Continue Marketing Technology
Marketing technology is a general term for tech used to assist marketing teams in their work. The technology is mostly used in the sphere of digital marketing, and also for the optimization of offline marketing channels.
This is a wasted opportunity. Many marketers have reported rapid and significant ROI from adopting these tools; but first, they had to convince higher-ups to make the up-front investment. So, in the interest of helping clear that path, I am suggesting a Marketing Technology Starter Kit: the seven programs that every company’s marketing team should have access to, at a minimum, to grow leads, opportunities, and revenue.
The type of business you have will also impact which technologies you might find important, and how they should be organized. A key difference is whether your business sells its products or services to consumers (B2C) or to businesses (B2B). B2C and B2B marketers will use different channels and techniques to acquire customers, and will have varying technology needs as a result.
When assembling a marketing technology stack, it’s important to know which technologies are foundational, and should be put in place first. Both B2C and B2B marketers should consider these technologies essential:
Content Management System (CMS) — technology that powers a website, blog, or other relevant web properties where marketers want to engage their customers.
Advertising Technology — this space is vast, but advertising is a key customer acquisition technique for marketers. Most will use a combination of SEM (search engine marketing), display ads, retargeting, and ad tracking or attribution software.
Email — a key customer communications channel that all marketers need in their toolkit. Sometimes, email is a capability that comes built into a marketing automation or inbound marketing platform.
Insights and Analysis — at a broad level, marketers need to be able to access their data to measure digital marketing activity. Most marketers will have website analytics and their own business analytics tracked in either homegrown or third-party tools. In more advanced cases, a data warehouse can pull together data from a wide array of systems to make insights and reporting more accessible.
These technologies combine to form a stack that marketers use to efficiently and effectively execute marketing activities across channels. This stack will include all the technologies you might use on a day-to-day basis, but you may not see them as an integrated toolbox, rather stand-alone tools. There might also be some essential technologies missing from your current stack which could greatly benefit your marketing campaigns.
We’re a big fan of Scott Brinker’s MarTech conference and always love checking out other company’s technology stacks in the annual “Stackie Awards”. So we were super thrilled to be announced a winner last night at the MarTech SFO event, and hear Allocadia named a Stackie award winner! See all winners, stacks, and more.
We have a unique perspective into what goes into an award-winning tech stack. Not only did we take home the award this year, but our client Microsoft also won a 2017 Stackie.
While Allocadia and Microsoft are on two different ends of the spectrum in terms of company size, there are noticeable similarities in how they approach their marketing tech stack. Microsoft’s has a similar infinity loop of sorts, they “kick off” with measurements and planning and they intertwine sales, product, and customer advocacy technologies within their stack.
The usual reaction is dismay at the complexity conveyed in these graphics, and confusion as to what they really mean. This situation harks back to the early days of the Web when people knew it was important, but did not know what it meant for their businesses and their careers. It was easier to ignore that state of complexity and to hope the Web became easier to understand over time, compared to the effort involved in trying to truly understand, apply, and leverage it. Marketers realize that a wait-and-do-nothing approach for marketing technology, however, is not an option. Any delay will lead to lost market share and in some cases loss of entire markets. In order to make sense of the huge number of options, people have turned to graphical representations of the tools that show how those tools can be utilized.
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Social Media — technology to monitor social activity and make social engagement easier can help maximize the impact of this marketing channel. Social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook are also a key part of the ads landscape, and many have paid advertising options available.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) — typically an area of focus for B2B marketers, a CRM can track marketing attribution when supporting a direct salesforce. The CRM will track all customer relationships and can provide insights on how marketing campaigns influence sales pipeline and customer growth.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — SEO is often a key strategy for driving organic traffic to your website by ranking higher in search engines such as Google, and often pairs well with content marketing strategy. There are many tools available to help with keyword research and other SEO-related initiatives.
The core objective of any marketing technology plan is to be agile. An agile methodology promotes a project management process that mixes engineering best practices with business development, and utilizes constant communication and adaptation.
Agility allows marketers to be more flexible, with more frequent and shorter cycles of action. Although being agile is traditionally associated with product development, applying this same mentality to marketing can have tremendous results, especially when rolling out products to your internal team members. 93 percent of CMOs who employ agile strategies cite that it has helped increase their speed to market for ideas, campaigns, and products.
Investments in Martech will become increasingly important as the consumer landscape evolves. With this in mind, marketing teams must ensure they are building out their martech stacks with solutions that offer ROI to the organization, while minimizing and roadblocks around deployment or onboarding that can lengthen time to value.
Brinker, author of the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog, shared those thoughts late last month when he released his yearly Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic. He and his team discovered 8,000 martech solutions, an increase of about a 1,000 from last year’s report. Brinker reported 150 martech solutions in his initial year of research in 2011.
“The empirical evidence would suggest that the world is becoming populated with more and more software options out there,” Brinker told CMSWire. “It's just that there are no barriers to entry creating software. Software doesn't have to be a major VC-funded unicorn trajectory, the next Adobe or whoever, to have a place in this world.”
Integration capabilities have grown in importance over the past several years, so that they're now driving a major focus for vendors to align data across a multitude of solutions and content assets, according to industry experts.
This special report will highlight buyers' focus when purchasing new solutions for their tech stack. The report also includes in-depth use cases from practitioners such as Extreme Networks and Taulia, which have implemented diverse tech ecosystems within their business to better understand, engage and convert potential customers.
Kristi Knight, chief marketing officer at customer experience software provider InMoment, said the well-established digital world emphasizes that marketers must gather feedback not only on the digital customer experience, but must also collect data on the employee and market experience, too. “By looking across three verticals,” she said, “marketers will be able to identify patterns that drive business improvement in retention and recovery moving forward."
When you align amazing technology with our sales and marketing offers, you are practically guaranteed success. Infusing the right technology will only expedite your sales process. When you combine marketing technology with sales tools like a CRM, it gives your sales team additional context to better help them close the deal. Your team can see real-time data on how your potential customers are interacting with your business.
