Well, it’s a group of technologies chosen to work together in order to achieve, monitor, and optimize your business’ marketing activities. Key factors to consider when choosing your stack is to make processes more efficient and easier, to be able to measure, improve and make marketing campaigns more cost-effective, and help with decision-making on which marketing activities to conduct. With so many choices out there, it’s essential for marketers to have a clear understanding of which technologies are most important to reach your business goals and to understand how these tools can help monitor and carry out your marketing efforts.
In order to do so, here are some key considerations to keep in mind when choosing your marketing technology stack.
Tip #1: Your Business Type (B2B vs B2C)
While some marketing technologies will make sense regardless of your type of business, there are different ones that will need to come into play depending on whether you’re a B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer) company.
B2C businesses use different channels and tactics to acquire leads and customers, and thus will have to use different technologies as well. There are a subset of tools that most businesses will need (such as something for email marketing, for Search Engine Optimization, for Analytics, and a Content Management System (a CMS).
Others will be more dependent on whether your business is B2B (such as a Customer Relationship Management technology (CRM), or various social media management tools (different whether you are B2B or B2C), for example.
Tip #2: Understanding the Customer Journey
There are literally thousands of options to choose from when it comes to marketing technologies, so how do you get started? It’s helpful to understand each and every step of the customer journey for your business, from their very first touchpoint, to a purchase and beyond. Once you understand this more fully, you can choose your base platforms across the journey, along with any additional complementary technologies that will support processes along the way. This ensures that you’re picking your stack based on the customer, and not for other more personal or technology-centric reasons. It’s also a larger exercise that will help when determine your marketing and content strategy and where there may be gaps to be addressed.
From here, you’ll be able to tell where you need more information and what needs to be improved upon so that you can pick the technologies that provide the required additional insight.
Tip #3: Determine Solutions for Business Problems
When you are selecting your marketing tools, make sure that you are doing so in order to solve specific business problems, and not because a specific technology is cool or a current trend that “everyone is trying”. Mainly, the stack should be facilitating your business’ customer experience, as well as supporting the implementation of a well thought out marketing strategy.
If a technology is not complementing this, then remove it or don’t waste extra time considering it.
Tip #4: Sharing of Data and Content
Make sure to consider that all of your technologies will need to work as a team, sharing relevant data and content. This will help you better understand your leads and customers with a more complete view and get a better perspective via closed loop reporting.
Determine what types of data need to be shared across all technologies, and then ensure that these integrations are not just possible, but also not overly complicated, for your necessary requirements. For content, this will allow for a consistency of voice and content strategy across your marketing team. It also eliminates the need to manage multiple versions of the content in more than one place.
Tip #5: Less is More
Instead of trying to cobble together bits and pieces as you go (although this may be how you get started), it’s best to have a bigger picture view of your needs, so that you may need to use less tools and integrate less pieces together later on.
You also want to ensure that all of the tools will talk to each other and work well together, and will achieve what you have brought them into your business to do originally. Make sure to consider all parts of the stack as a piece in a single system, and not in an isolated vacuum so as to optimize the system as a whole.
You don’t want to end up building a beast that becomes too complex and ends up defeating the purpose of why you are creating a marketing technology stack in the first place.
Summary
To summarize, when Determining your Marketing Technology Stack, key considerations include:
- Your Business Type (B2B vs B2C)
- Understanding the Customer Journey
- Determine Solutions for Business Problems
- Sharing of Data and Content
- Less is More
Now that you understand more about what to think about when setting up your Marketing Technology Stack, please check out our recent blog posts covering more useful marketing tips.
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