Businesses leverage numerous sophisticated digital channels—from social media to email marketing—to reach and engage their target audience. With the right tools, your marketing team can fully utilize these digital channels and bring better results. 

Thus, building an effective technology stack has become integral to effective marketing practices. In this article, you’ll learn the basics of a marketing technology stack and how you can build an effective one for your business. 

Understanding Marketing Technology Stack

Marketing technology, or martech for short, refers to the technology and software used by marketing teams to attract, convert, and retain customers. These tools help increase your marketing team’s productivity by automating and streamlining the marketing process. These tools can also help marketers analyze the success of their marketing efforts. 

In that sense, it’s called a technology stack when you put the different marketing technology together. Simply put, a marketing technology stack is a collection of tools that your team uses to do their work every day. 

Thus, you must choose the right tools and build a stack that works best for your team. 

6 Steps To Building A Marketing Technology Stack

There’s no one-size-fits-all method for building a marketing tech stack for your company. However, with numerous software and tools to choose from, it can be challenging to develop a marketing technology stack that works best for your team. 

With that in mind, here are a few necessary steps to help you build the best martech stack for your unique business needs:

1. Consult The Experts

Building your business’s marketing technology stack from scratch can be daunting and time-consuming, especially if you have little to no experience with this concept. Whether you want to save yourself from trouble or seek professional advice, hiring experts like OSG USA Managed IT services can help you take the first step.

Depending on the service you need, working with a managed IT firm allows you to streamline the whole process—from planning and procurement to implementation, maintenance, and support. This way, you have more time to work on other important things or get expert assistance from your marketing and IT teams for successful implementation.

2. Determine Your Marketing Strategies And Goals

Your marketing tools can help streamline your marketing process. However, their real value lies in the approach and strategy it enables and how they can impact the desired results of your campaign. 

Before you start listing which marketing tools to include in your stack, it’s critical to determine your marketing strategy. Your strategy doesn’t have to be complicated. However, you must develop your plan around your offerings, your target audience, and how you can reach them. 

Jot your current strategies and include ideas for potential software that you can use to implement these marketing strategies. If you don’t know which software you use, you can write that to your list until it’s time to research the right tools.

3. Identify Challenges

In this step, you need to determine specific gaps your marketing team faces. Thus, you need to schedule a meeting with your marketing staff and find potential challenges that slow down their daily duties.

What makes their job more difficult? Which is the most time-consuming process?

By discussing strategy with your marketing team, you can gather insights on the right tools to help increase job productivity. After all, your marketing team is the primary user and benefactor of the marketing tech stack you’ll implement in your business, so it’s best to ask the users for input. 

4. Set A Budget

The cost will always be a critical factor in every business purchasing decision. Even more so in building a martech stack since some tools and technology tend to be expensive. In general, you’ll have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on your marketing technology, depending on the size of your business and use case. 

Before fielding offers from different tech companies, you need to set a budget and determine how much you can spend on each tool and your overall martech stack budget. This way, you minimize mistakes like spending too much on one software that prevents you from procuring two more tools you need to accomplish your marketing strategies and business goals. 

5. Do Your Homework

Once you have planned everything, it’s time to research the products you need to build your martech stack. First, you can browse blog posts that discuss different marketing tools to get a general idea of the tools you need and the best providers for each. 

From there, compare each provider in terms of pricing, features, product reviews, and general fit for your marketing team. Then, to make it easier, you can create a list of the tech tools you need and include pricing and an available product description. After that, you can refine your list until you find the top tools you should try out. 

Also, remember that you must prioritize your evaluations and comparisons of the platforms and vendors based on your marketing strategies and goals. That said, don’t just look at marketing-specific tools. You also need to consider the ‘generalist’ tools that can be useful for your marketing team. For instance, collaboration platforms and project management tools are just some of the few solutions you should consider researching and adding to your martech stack list. 

6. Implement And Adjust Accordingly

Once you’ve decided on the right software combination for your business, you can start implementing them. Your current IT team should help you during the implementation phase. Ensure an onboarding process and training for your marketing team to ensure a seamless transition. 

Over time, you should also audit the performance of your martech stack and adapt accordingly to support your business’s marketing goals and strategies. For example, you can scale and upgrade your tech stack accordingly. Similarly, you can cancel unused software subscriptions or replace them with a better solution.

Important Takeaways

Modern businesses need modern solutions to thrive. Thus, they rely on various tools and marketing technologies to reach and engage their target audience. That said, by integrating the right technologies and tools, you can create an effective marketing technology stack that’s working in tandem. This way, you can get a comprehensive view of your marketing efforts and customer journey.