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Comprehensive MarTech Stack Audit Guide for Successful Transition from 2019 to 2020

Today, companies target and engage with their niche customers through different marketing channels, making their marketing and sales professionals leverage various systems beyond a CRM platform. To identify the ideal customer profile and build customer relationships, businesses require structuring an all-encompassing, flexible and integrated MarTech stack, which will allow marketing and sales teams to connect with prospects and customers from different touchpoints and communicate with essential product updates to facilitate their purchase decisions.  

Why do you need a MarTech Audit?

MarTech tools allow marketers to strategies, perform those strategies, and monitor marketing campaigns to examine the effectiveness of marketing strategies. Marketing professionals can use various MarTech tools to perform various operations such as collecting customer data, tracking campaign insights, identifying and creating customer personas, targeting and engaging with prospects and customers, nurturing leads, identifying opportunities, optimizing messages and email designs, improving customer relationships and many others. These MarTech tools form a stack that is built to help marketing and sales teams to organize their actions, manage overwhelming volume of data, make data-driven business decisions and creating a unified digital customer experience for new and existing customers. 

The set of different types of technologies including software, apps, web-based services which consist of MarTech stack can equip organizations to achieve greater in better customer engagement and conversion rates when built and audited periodically. However, many companies commit this mistake of adopting too many tools and too much of these tools will make companies paying exorbitant prices. That’s why marketers need to examine if they are paying excessive price for too many tools? Does  the MarTech stack bloated with unnecessary marketing software? To help you prevent bloating of your MarTech stack in 2020, we have laid out the following roadmap of four steps to perform a thorough MarTech audit to improve efficacy of your marketing campaigns in 2020.

4 Steps of conducting an effective audit of MarTech stack for smooth transition of your marketing process in 2020: 

1. Make a list of all existing MarTech tools List the software.

The first and foremost step to start the audit is to make an exhaustive list of all the existing MarTech tools you are using. Make sure you include every piece of tool in use by your marketing and sales teams. After that, you also need to check out the software in use for customer service, online reputation management, business analysis, sales development and other departments, including all newly implemented and old ones which are indirectly contributing in your marketing operations. 

While creating that MarTech list, you can figure out how much your organization has  already invested in all the tools that directly or indirectly help your marketing teams, how bloated is the current stack, number of software vendors your company is dealing with and many other aspects of investment in MarTech. Those Chances are that those MarTech vendors have approached your business earlier to cause the MarTech bloating issue you might be facing. 

2. Analyze benefits of all existing software tools 

After you have created the exhaustive list of all current MarTech tools in use in your organization, the next step is to analyze functionalities, advantages and disadvantages of all the software. Armed with this detailed analysis on all the software, you can discuss with your team, do extensive research and comparative studies on how those tools contribute in your marketing operations, which teams and professionals heavily rely on those tools and results of implementing those tools in marketing activities – how far each software has enhanced or facilitated your marketing efforts and results. Based on these comparisons and details, your organization will develop a better working knowledge of those tools.  

3. Organize and classify the MarTech stack

After thorough analysis of your in-house martech technologies, the next step is to classify and organize these tools. Marketers should organize their MarTech stack following either a visual design or text design approaches. Marketers can use a circuit-board design or a flow chart if adopting a visual method. Whether it is a text-based or a visual design approach, the primary focus should be on creating the best stack of tools organized in the right categories. For this, you can ask yourself these questions:

  1. Which software solutions currently help you handle social media? 
  2. Which ones assist with lead generation, 
  3. Which tools will aid in customer retention?  
  4. Which tools are required for content management? 

Then, sort the MarTech stack based on the tasks that the tools execute or based on the marketing trends that the tools support.

4. Assess all the tools

In this next phase, you need to evaluate all existing marketing software tools based on their performance, such as key performance indicators that closely indicate martech functionalities. For example, you need to check the number of quality leads, a lead generation tool has generated in the last 6 months or in a year. If there is another tool which is performing better or if there are any new tool in the market which can outclass the existing tools in the stack. Marketers need specific numeric value for these evaluations and they should continue the evaluation process till they get the right data on these parameters. Remember that If your company is taking too long to collect the necessary data, then it might be for the reason that the MarTech stack is not too effective or integrated into the process.

In order to analyze how your MarTech stack is performing, you need to ask these following questions: 

  • How important is the tool for your overall business goals and marketing operations?
  • Does the tool meet your users’ needs? 
  • Can your users engage with the tool?
  • How effective is it to generate or gather, process or transform, and organize and create reports?
  • How effective is it to protect company data? 
  • What is the level of security is offered by the tool?
  • Can you expand the data capacity, security or other functionalities when your business will grow?
  • Can existing tools integrate with our marketing tools and data sources?
  • Is the tool capable of exceeding your expectations? 
  • Do you use the tool most frequently or regularly or aid in troubleshooting marketing problems?

If the answer to most of these questions is no, then you need to start looking for alternatives to your existing martech tools for 2020.  it may be time to look for a better solution. While searching for new tools. Make sure you have done the right assessment before buying new tools – you can consult with similar businesses which are not your direct rivals about the tools that worked for them as well as consider browsing online for tech reviews to find experts’ reviews and recommendations on the type of tools you are looking for to replace your existing tools in the MarTech. Also, you need to check out the tools with the highest ratings and that offer unique features that supports your marketing strategies and efforts, and make you a more powerful marketing team in 2020.