How to Create a Mature Marketing Stack
The marketing technology (MarTech) stack refers to a comprehensive and integrated collection of software, services, and resources to generate leads or sales. The marketing stack is considered an "end-to-end" solution for digital marketers because it provides tools from lead generation through conversion tracking. Though the process may appear daunting, you can quickly decide what tools to implement for your marketing stack once you know the basics. The following four steps can serve as your guideline to take charge of your MarTech stack.
Determine the Purpose of Your Marketing Stack
Firstly, you need to figure out your business's specific goal or marketing purpose. Do you want people to sign up for something? Buy something? Or simply share something on social media? These are all different goals that need different tools to be accomplished.
Create a Marketing Plan:
Even though MarTech is primarily about automation, you still need a marketing plan. You can't automate everything and have no direction for your marketing efforts. To make the most of your marketing strategy, you must keep in mind all aspects of how customers interact with your business, including where they come from and what they want. It would be wise to figure out your budget first and find someone who has experience with marketing automation to guide you through this new terrain.
Create A MarTech Stack!
After defining your target audience in the marketing plan, you must find their main channels of consuming information. Is it possible that certain demographics of people don't care about social media marketing or e-mail campaigns? Maybe the older generation prefers reading content in a newsletter. While every company is different, marketing experts agree that most businesses need to consider the following as part of their MarTech Stack:
Social Media Content Management Tools: There are many tools available that can help you manage and schedule content on your business's social media channels. They all essentially do the same thing, and most offer a free trial to test before committing. Hootsuite and SproutSocial are two of popular ones that help you manage all your social media activity in one place.
Pick a CRM: A CRM, or a customer relationship management system, is a database that stores information on your customers and their interactions with you. It's designed to put all the information about each customer in one place to be analyzed for patterns and trends, which will help you sell more products or services to them. HubSpot and Monday.com are two of the most popular CRM platforms, which help you automate repetitive tasks and increase efficiency in marketing campaigns.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Every business owner should know the importance of search engine optimization for their website. You must invest in this if you want to get more organic traffic to your website and not just depend on paid ads. Content creation is considered the most effective way to improve SEO.
E-mail Marketing: With more than 300 billion e-mail accounts worldwide, e-mail marketing is considered one of the most effective ways to reach and engage your customer base. Tools such as MailChimp can help you create e-mail newsletters and campaigns that are tailored for your customers.
Digital Marketing Analytics Tools: You need tools to measure the success of your campaigns. You can use a free tool such as Google Analytics to track website traffic and analyze user consumer behavior. You'll want to use this in tandem with your CRM to see how each campaign affects your sales.
Implement Your MarTech Stack:
After making your list of tools, you need to decide who will be responsible for implementing them. They will need to be dedicated to marketing and should know the ins and outs of how to use the tools.
The key to building a mature MarTech stack is having all your tools connected so that they work together seamlessly. In a nutshell, it's all about making a list of tools that you need and having the right person to implement them. It's as simple as that.
