You rely on your marketing technology to optimize, amplify and measure your marketing processes every day. The software programs in your marketing technology stack are used to do things like streamline your internal collaboration, target the right customers, create personalized, proactive customer communication, and analyze the performance of your marketing campaigns.
Marketing technology (MarTech) makes up one of the biggest portions of an organization’s total marketing budget, 26%, according to Gartner. But the size and number of moving parts that make up a MarTech stack can vary widely between businesses, and there are thousands of options to choose from, 8,000 according to ChiefMartec’s latest annual survey.
More important than the number tools in your stack is the reason why they're in your stack. Smart marketers build a technology strategy that optimizes and align's with their organization’s business model. In other words, the technology you use should be there based on your marketing goals and overall marketing strategy, and help you plan, engage with, and sell to your desired audience. This could take a handful of systems or a couple dozen, depending on your needs.
Interestingly though, recent research from Gartner found that marketing leaders report that they utilize only 58% of their MarTech stack’s potential. To improve this number, Gartner recommends “maximizing MarTech stack effectiveness…by using a best-of-breed strategy that capitalizes on the strengths of multiple solutions” and “by giving team members time to learn and master the technologies in the stack and investing in training…that can add new perspectives.”
What tools are you most likely to find in a modern MarTech stack?
To help you better understand the different tools that are most popular in B2C MarTech stacks in 2020, we’ve divided the typical stack into three categories to simplify the list: tools used to attract customers, tools for engaging customers, and tools to analyze and optimize your campaigns.
In the attract customers category, you’ll find MarTech which likely need no explanation, like:
- Landing page builders
- Social media planning and management tools
- Advertising tech (a category of its own!)
- Email marketing systems
- Search engine optimization tools
- Content management systems
In the engage customers category, you’ll find MarTech tools like:
- CRM, which helps you manage your phone, chat, email and other touchpoints, by tracking leads, offers, and conversions in one place
- Marketing automation tools, which automate customer communication by managing complex multichannel strategies
And in the analyze and optimize category, you’ll find these MarTech tools:
- Analytics platforms, which track key performance metrics like website traffic, page views, click through rates, etc. (another broad category of technology)
- Business intelligence technology, which retrieve, analyze, and report data for historical, current, and predictive views of business operations
- Conversion optimization tools, which enhance your website and content to boost conversions
- Data management tools, such as:
- Customer data platforms, which integrate with your other MarTech tools to aggregate, cleanse, store, and unify the first-party customer records stored in them to create one centralized, unified customer database.
- Data management platforms, which house audience data for targeting digital campaigns across third-party ad networks
The best MarTech stacks are built to be customer-centric
Ultimately, in order to deliver the personalized experiences that customers want, your MarTech stack needs to be organized around the customer and not around your channels. The reason is that today's consumers are active on more channels than ever before, so channel-specific campaigns are no longer the best way to market to them. This is why multichannel marketing and cross-channel marketing strategies have grown in popularity in the marketing world today. But to effectively deliver personalized experiences, these marketing strategies require accurate, real-time insights into your customers' behaviors and preferences.
This information should be found in the customer records stored in your various MarTech tools, but often these records are siloed in your various MarTech tools. With disparate data you run the risk of building and executing your campaigns based off of inaccurate, outdated data, which is why customer data platforms have become one of the most critical components in any MarTech stack. A CDP is the most effective technology for unifying customer records and achieving a 100% accurate and trustworthy understanding of your customers, both individually and at-scale. This means better customer segmentation, enhanced targeting and personalization, and more effective campaigns.
Just as importantly, CDPs ensure that you're maximizing the ROI of the other tools in your MarTech stack, which is why the QuickPivot CDP offers third-party integration with over 300 of today's most popular MarTech systems. The QuickPivot CDP also features tools for customer data management, identity resolution, cross-channel campaign management, customer segmentation, and reporting and analytics, making it an invaluable weapon in a data-driven marketer's arsenal.
So if you’re looking for a way to improve the effectiveness of your MarTech stack, the QuickPivot CDP might be just what your business needs to take its marketing efforts to the next level
.
