How Can Marketers Increase Their Chances of Successful MarTech Investment?
The marketing industry has witnessed a massive disruption in the last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Even major brands are not able to strategize marketing campaigns that will help them overcome the challenges and profit through the crisis. Moreover, with the complete digital transition and new policies to follow, marketers face new challenges every day, and companies cannot generate the expected return on investment. This is mainly because post-pandemic organizations invest budgets in technology without having the skills, people, or time to deliver the desired outcome.
Instead, organizations should try to achieve the business objective with the technology they already have. At the same time, try to upgrade overlooked functionalities. You might also need additional skills and knowledge to make the functionalities work in the right way.
Guidelines on building MarTech stack
The challenge in building an ideal MarTech stack is to select the right technology from a list of thousands, make them user-friendly, and set them up in a way to leverage the best possible benefits. To help you get the best ROI from your marketing investment and gain a competitive advantage in the industry, here is a list of guidelines for building your organization’s MarTech stack:
Automate your marketing system
With the increasing workload and the rapid technology innovation, it is time to share some of our work with the machines. Automating the marketing system’s possible areas helps you create more leads in less time and develops better customer relationships. A well-developed marketing automation tool not only focuses on building enterprise-grade power but also on consumer-grade ease of use. By constructing your MarTech stack around automation platforms, you can easily analyze the stored customer data, which in turn can help you produce a customer-centric marketing campaign. Moreover, creating great customer experiences keeps you ahead of your competitors in the industry.
Never tamper with your marketing strategy
With the availability of so many marketing tools and the pressure of success, one can easily get carried away to change the entire marketing strategy. This might create confusion in the system and turn out to be a massive digital marketing failure. Thus, always remember to stick to your strategy first and select technology that fits your marketing strategy. To achieve your business objective, you need to build your MarTech stack around your sales and revenue-driving strategy. Remember that strategizing the entire process took a significant amount of effort since it was made to keep every perspective under concern.
Segment and document all the data collected
If your business is going on the right track to success, your data center must be overflowing with uncontrolled and oversaturated data. A modern, booming business looks like this only, but only until all the abandoned data gets messed up due to a lack of documentation of the ever-evolving data. To maintain long-term success and avoid data integrity issues, you need to label all your customers, as well as their business history. This offers easy access to the data whenever required and is also easy to understand for new employees.
Give your strategy the highest priority
Build your MarTech stack in a way that it easily collaborates with the rest of your team and will continue to do so in years to come. Even though you will have to keep upgrading your system with technology innovations, you cannot frame your MarTech stack based on your short-term goals because switching systems can be expensive. It would help if you made a preliminary analysis of how each of your movements might mark the business’s future and develop the MarTech stack accordingly. Also, there is no point in wasting time looking for the forever-technology since we all know that the concept of forever technology is a farce. So ideally, you must opt for technologies that will sustain your business until the next disruption.
Run an audit
Technology can create wonders, but similarly, even a tiny overlooked error can cause significant damage to your entire plan. Thus, before stacking marketing tools and technologies, it’s essential to run an audit of everything, including marketing automation, web analytics, conversion rate, sales enablement, social media platforms, and all other paid media. This helps you analyze how accurate your final MarTech stack will be and also gives you a scope to mend any issues detected.
A good MarTech needs proper evaluation
Marketers need to make a detailed analysis of which technology might fail, creating a scope for better ROI by evaluating several areas. From deciding the new technology’s purpose to selecting the right vendor to the integration of the right tools, marketers can’t afford to make any mistakes. At the same time, you should also remember that technology can offer you its best service only if you know how to drive it and have patience.
How to evaluate a MarTech Stack?
Unable to keep pace with the sprawling MarTech innovation, marketers often fail to make strategy-driven choices. But suppose they are aware of the right questions to ask and find answers to before investing in new marketing technology. In that case, you can save your company from innumerable complications shortly.
Here is a list of questions to help you evaluate your new marketing technology:
Does the new marketing technology integrate with your existing MarTech stack?
Upgrading to new technologies does not mean that you have to leave behind everything your marketing team has built over time. Instead, all your old customer data and past achievements play a considerable role in making your new MarTech. Thus, it would be best to analyze the areas that can create a bottleneck in merging your old marketing technology with the new one. The new marketing technology provider should also understand your business’s objective and tailor digital marketing services accordingly. It should support your unique use cases efficiently, and for that, even you need to be very transparent about your business needs. To avoid challenges down the line, you need to ensure that the new marketing technology integrates smoothly with your existing MarTech stack. The new MarTech should seamlessly integrate into the core existing technologies such as marketing automation platform, CRM, and content management system. Also, ensure your existing technology is capable of handling the promises of the new marketing technology.
Are you investing in the new technology for a long-term or short-term objective?
Pre-deciding your marketing objective term and your unique needs help you select the technology provider accordingly. If you aim toward a long-term objective, is the new marketing technology you plan to adopt compatible with your plan? A long-term marketing objective will need post-service customer support facilities and not all MarTech companies offer that. It is ideal for making sure that the new marketing technology will support multiple projects or develop short-term marketing strategies.
Do you have a team to implement the marketing technology properly?
If you are outsourcing a marketing technology service provider, there is a high probability that you are assuming the implementation of the tools will also be done by them. But that is not always the case. Some marketing technology agencies just provide you with the tools, and the rest depends on you. If your team is well-acquainted with the latest technological developments in the marketing industry and is confident about implementing them, you need not worry. But if you are a software company with zero digital marketing knowledge, you might get lost in the new marketing technology tools’ complications.
Does the new marketing technology offer privacy protection?
The advancement in technology has also increased the rate of cybercrimes and when incorporating any digital service, keeping a check on the security side is very important. Not all marketing technology service providers offer privacy protection, and some offer them at a hidden cost. Since the entire marketing process revolves around customer data and financial transactions, any breach in the system can create a negative reputation for your company among your potential customers. Your new marketing technology should provide complete security to all personally identifiable and transaction-level data.
Does the new marketing technology offer marketing metrics?
The most important benefit of digital marketing technology is its ability to generate and provide your marketing campaign’s success metrics. Marketing metrics such as open rate, conversion rate, and more determine your digital marketing campaigns’ efficiency. Based on the results, you can modify your marketing strategy by working on the flaws. But analyzing the metrics can be a difficult task, and fixing them can be more difficult. Ensure that your new marketing technology automatically deals with the metrics analysis process and offers you suggestions on tweaking a specific strategy to create better results.
In today’s customer-centric world, it is vital to keep customers at the heart of every decision. If your marketing strategy has no benefits for your customers, then there is a high chance that your campaign might fail, no matter how much money you are investing.
If you need professional assistance with the selection of the right marketing systems for building and managing your MarTech stack successfully, you can start right from here – all you need is to contact us or simply say “Hi” or “Hello” at info@marrinadecisions.com. Or you can DM us on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.