How can you improve a company's marketing technology stack?

Like so many other areas in life, a well architected marketing technology stack starts with good planning and solid process, applied by skilled and talented people. If you choose your team wisely, they'll most likely prepare a good plan, apply a disciplined process and derive a solid architecture. As marketing has increasingly digitized, so have the technologies advanced, the sophistication of marketing strategies increased and competition for attention intensified. This means that in addition to a high-performing marketing stack, you'll also need meaningful messaging, awesome creative and emotive appeal to succeed. And, you'll need well-organized data to constantly learn and improve.

Enhance your marketing technology stack through a comprehensive martech audit. Align strategy with business goals, prioritize ROI-driven investments, and prioritize seamless integration for improved efficiency and customer experiences. - Assess current infrastructure thoroughly. - Integrate platforms for seamless data flow. - Employ AI for personalization and automation. - Enhance analytics for data-driven insights. - Prioritize scalability and cybersecurity. - Coordinate cross-channel strategies. - Opt for user-friendly interfaces. - Provide continuous training and support. - Monitor and optimize performance consistently. - Cybersecurity Measures

Are you in an organization with two or more business units - with each unit running emails or other tasks on various tools? Name someone who will lead the internal audit. Each unit fills out a form to the audit lead. The form has common and business critical tasks broken down by CRM, Marketing, Sales, Service, Accounts (Commerce). Start simple! Iterate with new tasks often.

I recommend starting with an audit. However, when completing the audit, discuss cost, management, and efficiency. Cost is about what is in your budget and what is your ROI with the stack. For example, having HubSpot can accomplish email marketing, creating landing pages, acting as a CMS, is a CRM, and will integrate with other software. Think about what is offered, what you can do with it, and how it alleviates cost. Management and efficiency coincides with the seamlessness of the software, learning curve, and how it integrates. You can purchase any martech software, but if it is a hassle or cost more time than it's worth, you'll do more work.

We've helped dozens of clients to centralize their channel inflows through No-Code tools like Airtable. Marketing teams tend to become a multi-headed monster, where lead attribution is made through spreadsheets and ROI at channel/campaign level is hard to measure. Integrating your tools into a core platform such as Airtable results in clean dashboards with real-time data allows you to improve your marketing spend and results. No-Code should indeed be the core of any marketing tech stack. 🚀

When crafting a targeted IT architecture for marketing, it proves most advantageous to center efforts around the client's journey and overarching marketing objectives. A prevalent challenge faced by large enterprises lies in the abundance of disparate technological solutions, each tailored to specific tasks but often featuring redundant functionalities. In scenarios where a company boasts virtually limitless financial resources, the optimal approach involves adopting mature, off-the-shelf solutions from the market (such as CRM, CDP, etc.) and seamlessly integrating them with one another. This strategy ensures a cohesive and efficient IT landscape tailored to the company's expansive needs.

This is a topic that needs to be discussed more. Before jumping in look at the software in your stack. See what tasks, initiatives, and problems can be solved by each software in a chart. Take a closer look at what overlaps then determine which software can do a group of tasks well. Next I recommend seeing the cost of how much can be saved. This will be a great piece of information on justifying changed to the martech stack.

Consolidation and integration must not just look at multi-function platforms, but also internal organization design and ownership. a) Different stakeholders collecting, organising, and reporting disparate data sets in diverse methodologies needs to be first synchronised meaningfully. b) Ownership of the management of data sources, flows, and the martech stack must be clearly aligned, and internal process reorganised to fit the new, streamlined way of working. c) Periodic training, process review, and review of data integrity must be undertaken to ensure the organization gets the most value from the new martech stack.

First, I recommend getting email updates for each software you pay for. These are helpful to know what new feature and services in progress or are live. Also, take time once every two weeks to read a blog post or content piece about your technology to see the possibilities you can do with it.

I recommend creating a folder with tutorials from the team. This can help the team learn how the specific team uses the software, manages tasks, and work with data. Also include best use cases, important documents, and onboarding documents/videos. Last, see if your technology offers training or webinars that can be presented to the team.

Connect business needs with technology requirement otherwise there's a risk of upgrade not leading to any value. The marketing team should communicate their challenges in achieving desired goals. The role of project managers is to then translate this business need into technology solution. This is a collaborative and iterative process which require people from across different functions coming together and aligning on the future state tools and platforms.