Just in case you are really considering the question — the answer is no. No one needs 8,000 solutions to any problem. In fact, at that stage, the solutions are no longer solutions. You could go as far as saying the sheer number of solutions is becoming a problem. But that is not the point of this article.
The Martech landscape is growing at an unprecedented speed. In 2020, a thorough analysis of the market found 8,000 solutions. By this year, the number had grown to over 9,000. It begs the question of how marketing professionals can find their way through this vast amount of offerings and decide what they need in their Martech stack. Here is some guidance.
The World of Martech
For those who have not yet come across this term, here is a quick definition of Martech. The word itself is an amalgamation of marketing and technology. It refers to types of software marketers rely on to achieve their goals and optimize their strategies.
Most digital marketers will utilize several different kinds of Martech on a daily basis. The entire set of marketing technology a company uses is known as its Martech stack. Choosing your Martech stack wisely will make your professional life easier as software helps you automate part of your tasks and, crucially, allows you to understand your customers better.
Knowing Customers Inside Out — Customer 360
Gaining more insights into customer behavior is often referred to as customer 360. Think of it as getting a 360-degree view — a full view — of your customers’ motivations and behaviors concerning your brand. Your business can achieve this by compiling all the data you have about a specific customer in one place.
Whilst some experts argue that it is impossible to gain such detailed insights, others believe that by compiling the best possible Martech stack you can get close. Your Martech stack will help gather the data across all touchpoints, compile it, and analyze it to gain unparalleled insights.
Six Core Areas of Your Martech Stack
To build the best possible Martech stack for your company, you need to consider the six core areas of the Martech landscape. From those, you can then choose tools that help you reach your goals in each area.
· Advertising and Promotion
· Content and Experience
· Social and Relationships
· Commerce and Sales
· Data
· Management
All six areas overlap and influence each other. They do not exist in a vacuum, meaning that what you decide for one area will have consequences for another.
Advertising and Promotion
Gone are the days when a brand simply needed to choose between print or broadcast advertising. Digital marketing has opened many more channels brands can take advantage of to share advertising messages.
On which platform are your customers most open to advertising messages? Someone who uses social media regularly does not necessarily want to receive adverts on their favorite social platform. But they might be happy to consider paid-for listings on search engines. How does your audience feel about display adverts that temporarily cover content? For some, this will be enough to turn them away from your brand. Others might happily consider those adverts.
One of the biggest choices you need to make in this area is whether you want to advertise digitally or follow a more classic path. In most cases, digital advertising will help your budget go further. Once you have chosen your channel, each of them has a vast range of Martech tools to help make the right decisions for your budget.
Content and Experience
The field of content and experience is one of the biggest areas of Martech, with thousands of tools available to marketers.
From classic email marketing to marketing automation and campaign management tools, and on to digital asset management (DAM), a wide range of Martech tools fall into this category. So, how do you pick what you need?
Start by thinking about how you want to market your brand. Are your customers more likely to engage with emails or do they want to see video content? For many brands, the answer is a bit of both. If that sounds like your product or service, you will likely produce different versions of a similar piece of content suited to different channels. Once you start accumulating images, videos, and other content, DAM software becomes a must. These tools help organize and store content in a way that keeps it easily accessible.
Do your customers respond better to generic messages or to highly personalized, targeted content? The answer is almost always the latter. Personalization and testing tools allow you to decide what will work best before sending the wrong messages. They can save a substantial amount of your marketing budget.
Social and Relationships
Relationship marketing has come a long way since the first customer relationship management (CRM) tools hit the market a couple of decades ago. As a result, this area of Martech remains the biggest, alongside content and experience.
Social media marketing has grown exponentially over the past ten years, which is why brands have countless tools to choose from. If social media is one of your chosen channels, ask yourself how you can simplify your activity there. For many brands, scheduling posts ahead of time, for example, once every month, saves time and effort. But not all scheduling tools are equal. Some include analytics, which allows you to schedule and measure at the same time.
Influencer marketing has grown out of social media marketing. It is an excellent way to connect to customers on a natural, personal basis. But even the most authentic influencer can benefit from digital marketing technology — as can the brand they represent.
Social and relationship marketing is not restricted to social media. Tools in this area also include call analytics and management, critical to brands that rely on these channels.
Commerce and Sales
Obvious as it may sound, no business survives without sales. Compared to even just 50 years ago, the sales process for most brands has changed beyond recognition.
One of the drivers of this transformation has been sales automation and information or intelligence gathering. Therefore, it is no surprise that this area yields one of the largest choices of Martech tools. Knowing its customers — or customer 360 — is critical to almost every brand’s success, and combining that knowledge with a sales approach helped by automation will yield better returns.
As online shopping grew in popularity, so did the amount of Martech tools that facilitate eCommerce and eCommerce marketing. Does your brand rely on online sales? If yes, eCommerce tools need to be part of your Martech stack.
Data
Data and data management are at the heart of digital marketing. But where data used to mean rows of numbers that were indecipherable to many, Martech has made data accessible.
Countless tools allow marketers to visualize information and access the most important details at a glance through a dashboard. In addition, data enhancement technology can add rich context to a company’s existing customer information. Generally speaking, data enhancement takes existing records and adds detail from publicly available sources.
These tools are also ideal when you need to add missing details to customer records. Within minutes, the software achieves something that would require painstaking research from a human. With Metaverse coming sooner than later, the need for data is more for brands to achieve their goals.
Management
Management Martech can take many shapes. Some of the best-known tools in this category facilitate lean and agile project management as well as collaboration.
Has your business adapted remote working and hybrid working styles? Most businesses needed to change their way of doing things noticeably during the coronavirus pandemic. That is when collaboration tools became must-haves. As countless professionals continue to work away from their offices, we predict that collaboration tools will only grow in importance.
But management tools can help in other areas of the business, too. Think about budgeting and finance tools, for example, both of which make it easier to stay on top of campaign budgets and overall marketing budgets. Some will tie in naturally with project management tools, allowing marketers to control even complex projects.
Final Thoughts
At the time of writing, digital marketing professionals had over 9,000 Martech tools to choose from. How many do you really need? There is no one-size-fits-all answer. As companies differ, so do their technology needs.
A small startup may need as little as one or two Martech tools in their stack. As the business grows in size and complexity, you may need to add more tools. However, it is worth looking for Martech tools that can combine several of the six core functions above. The benefits of combining are obvious: your team only needs to become familiar with one system in order to manage various tasks.
Data is consolidated in one place and stored safely. Speaking of consolidation, the Martech sector has seen some consolidation throughout the pandemic. But at the same time, new players have launched new software, keeping the industry growing.
To build your perfect Martech stack, take a look at the core areas and define your needs in each one of them. As your business evolves, so will your Martech needs and the products ready to meet those needs. The goal remains the same: finding the best solution to grow your business as efficiently as possible.
