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Defining Your Marketing Needs

Before starting your evaluation of MarTech solutions, define your marketing goals and painpoints. Understand what you are looking to achieve from a business perspective and sideline features and functionality until your team is aligned on the baseline. Every solution has a sweet spot and will add the most value  in an area of the funnel. From top to bottom, are you looking to:



There are many additional opportunities to align features to your business challenges so it is imperative to get it right before signing a contract.

Create Alignment On Pain Points

All go-to-market teams face challenges. Identifying the full breadth of challenges and prioritizing the drivers for your decision on MarTech can be very risky in a vacuum.

The opportunity for marketing leadership to involve other leaders in the organization can help propel your team to success. Marketing might have their own challenges, but if the entire business is participating in your brand, then it will be beneficial to include sales, operations, product and talent leadership in your evaluation process. This will ensure that when your MarTech selection is made, you’re aligned on the path forward for maximal ROI.

Push Your Current Tech Stack To Its Limits

Make sure to include an evaluation of your existing marketing technology stack so you don’t migrate your painpoints to your new tools . How effective are your tools in place, can you keep part of your current stack going while integrating new components or does everything need to be replaced?

Maxing out your current tech stack can also help you figure out your priorities. Is your team struggling to collaborate on a spreadsheet? Is poor user adoption killing the process and data quality? Is a clunky email editor hurting productivity and impeding agility? If so, perhaps you need to focus on a friendly user experience to make work easier and streamlined for your team.

Evaluating MarTech Tools

Once you understand your needs, assess MarTech tools based on functionality, license terms such as cost, time commitment, internal readiness and the user experience. Some of the best and most powerful MarTech solutions might give you horsepower, but if your team can’t drive it, you’ll get lucked into an expensive paperweight that can handcuff your business for years.

Key Features and Functionalities

Different tools excel in different areas. HubSpot focuses on marketing automation. Sprout Social specializes in social media marketing. Moz excels at search engine optimization.

Make a list of must-have features and focus on tools with features aligned with your goals. Prioritize email marketing tools if nurturing leads is essential. If your goal is content marketing, content management systems and SEO tools like Moz or Google Analytics become vital. Consider which platforms social media marketing will be run through and find the right marketing software and email marketing software.

Regardless of your priorities, ensure your solution has powerful analytics tools and work backwards from there. Without reporting, you won’t be able to optimize marketing’s efforts and understand the levers to pull to increase effectiveness. You’ll operate blindly and will leave tons of value on the table.

Budget Considerations

MarTech tools range from free to tens of thousands of dollars per month. Set a budget upfront to avoid overly expensive options that strain your resources.

You can pilot tools too in order to reduce risk. Most offer free trials so your team can try a solution and really get a sense of their new day-to-day. As you initially embark on your new journey, start small and expand with success or as your current infrastructure strains. Most solutions will offer an array of features and add-ons that can sneakily drive costs, so be very true to your priorities and don’t be afraid to tell your AE… no, thanks.

Integration Capabilities

MarTech solutions today should integrate seamlessly and in real-time. Delays, poorly mapped data and disconnects across teams because of slow or clunky integrations can cause bottlenecks, disappointing customer experiences and frustrating employee experiences. 

Look for tools that integrate with your existing systems to avoid data silos. This streamlines workflows, improves data management, and maximizes insights. If improving customer experience is a priority, evaluate whether each MarTech solution enhances or detracts from it.

With the emergence of AI, data will become a core differentiator for your business and needs to be addressed for the long-term. Most modern MarTech solutions offer powerful data management tools that will allow you to prospect, engage customers, and enable employees. When it comes to data, approach your solution through a perfectionist’s lens. As AI advances, enabling content creation, personalization, and process efficiency, data will be key to unlocking its potential.

Building Your MarTech Stack

After narrowing your list, test them before committing, commit to as little as possible for as short as possible (even if this means paying marginally more in the short-term), and make sure your team is prepared with content and data so they can hit the ground running after a contract is signed.

Implementation and Training

All tools come with unique implementation, training, and ongoing maintenance costs. These costs can exponentially increase your investment so make sure you factor in services and team enablement. Depending on your requirements and unique business operations, services can drive up costs 2-4x.

Optimize Your MarTech Strategy

Choosing the right tools is just the start. How you use them is key to a positive return on investment. Marketing efforts are wasted without an ability to create personalized targeted content and connect with your target audience. Tools include content management platforms that integrate with tools specific to certain goals.

CDPs Enable The Customer Experience and Analytics

Great marketing is informed by data across all business functions. With the emergence of CDPs (like Salesforce’s Data Cloud), marketers are able to funnel data from all areas of the business into a single platform for segmentation or for triggering journeys. Analytics can be consolidated from many traditionally disparate data sources, such as buyer signals, intent, website analytics, social sentiment, service calls, up and cross-sells, and customer satisfaction.

Seamless experiences CDPs enable will increase customer satisfaction, drive retention, and ultimately drive organizational growth. Many MarTech solutions require high data quality sourced from 3rd parties, user inputs, and CRM.

Lastly, CDPs can provide incredibly useful insights that span the entire customer journey to give your business a true 360 degree view. Without a complete customer perspective, businesses tend to break up into siloed organizations, working separately, hurting collaboration, and impeding growth. 

With a customer 360 view, in a snapshot you can assess the health of your entire pipeline room demand generation to customer retention. Following your audience throughout their brand experience and staying relevant shows your customers your commitment to their needs, creating loyalty and raving fans.

Ongoing Refinement and Execution

MarTech solutions are different from CRMs. They are not designed to be highly customizable for internal users and are predominantly enablers for go-to-market teams to create campaigns and drive revenue. This means that onboarding and implementation efforts should, at a minimum include:

• Articulated customer experiences to help marketers get campaigns up and running faster.
• Campaign blueprints to allow the team to build workflows and understand their short and long term needs.
• Content can take a long time to produce and plug into campaigns, so building a content library ahead of an implementation will ensure you won’t experience significant delays in driving value.

The MarTech landscape constantly evolves. Keep learning, stay updated on industry best practices, and regularly reassess your tools. This ensures your strategies remain effective. 

Resources such as HubSpot’s resource portal, Apollo.io Academy, or Salesforce’s Trailhead are great starting points for inspiring your business with strategies and tactics to succeed on your investments. 

Lastly, find an independent implementation partner that your team can lean on for customized build, complex processes, or additional bandwidth to drive productivity. Great consultants will take the time to learn every detail of your business and will act as a true extension of your team. Having spent years studying the intricacies, staying up-to-date on industry trends and certifications will provide a huge boost to your team.

Conclusion

Choosing the right MarTech tools will drive marketing effectiveness exponentially. They streamline workflows, integrate data, and measure impact. This frees your team to focus on growing your brand.

Selecting a MarTech tool shouldn’t be overwhelming. These tips ensure you invest wisely, allocate resources effectively, and engage customers.

Today’s integrated highly collaborative, integrated environment means your focus will not just be on email execution, but enablement across your entire business. By assessing your strengths, priorities, and areas for improvement, you can choose the right long-term tools and marketing technology stacks.