How to Build a Marketing Technology (Martech) Stack?
What is a martech stack?
A martech stack is a group of marketing tools which, when brought together, cover all the major areas of marketing to help improve your campaigns. A good marketing technology stack will include tools that manage everything from paid ads to analytics.
In short, a martech stack helps you automate multiple aspects of your marketing without paying for overlapping tools.
How to Build a Marketing Tech Stack
Identify your primary marketing strategies and goals.
Before ever choosing a martech tool, you’ll need to outline your marketing strategies. It doesn’t have to be complicated, either: you simply need to have an idea of the basic strategies that you want to implement.
If you already have an established marketing team, take a look at the digital strategies that are currently in place. This will help you gauge, from the get-go, the types of tools you need.
Survey your team to find out their challenges.
Next, sit down with your team and find out the challenges they encounter when trying to execute their day-to-day duties.
What adds more time to their workflow? What makes their job harder?
While the conversation should be open-ended, try to connect their challenges to your marketing goals. For instance, if you want to increase organic traffic, ask what specifically your team finds challenging when trying to optimize the website. If they say keyword research takes too much time, then you’d know that you’ll need a keyword research tool specifically.
Establish an estimated budget.
Building your dream martech stack means nothing if you can’t afford it. As you begin to determine the types of tools you’ll need, think about the funds you’ll allot for them.
You can go several ways about this. You can determine a budget per tool or per strategy. Alternatively, you can choose a budget overall for the entire team in a yearly, quarterly, or monthly basis.
Choosing a monthly budget is the best choice for small marketing businesses without a dedicated finance team. Most tools are available on a monthly subscription basis, which makes it easier to drop one if it doesn’t work for the team.
Research the tools you’ll consider for your martech stack.
Now that you have your strategies, your tool ideas, and your budget, it’s time to research the actual products you’ll add to your martech stack. If you’re a marketing leader, you can leave this task to individual team members, because they’ll be the ones using the tools.
It’s helpful to look at product curation posts to get a general idea of the offerings that are out there.
Consider non-marketing tools to add to your martech stack.
When we talk about the martech stack, we’re often caught up in marketing-specific tools. But there are a wide range of “general” tools that are useful for a marketing team.
Project management tools, collaboration platforms, and data sync software solutions are just a few of the products you can consider. Anything that cuts time from a complicated workflow is worth exploring. Google Drive would be an example, and so would Asana.
Add these products to your martech list, including the pricing and a brief description.
Compile the data that you’ll transfer into the tools.
After you’ve purchased the tools, it’s time to transfer the data. Already have a list of leads? How about Microsoft Word documents you’d like to import into Google Drive for collaborative editing?
Compile all of them in folders. Assign a type of data to each team member. For instance, one team member can compile the contacts from a conference. Another team member can compile the current templates you use for your social media posts. Another can compile all of the copy from the website for the website redesign.
Assign one team member to create a workflow per tool.
Now that it’s time to adopt the martech tools, you don’t want to throw it out to your team without a workflow. That’s an easy way to end up with a subscription that no one is using.
Assign one team member to explore one specific tool. This team member will jot down workflow steps for using the tool effectively and write a step-by-step tutorial with screenshots. After, schedule a meeting for the team member to carry out a live tutorial.
Analyze the tools’ success and switch solutions if necessary.
You don’t want to end up with an unused martech stack. Always audit your tools for their success — whether they effectively streamline workflows, automate tasks, and help your team do their work in a better way.