The martech landscape is crowded, and it can be difficult for marketers to identify whether their stack is right, or optimised for maximum impact. Do you have the right platforms? Are you getting the most out of them? Are the right team members using them? How do you make sure there isn't any wastage? Do they all pull from a single source of truth? Do they integrate where they need to?
The current world of marketing technology
Before we look at how you can maximise your existing martech stack, let's look at the world of marketing technology.
Scott Brinker has released the 2019 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, and it continues to demonstrate growth YoY of platforms and vendors in an already crowded market. This year Brinker lists 7040 marketing technology solutions and acknowledges that there are thousands more solutions not listed. He acknowledges these across five categories:
- Regional martech apps
- Vertical industry martech apps
- Martech apps built for particular martech platform ecosystems
- Martech apps built by services companies and packaged as products
- Martech apps built with low-code/no-code through citizen developer platforms
You have 1000s of platforms to choose from and often hundreds in each category. Maximising your martech stack means both making sure you have selected the right category to close your strategic and operational gaps and the right solution within the category.
Martech is only one piece of your puzzle
Of course, martech is only one piece of the puzzle. Three key elements to drive your martech stack are a strategy, people and process.
Martech doesn't develop strategy; it executes it. Your stack is only as good as the strategy you have developed for it to support. Without a robust marketing strategy, crafted to deliver the business' goals, no amount of marketing technology can deliver the right results. Your strategy informs the categories of marketing technology you need to invest in.
Without the right people to deliver the strategy and use the platforms in your stack to their absolute optimum, it doesn't matter what solutions you have; they won't deliver an ROI for you. Your team need to be strategic enough to understand how the platform achieves the bigger picture, and able to operationalise the technology within the stack.
Understanding how the stack works together requires a strong process, one that is mapped, disseminated and followed. How does each element work separately, and combined, to deliver an ecosystem ROI and an individual platform ROI? How does data move between the stack components, who has approvals delegation, who owns the data? Your process mapping needs to cover all of this.
Audit your complete martech stack
We are now on the same page that your martech stack isn't a magic bullet, it is time to complete a stack audit to identify gaps, overlaps, inefficiencies and the best way to move forward. Your audit should cover:
- what is the purpose of each platform?
- who uses the platforms?
- how are the platforms used?
- what channels and touchpoints do they influence?
- is it a strategic or operational solution?
- what % of features are used in each platform?
- are there existing or proposed integrations?
- who leads/owns each solution?
Once you have audited your stack and identified opportunities, you can map these against the actions of consolidation or introducing new investments.
Outfit helps maximise your martech stack
Maximising your marketing technology stack comes back to your strategy how you can get the absolute most out of each platform, and optimise the way the stack works together.
A platform like Outfit is uniquely suited to support your aim of maximising your existing stack. Outfit harnesses your existing platforms and uses these to create an interdependent ecosystem.
In this way, the assets in your existing Digital Asset Manager (DAM) are used real-time in the Outfit platform to ensure the right assets are used in collateral creation. The exported collateral from Outfit can also then be stored directly in your DAM for future use.
The data in your CRM can be used to drive personalisation and hyper-personalisation of assets within Outfit without spreadsheets and endless copy-and-paste. Because the data integration is live, the creation of on-brand and targeted creative is up-to-date.
Outfit can integrate with your marketing automation platform to produce content at scale and then push into the MA platform to allow you to create targeted, tokenised and segmented assets like email headers and content sections.
Outfit can integrate directly with your CMS so new landing pages can be built on-brand in the Outfit platform and pushed into the CMS for new campaigns.
Outfit integrates with your DAM, CRM and Marketing Automation platforms to use your current datasets to customise your templates. These integrations allow you to personalise and automate your content creation based on this data, and your brand, without the need for messy spreadsheets, competing datasets, assets stored in 5 places and teams using the wrong collateral.
Maximising your existing martech stack doesn't have to mean wholesale changes or replacing your existing category profile - it can mean getting more from your current systems, through Outfit.
