The success of a company's sales and marketing activities today depends heavily on its technical infrastructure. MarTech stands for the fusion of marketing and technology.
The so-called tech stack is the basis of all digital marketing. It is made up of various systems, software components and tools, such as commerce, interaction, communication, CRM and ERP systems as well as databases. The goal is to effectively manage customer, product and transaction data.
In this article, you will learn about the advantages of a well-developed tech stack for your marketing activities and what to look out for when setting it up.
The MarTech stack is a collection of tools, technologies, software and systems within a company. Taken together, all solutions have the function of digitally mapping and automating the marketing process. They also offer the possibility to generate and analyse customer data in the different contact phases, from initiation to business processing and beyond.
Marketing technology is so important because it has an influence on various other departments that overlap with marketing (e.g. sales, support, IT). This also results in changes in the processes and workflows of other stakeholders or areas beyond marketing.
MarTech therefore brings a gain in transparency and speed not only for marketing, but for everyone. Through digitalisation and automation, measures and customer interactions can be presented simply, quickly and better, and permanently evaluated. In this way, customer communication and the customer experience, e.g. with the help of chatbots, can be improved from both a marketing and a support perspective.
Key figures such as a decline in new leads (people who have become aware and show interest in the company or the product) or declining sales are identified much more quickly and the company can take countermeasures accordingly at an early stage.
As a result, the measures for new customer acquisition or customer retention are increasingly fine-tuned to the customers and the effectiveness is increased. The company's own resources are conserved and customer communication is improved.
Achieving goals in a digitalised world is complex and dependent on many influencing factors.
A clean MarTech stack helps to deliver communication across different channels, touchpoints and journeys, measure success and manage interaction.
The automation of marketing measures helps to manage campaigns more easily and to play them out in different channels. In order to focus measures and implement them more efficiently, data and conclusions are generated with corresponding measurability concepts.
The large amount of data that MarTech tools generate helps marketing and sales work together to reduce errors and thus optimise the customer experience.
With tools in the MarTech stack that enable A/B testing, upselling or remarketing, for example, a long-term improvement in conversion rate and return on investment (ROI) is assured.
Constantly changing customer needs, new communication and interaction channels, new types of target groups and multi-channel strategies require a high level of control and attention. Well-built MarTech stacks benefit by ensuring an overall view, providing decision support through performance measurements and enabling scaling where necessary.
Before you start building a MarTech stack in your company, you first need to analyse your current marketing: Which processes and tools have been effective and which have not? In which activities were too many resources tied up and invested? Which processes could be automated to free up resources and improve your marketing and return on investment (ROI)? Which functions are needed? But the most important question is: What do you want to achieve with your marketing in the future? Only when you are aware of what and how extensive your requirements for the MarTech tools are, can you sensibly build a MarTech stack.
The strategy for your marketing and the marketing processes determine which MarTech tools you need. It is important to focus on the essential MarTech tools first and add other technologies only when they are really needed. Companies that already have experience in using marketing technologies can go further and build a complete MarTech stack.
Project management tools are a helpful element in planning, organising and managing marketing projects. MarTech tools such as Trello or Asana, for example, make it easy to maintain an overview in everyday project work and also not to lose sight of the efficiency of processes and projects.
Social media marketing tools enable optimised planning and evaluation of social media measures and thus centrally controllable social media management, adapted to the needs of customers.
Social listening tools are tools that keep your eyes and ears open, so to speak, and let you know as soon as a company, a brand or certain keywords are being talked about on the internet (e.g. on a social media platform).
For better discoverability via search engines such as Google, a MarTech tool can help improve the content on a company's website in order to obtain a higher ranking.
Content management tools, such as WordPress, Ghost or Joomla, can be used to create and manage websites and easily edit content or add pages, for example.
With features like trigger-based emailing and analytics, tools make email marketing more targeted and automated.
For effective planning, creation and management of ads for Google Ads or Facebook Ads, there are MarTech tools that help manage the ads for each platform.
CRM tools help to optimise interactions with customers, to build and maintain long-term relationships with them, and to do so in a coordinated way across all departments.
In order to meet the demands on customer experience, special MarTech tools make it possible to accompany customers comprehensively and personalised on their customer journey.
Special analysis tools collect data and measure the success of digital marketing measures. Marketing departments can therefore adapt their activities based on data and thus increase the return on investment.
New solutions must fit the circumstances, but they should never be 1:1 replacements (from an efficiency and performance perspective) for the previous solution. Rather, it is important to use the potential of the new solution. To do this, processes and procedures must always be questioned and adapted in the course of the system changeover, and the users of the new system must be included in the changeover process. A balance of the three project components system - process - people is needed. Therefore, there is no such thing as the best tool, there is only the most suitable tool, taking into account the framework conditions. When we encounter problems with the implementation of new MarTech solutions with clients, they can always be traced back to the non-observance of the formula system - process - people.
For example, when the old tool landscape no longer fits the new organisational structures or, on the other hand, the organisational structure has remained the same, although an adjustment would be unavoidable from the point of view of the new systems and processes.
We at netzwerk P see our task as supporting companies in these issues:
It is always important to us to generate a sense of achievement for those involved in the project. Small-scale successes help to move the project forward as a whole and to use the project participants as multipliers within the company. To this end, we network experts internally and externally for successful projects.
Getting the local dealer involved in all available CRM efforts is a challenge.
Interested? I look forward to your questions and exciting conversations about MarTech-Stack!
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