5 Ways to Maximize the Value of Your MarTech Stack

To reach and engage customers, marketers need to create and maintain a digital presence that attracts and retains their audience. And to keep up with the dynamic needs and behaviors of customers, you need a robust set of tools to deal with more data and complex processes as you grow.

In short, you need an optimized MarTech stack. A solid MarTech stack will help you move prospects down the funnel, engage your existing customers, and help generate more business.

In this post, we’ll go over how to make the most out of your MarTech stack to maximize ROI.

Signs That You Need to Optimize Your MarTech Stack

Consider optimizing your MarTech stack if:

• Your prospects are not reaching the bottom of the funnel.
• You are unsure of whether your current marketing technology stack is actually fulfilling your needs and providing ROI.
• Your business or processes have become more advanced than the platforms in your MarTech stack. You need a more advanced or a more diverse set of tools to enhance the customer experience across various touchpoints.
• Your technology stack is not fully integrated, leaving you unable to get a clear view of the entire customer journey (i.e. marketing has no idea what happens to a lead once it’s passed to sales). Your current vendor is not providing solutions that meet your business needs.
• You want to improve productivity with digital assets management.

So, to meet your customers where they are and to provide them with frictionless, personalized experiences, you need a high-performing digital marketing program, powered by an integrated MarTech stack.

5 Ways to Get the Most Out of Your MarTech Stack

Now that we’ve established why you need to optimize your MarTech stack, let’s take a look at five ways for your MarTech stack to bring ROI to the table.

1. Evaluate Your Marketing Channel Strategy: In order to select and leverage the marketing technology that’s best for your needs, you need to understand your marketing strategy and the channels that will be used to support it. It is crucial to understand different marketing channels and which ones you should use to achieve your business goals. Start by analyzing your objectives, audience, and competitors, then choose the marketing channels that best align with them to amplify your reach and boost conversions. Some of the channels you should consider are:

• Email Marketing
• Word-of-Mouth Marketing
• Podcast Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Video Marketing

2. Analyze Your Current MarTech Stack: Only 9%^[i] of marketers use the complete capabilities of their existing MarTech stack. So, instead of continually hunting for new technology or tools, take an inventory of your existing tools and figure out how you can use them differently to maximize your ROI. First, define your goals and strategy, then audit the platforms that you already have to identify what’s underutilized and what can be leveraged to achieve your goals.

3. Assess and Invest in the Right Tech Tools: Before you invest in a suite of high-budget tools, assess what features and capabilities are really important to your business. Start by identifying the challenges that your MarTech stack should solve. Next, involve all stakeholders to understand their use cases and if the tools that you’re considering align with your unique business requirements. Also, be sure to evaluate the time and effort that would go into training your teams to use these tools. Tools that solve multiple challenges and are easy to use can result in lower costs to deploy and manage and lower license fees. Having a clear understanding of your needs before you evaluate and choose a solution (or multiple solutions) will minimize your risk of paying for features you don’t need or oppositely, investing in tools that aren’t robust enough.

4. Choose the Right Vendor: Remember, when selecting a new solution, the company behind the technology is just as important as the technology itself. Your approach to finding the right vendor must be shaped around the business needs that help you serve your customers better. When you reach out to a vendor, evaluate the following things:

• Is the vendor transparent with long-term costs?
• Are there any hidden costs for implementation, training, and configuration?
• Are they proceeding with an agreement or providing a trial period?
• If they have any third-party validation of their processes (like a certification)?
• Will they support you adequately after you become a customer?
• How stable is the vendor and are they likely to continue to support and improve the product you are considering?

5. Use MarTech to Foster Sales & Marketing Alignment: The need for alignment between marketing and sales teams is not just for organizational efficiency and more accurate revenue attribution, it is critical for a smooth buying process and positive customer experience. Marketing and sales alignment starts with connecting tools together to create automated workflows with the aim to move prospects to the bottom of the funnel. Here are the two ways you can use your MarTech stack to ensure your marketing and sales teams are set up for success:

• Create automated workflows that bridge your marketing and sales tools to get better insight into your customer’s buying journey across every touchpoint.
• Sync data bi-directionally and identify metrics and KPIs that are important to both the marketing and sales teams. Get buy-in from each team on how these KPIs will be tracked and reported on.

The Bottom Line

Equipped with a well-optimized MarTech stack, marketers can deliver the right experiences to the right customers, across all touchpoints, driving higher engagement, conversion rates, and ultimately, ROI.

Ready to make the most of your MarTech stack? Talk to us!

Statistics References

^[i] 5 Quick Tips to Improve Your MarTech Stack