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Ask any seasoned marketer to estimate how many solutions are in their company’s martech stack, and most will guess too low. In a complex and evolving landscape, companies are bringing on all kinds of martech solutions, and not all of them work as promised or are even used to their full potential.
In a survey, 20% of in-house marketing professionals said their martech wasn’t up to snuff. This isn’t surprising, given the more than 8,000 marketing software solutions on the market, and the decision-makers often aren’t the day-to-day users.
The problem isn’t overworked marketing teams, but the daunting array of marketing technology solutions. In a business climate in which marketing departments are expected to impact customer experience, digital marketing, retention, brand management, and more, software that siloes these functions risks loss of productivity and time.
When customer experience isn’t aligned across channels, communication comes across as uncoordinated and not personalized, which results in less customers buying and less revenue for your brand.
It’s hard to meet aggressive revenue expectations when technology isn’t working in your favor. Let’s look at how you can take back control of your martech stack and get the results your business demands.
What a martech stack should do for you
When a business problem is identified, often the impulse is to add more tech.
Social media not performing as expected? Get a new social media management tool. Emails not getting opened at the desired rate? Change up the email software. But in many instances the answer isn’t more tech.
What brings your marketing efforts to the next level is ensuring all your marketing channels are integrated into one consolidated customer engagement platform that helps you reach your targets.
When marketers can more easily personalize messaging and experience, free up some of the time they’ve spent working on siloed tech, and create comprehensive campaigns that are savvier and more sophisticated, they achieve better results.
Martech’s job is to:- Connect data. You have many points of customer and prospect data collection. The more you can integrate this information, the smarter your messaging will be.
- Adapt. Marketing objectives can change fast. Does your martech stack have the agility to change with them? Your team needs the ability update campaigns and messaging in order to move with market needs and trends.
- Leverage artificial intelligence. The ideal marketing solution uses AI-enabled customer insights to not only execute what you ask, but make good suggestions to inform your customer engagement strategy.
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4 things to look for in a marketing solution
No one relishes a change in marketing technology, but if you’ve decided your current stack isn’t getting the job done, the change doesn’t need to be painful.One of the keys to getting buy-in from decision-makers and support for switching is to focus on the benefits such as integrated data and personalized messaging. Choosing a solution with easy ramp-up and the right amount of support will have you up and running in no time.
Here’s what you should look for when choosing a new martech stack:
- Integrated data infrastructure
- Personalization tools
- Automation and ease of use
- Great metrics
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Martech stack: No more silos
First and foremost, consolidating data is the biggest hurdle to overcome when you’re looking to deliver a customized experience to your customers and prospects. The best solutions take in data quickly and integrate it across channels.
Making sure all your customer touchpoints and information are no longer siloed is the best way to analyze and act upon all the data you so painstakingly gather and acquire.
In a world in which 55% of marketers say that an inability to execute across channels is holding them back, finding a solution that integrates your data seamlessly can make a big difference in your results.
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The human touch: Tailored messaging
At its core, marketing is about connecting with people to help them make informed buying decisions. The more you can speak to your customers and prospects as the unique individuals they are, the better they’ll react to your messaging.
Your martech should be flexible enough to personalize your messages in a variety of ways across multiple channels, while still keeping the customer experience cohesive. You won’t necessarily want to speak to your social media-first customer in the same way as the prospects who like email, so your marketing technology should help you easily pivot and tailor your message as needed.
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AI and automation ease the way
Even the most sophisticated functionality won’t do you much good if it’s clunky, counterintuitive, or hard to use. Your team will get bogged down if your martech stack requires IT resources or extensive services engagement.The best martech solutions will use AI and automation to increase the effectiveness of your campaigns without requiring a lot of ramp-up. Setting up efficient workflows will mean your team can get on to dreaming up great new ways to connect with customers instead of puzzling over how to make your martech work.
Follow the data
All the automation and customization in the world won’t help much if you don’t know what’s working and why. But you also don’t want your reporting and analytics to be so complex it requires a team of data scientists to pull actionable information from them.
Advanced martech solutions give you robust information without overwhelming you or getting your team stuck in the weeds. Look for solutions that include AI that extrapolates insights from your existing data and shows you where your focus should lie.
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Martech excellence makes it seamless
Marketing messaging needs to be nimble and scalable. A customized one-to-one experience for your customers means leveraging automation and pivoting when needed.
Done right, martech provides seamless support without bogging you down in a collection of hard-to-use systems that don’t talk to each other.
Marketers wear many hats today. To meet the mandates given to increasingly overburdened marketing teams, you need a martech stack that helps you cull the most important information from your data and organize it efficiently, and communicate with your customers in a way they find useful and actionable. The best martech makes automation a breeze and sheds light on potential opportunities to connect further with your customers.