Unless you just time-traveled from the Mad Men era, you know it’s almost impossible to execute a marketing campaign without digital tools. But with the average enterprise using 120 marketing technologies, orchestrating the many platforms across different teams can feel like herding cats.

What technologies should you use, and how can you optimize their effectiveness? Instead of getting a bunch of applications and hoping that magic will happen, you should consider how they work together as a Martech stack before making your decision.

What is Martech?

Short for marketing technology, Martech encompasses a range of software and digital tools that help organizations design and implement marketing strategies. A Martech stack is a group of such applications used by marketers to execute their campaigns. All the software platforms in a Martech stack integrate, creating an ecosystem in which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Why is Martech Important?

The global marketing technology industry is valued at over $121 billion. Here’s why organizations are investing heavily in Martech (and why you should too!)

Rein in the Data

Unless you have a factory the size of the North Pole full of Santa’s little elves crunching numbers 28 hours a day, you can’t possibly handle the deluge of data that’s coming in from every business system. Let alone deriving insights fast enough to make timely and accurate data-driven decisions. A Martech stack integrates disparate workflows and syncs up all the data in real-time. Marketers can then aggregate, unify, analyze, and extract insights from the vast amount of information.

Break Down Silos

Breaking down internal silos, improving transparency, and fostering internal communication is key to improving the customer experience. A Martech stack can help you improve collaboration between marketing and operation departments. It ensures that those selling the brand and those executing on the promises base their decisions on the same real-time data, so everyone is rowing in the same direction.

Optimize Personalization

Marketing personalization is all the rage. But it can’t be executed at scale without technologies that can process customer data and automate the delivery of targeted content at scale. The more data you can analyze and act on, the better you can understand your prospects and customers. The insights can help you target marketing campaigns effectively to convert more leads and increase the ROI of your budget.

Manage the Customer Lifecycle Holistically

An integrated Martech stack gives you a big picture view of customer interactions from the initial touchpoint to conversion. The visibility helps marketers connect the dots and streamline the customer journey to drive sales and improve loyalty. It’s also the key to unifying multiple customer touchpoints and delivering an omnichannel customer experience that can increase conversions through your website, email campaigns, social media, mobile app, and more.

What Tools Should I have in a Martech Stack?

Now you may wonder, what exactly goes into a Martech stack? Here are some essential tools you should include:

Content Management System (CMS)

A CMS allows business users to update website content quickly without writing any code. It enables companies to create content and implement marketing strategies cost-effectively. With content being an indispensable component of most marketing strategies, a CMS gives marketers the agility to experiment and adapt quickly. From publishing blog posts to split testing landing pages, you can streamline these processes to achieve results cheaper and faster.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

A CRM system allows marketers and sales professionals to access the latest customer data (e.g., order history, preferences, customer service issues, interaction with your brand on social media) from a centralized location. They can then better align their activities to effectively nurture customer relationships and progress prospects down the sales funnel. The streamlined system also helps improve collaboration and productivity while minimizing frustration among team members.

Customer Data Platform (CDP)

A CDP is a marketer-managed system that brings together all customer data. You can stitch together information from different sources to create a persistent, unified customer database, which is often called a single customer view or a 360-degree customer profile. The customer data can then be accessed by other systems (e.g., CRM software) to leverage the appropriate information for executing marketing campaigns.

Marketing Automation Software

A marketing automation platform allows you to automate repetitive, labor-intensive, and time-consuming tasks. It’s critical for implementing marketing personalization strategies at scale. For example, you can nurture leads by integrating data from your CDP and CRM platforms to send the most relevant content or offer via email based on customers’ real-time interactions with your brand.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools

With 68% of online experience starting with a search engine and more people using online searches to discover products, companies need to ensure that their websites rank high on relevant search results. There are many types of SEO tools. Some help you research keywords while others allow you to spy on your competitors — giving you the insights to improve your search engine ranking and drive high-quality traffic to your website.

Social Media & Content Management Software

Social media management tools allow you to schedule and publish content on one or more social media platforms. You can monitor mentions, respond to questions, provide customer support, and manage interactions with your followers all in one place to streamline workflows and facilitate collaboration among team members. You can also use these tools to monitor the effectiveness of your social media advertising campaigns.

AdTech Platforms

AdTech is an umbrella term that covers all the technologies marketers use to manage digital advertising campaigns. These solutions allow advertisers to serve the most relevant ads to targeted audiences through automation technologies and optimize their bids. They also help you track engagements and clicks to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns and generate insights to inform future tactics.

Analytics Tools

These software applications collect data from marketing platforms. They help marketers measure their campaigns by tracking various key metrics, such as website traffic, traffic sources, click-through rates, bounce rates, etc. Some of them focus on individual marketing channels (e.g., email, social media, display) while others allow you to analyze all your marketing data holistically. They give you the ability to derive insights in real-time to support accurate data-driven decision-making.

Still Scratching Your Head? We Don’t Blame You!

Implementing a Martech stack is complicated. You need to get clear on your marketing objectives and identify the right tools for every strategy and channel. Next, you must make sure all the applications play nice with each other. Then, you have to hook everything up correctly to deliver a seamless customer experience across every touchpoint.

Don’t worry, you can optimize your Martech stack with the right experience and expertise. Schedule a free consultation with our experts to see how we can design a marketing strategy and select the right tools to support your campaigns.