How to Build the Most Efficient MarTech Stack For Your Money

MarTech is the use of technology in marketing. As new tools become available, businesses must decide how they’ll adapt their current technologies to include them. Key tools within a stack, such as customer relationship management (CRM), analytics and marketing automation, influence how marketers approach business. Today, professionals have more MarTech options at their disposal than ever.

Every step of a consumer’s journey, from awareness to conversion, involves various marketing technology tools. A MarTech stack refers to the combination of tools that are used to streamline the process, analyze information and provide data on customers.

Some of the most common uses of MarTech fall under the following categories:

Advertising and promotion
Sales and marketing
Content and experience
Social relationships
Data

With thousands of marketing technologies available, enhancing your MarTech stack to maximize impact can be daunting. Marketers want bang for their buck, but shiny new technology can be misleading. Implementing new tools depends on your business needs and what you already have. The process of optimization involves carefully comparing your strategy and goals against what each tool offers you in support.

Consumer expectations are at an all-time high. To foster meaningful relationships throughout the customer journey, optimizing your MarTech stack with technologies that support personalized engagement is essential. An integrated MarTech stack means you no longer waste valuable time switching between tools, instead diverting resources to the more important things.

How to optimize your MarTech stack

Before we look at how to build the smartest MarTech stack for you, it’s important to understand what the fundamental components are. These are the building blocks that you will use to create a seamless, integrated stack:

Content management system to host your site
Marketing automation
CRM software to personalize the customer experience
Email marketing platform
Social media automation
SEO tools
Analytics software
Mobile marketing apps

Once you’ve got the key elements of a MarTech stack in place, it’s time to start optimizing them to be as effective as possible.

Consolidate your current tools

If you aren’t sure what tools you have, it will be impossible to enhance them. Understanding what technologies you already have within your stack will provide a clearer picture of how they align with your goals and, if they don’t, what you need going forward.

So many different marketing technologies are now available that you might have overlapping tools that offer similar functions, or you may be wasting money on tools that you don’t even need.

Find out who uses each marketing tool within your agency. Does it add value to their work? Is there room for improvement? By conducting an audit of your current MarTech stack, you can begin to understand the amount of need and how much benefit each provides to your business.

Once you’ve streamlined your existing stack, you can start working on ways to optimize it.

To learn more about how to get the most value from your MarTech investments, listen to our interview with Kerry Dawes on The Strategic Marketing Show:

Listen to the episode via your preferred pocast platform:

Integrate your systems

To maximize efficiency, individual technologies within your stack must be able to distribute data seamlessly.

However, integrating a MarTech stack is seen as one of the most difficult challenges among IT leaders. Despite this, it should still be a priority and a little extra investment early on will certainly save a lot of effort later.

As an example, a growing business might have three tools: email marketing, analytics and CRM. To analyze your data, you have to go into each system and piece together all three sets.

Now, imagine the business grows further and has seven different tools. Piecing together seven data sets is going to bury employees in hours of work and what they eventually put together might not even be informative.

As you add new tools to your stack, it’s best to take a holistic approach to your current setup. How will new technologies interact with your current tools? This will give you a much more focused idea of what you need to support your strategy.

Capitalize on your CRM tools

For customers, your website is one of the key entry points into your business. But what happens after your potential clients pass through the door? This is the time to make the most of your CRM.

Your CRM collects and stores vital customer information in one place, building a profile for everyone who interacts with your website. As a result, you can visualize customer behaviors and observe pain points in the customer lifecycle. This means that you can make any improvements quickly, increasing your reputation and customer loyalty.

Furthermore, a CRM system will allow you to close repeat deals with clients by crafting a tried and tested sales process. You’ll see an increase in customer acquisition too, as your CRM channels all of your sales, marketing and finance data into accessible metrics.

Use your data efficiently

MarTech solutions offer deep insights into consumer preferences and behaviors, but some businesses might be skeptical to use them for fear of breaching compliance laws.

Data is essential to making informed decisions for your business, so don’t be afraid to use yours. MarTech solutions that prioritize only the most relevant data to your goals are useful for truly understanding information while staying within the data protection guidelines.

Additionally, be honest and upfront with your customers about how you’ll use their data. This will reassure your clients that the information they choose to share is in good hands.

Customer experience is vital

Customers genuinely value their relationships with businesses, with 80% of clients considering their experiences just as important as the products offered. Therefore, thinking about how your MarTech stack supports the customer journey is paramount.

To get a clear picture of which tools you could add to your stack for the biggest advantage, think about what enhances customer experiences the most. If your technology investments don’t encourage a symbiotic relationship with your clients, you’ve got a stack that is limiting your capabilities instead of furthering them.

Modern MarTech solutions are making it easier than ever to manage and conduct thorough analyses of data, while simultaneously publishing relevant, engaging content. However, marketing teams are still using only 58% of their MarTech capabilities.

Having established the components you need for your stack, the next step is integrating and optimizing the technologies to ensure you’re pushing the MarTech solutions to the maximum and reaping the rewards for your business.