy as soon as possible. While coming up with video content for TikTok may have been relatively easy, integrating the process into their existing workflows may not have been if their technologies weren’t up to speed.

So this is another thing that makes marketing tech such a powerful asset to an organization. Finding tools that remain on the cutting edge of marketing and keep their features up to date as the industry changes or as world events shake things up will be a huge game changer for your organization.

Tips for Creating Your Martech Stack

Here are some tips that will help you evaluate the thousands of marketing technologies out there and to create the optimal stack for you and anyone else in your organization involved with marketing:

1. Set Your Marketing Goals

Figure out what’s most important to you in marketing your business. Do you want to:

• Generate brand awareness?
• Build your online reputation?
• Generate leads?
• Increase sales?
• Improve user loyalty and retention?
• Something else?

Start with three to five goals to start. This will help you determine which strategies to use, so you can focus on the martech built specifically for those purposes.

2. Know Your Audience

Even if you’ve already identified your target audience, you may need to spend some time getting to know their digital habits.

For instance, there’s a very big difference between marketing to Gen Z vs. Boomers. If your plan is to use social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram to create content, then you better be going after a younger audience.

Once you’ve figured out who you’re targeting and how they prefer to engage with brands online, you can flesh out your marketing strategy by selecting which kinds of tactics and channels you’ll use. This will help you narrow down the list of martech even more.

3. Start Small

The cost of marketing technologies can quickly add up. So you don’t want to go buying a whole bunch of tools that look great but that might not necessarily be as useful as they appear to be. Nor do you want to invest in too much technology and spread yourself so thin that you don’t have time to figure out the nuts and bolts of each.

Take a look at your goals and audience data and come up with three marketing priorities. For example, let’s say you want to publish blog posts twice a week, launch a weekly newsletter and run Facebook ads.

By determining what your priorities are right now, you can focus on finding the proper solutions and getting them fully integrated into your workflow. Once the whole thing is streamlined and bringing you a return on your investment, you can explore growing your martech stack further.

4. Create a List of Martech Requirements

There’s so much technology out there that it can be difficult to settle on just one tool or to be satisfied with the one you chose because you’ll be second-guessing your decision.

To bring some clarity and confidence to your decision-making process, start by creating a list of requirements for the different types of martech you need.

For example, let’s say you’re looking for a social media management app. Your list of requirements might include:

• Multi-user account access
• Integration with Instagram, Facebook and TikTok
• Planning and scheduling tools
• Calendar view
• Draft approval process
• Link shortening
• Engagement monitoring
• Analytics reports
• Ticket support

This list will help you determine which features and functionality are non-negotiable so you can weed out options that don’t fit your needs. You can also create lists of things that would be nice to have, which can help you choose between tools that otherwise offer the same thing.

5. Consider Usability

When evaluating the features included in a marketing tool, it’s also important to consider bloat.

While you want to use tools that enable you to do everything you sought out to do, you also don’t want your tools to be so overloaded with features you don’t need that they’re constantly getting in your way.

You also need tools that are intuitive. It’s OK if there’s a slight learning curve in the beginning. However, if you or anyone else who uses this tool can’t get over that hump, you have to decide if the extra time you spend trying to use it is worth it.

Scheduling a live demo is a great way to decide if the tool is usable enough for your purposes.

6. Try to Consolidate Your Systems Whenever Possible

It might only take a few seconds to log in and out of each tool you use. But that time adds up. That’s not the only way in which using numerous martech solutions can steal time away from you.

Consider crucial software like your CMS and CRM. You’ve built an incredible website with your CMS and have various forms set up throughout the user journey. From lead generation to ecommerce checkout, there’s a lot of valuable information you’re collecting.

It would be a waste to have to manage all of it from different platforms. Or, worse, to have to move that data into a separate system entirely in order to make sense of what’s going on with your marketing strategy.

Now, finding a CMS with a built-in CRM isn’t usually possible. So instead of looking for platforms that consolidate various marketing tasks into one, you can instead look for platforms that integrate with others in your stack. For example, if you use Progress Sitefinity to create your site, you’d be able to integrate it with Microsoft Dynamics/365 or Salesforce.

7. Get User Buy-in

Create a list of everyone within your company who will be using each of the tools in your martech stack. Before purchasing anything, make sure you’ve got their buy-in.

In addition to checking that the new tool will be intuitive enough for them to use, you need to understand how disruptive it’s going to be to their existing workflows.

Now, you do have to be careful. Some people don’t like changing tools simply because they prefer the old way of doing things. So you need to be prepared to have a discussion about the benefits of adding new tools or upgrading existing ones. Show them how it’ll save them time, be easier to use, improve their results, etc. If needed, schedule time for them to walk through a demo so they can see it for themselves.

8. Look at the Scalability of the Platform

Your list of requirements will help you choose platforms that serve you best today. You also need to think about if they’ll be able to keep serving you in the future.

There are different things you may want to look for. For example:

• Can you add more users to your account?
• How adaptable is the platform? Does it seem to be on top of industry trends today?
• Are there pricing tiers for different levels of business or business needs?

If you’re not sure about the scalability and adaptability of the platform, that doesn’t mean you need to start your search all over again. What you need to figure out next is how easy or difficult it’ll be to extract your data from the platform and then migrate it to another if you decide you need something more down the line. If that isn’t possible or it’s not a simple thing to do, then you probably want to find an alternative solution.

9. Regularly Evaluate Your Martech Stack

Once you’ve added software to your stack, give it some time to see how things pan out. Then, every six to 12 months, evaluate your solutions.

Here’s what you’ll want to know:

Is your stack as well-integrated and effective as it could possibly be? What’s missing? How could it be better?

How has your marketing stack impacted those who use it on a qualitative and quantitative level? Are there any noticeable differences in productivity, accuracy or satisfaction?

Are you making more money from marketing than you’re spending on your software? If so, by how much? Is that a substantial enough ROI for you?

If your technologies aren’t helping you to create better content or improve your ROI, or if they’re hampering productivity, don’t be afraid to switch things up. While you might be worried about the cost of finding something new and the time it’ll take to onboard the team, consider how much your existing solutions are costing you in terms of business.

Wrapping Up

There are thousands upon thousands of marketing technologies available, all promising to make the act of marketing much easier and more effective. While the alternative of trying to do everything on your own is definitely labor-intensive and inefficient, choosing the wrong martech for your organization can lead to the same results.

So take your time in determining what you need and start small. As you add the right tools to your martech stack, you’ll notice all those benefits adding up behind the scenes—a team that’s happier because they’re not wasting time on mindless tasks, high-quality content that your audience responds well to and a marketing strategy that’s paying off in a huge way.

If you’re interested in learning more about Sitefinity, you can sign up for a full demo at your convenience.