Choosing the right marketing tech stack
Technology has changed the daily life of consumers and has enabled advertisers to reach potential customers in new ways. In the marketing world of today, making use of technology, such as marketing tech, is the golden rule of marketers to perform efficiently and attain better results.
Types of marketing tech (MarTech) tools for your business
A MarTech stack is the combination of marketing technology tools your business uses to achieve your marketing objectives. There are a number of MarTech tools on the market, all with different use cases. It is important to understand what each type of MarTech tool does in order to assess whether it is necessary to make use of in your business and whether it fits your current technologies in place or not.
Advertising Marketing Tech Tools
Digital advertising is an area that almost every business invests in nowadays. Ad server selection and demand-side platform selection are key considerations to enable you reach audiences in scale efficiently.
Content & Experience Tools
A Content Management System (CMS) or Digital Experience Platform (DXP) helps you to efficiently create, manage and publish your content. A CMS tool can help you effectively distribute the content across multiple platforms and more easily update each piece of content once live. Commonly used CMS platforms include WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager sites and Sitecore.
Other useful content and experience tools include Digital Asset Management (DAM) such as Bynder or Adobe Experience Manager Assets.
Social Media Management Tools
Social media tools can help you listen to what users are saying about your brand in real time across various social platforms, and also what they think about your competitors. They enable you to respond swiftly to these conversations, from something as small as replying to a happy customer to shifting the focus of an entire campaign, depending on the insights gathered. Finally, social media tools can generate various useful reports such as interesting topics to cover, popular post formats, which times of the day you get the most engagement and so forth.
Some examples of social media tools include Hootsuite, Later and Buffer.
CRM Marketing Tech Tools
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool can help your business collect, organize and manage customer data in one place. In fact, CRM selection is vital for any business and can be considered the backbone of your digital marketing strategy. Well-known CRM tools include Zoho CRM, Salesforce and HubSpot.
eCommerce Tools
If you sell products or services, you will need to add a commerce and sales tool to your Marketing Tech stack. Sales tools can help your team automate a follow-up series following a sales inquiry, manage your stock and have a central database of sales assets to refer to. Examples of these types of MarTech tools include Shopify, SAP Hybris, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Woocommerce, Commerce Tools, and Magento.
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In terms of eCommerce, you need to choose a suitable online selling platform for your products. Some important considerations include what features the platform offers, whether it can integrate with your back-office operations, CRM integrations, inventory management, security, scalability and whether your shop will be mobile optimized. You will also need to take into account the associated costs – is there a once-off fee or monthly costs involved? How much will making changes and customizations cost?
If you are an eCommerce merchant, you will also need to consider the integration of payment providers and shipping partners with your website.
Data Management Tools
With first and third-party data becoming central to the success of your marketing strategy, it is essential you have a Customer Data Platform (CDP). CDPs can help you collect, organize, segment and analyze your data in real-time, giving you a 360-degree view of your customers. This enables you to be agile and make changes to your campaigns quickly to avoid wasting resources on underperforming campaigns. Zeotap, Tealium, Salesforce CDP are examples of CDPss.
We can assist with CDP selection.
Thanks to our expertise in the technology world, we will undertake a Marketing Tech Stack evaluation for you and help you select the adtech tools that best suit your business.
The Marketing Tech stack selection process
We understand that selecting the right Marketing Tech stack for your business is near impossible with so many options available to you. In order to narrow down the selection and ensure you choose MarTech that will contribute to your marketing objectives, we can help manage the entire selection process from RFP/RFI preparation, evaluation of the responses, pitch preparation, vendor selection and contract negotiation.
1. Set your objectives
Before we help you build your MarTech stack, we need to understand and assess what you hope to achieve by using these tools and how you expect them to contribute towards your overall marketing strategy. Based on your specific marketing objectives, we will analyze several factors, including who you need to reach, the size of your audience and geographic locations of your target, in order to guide our recommendations.
2. Audit your existing Marketing Tech stack
Once we have a better understanding of your goals, we can audit your existing MarTech stack and examine where you are falling short or which tools are underperforming. Even if you are only replacing one area of the existing MarTech stack, it’s important to remember many of these tools are integrated with other areas of the stack, so they must all work well together. We will look at whether your existing tools are being underutilized, whether there are specific functionalities missing, duplication of efforts across teams/tools and whether you are using tools that are outdated. Should the whole MarTech stack be overhauled or is there one part of it that should be relooked?
3. Create a list of requirements
Next, based on your business cases, we will create a list of requirements that should be fulfilled by the new tools. To ensure we include the most important requirements and that everyone is on the same page, we engage directly with all stakeholders.
4. Send out RFPs
Once the requirements have been agreed upon by all stakeholders, we compile and send out a Request for Proposal to a large pool of vendors. Depending on your preference we can act in an advisory capacity or manage this process entirely.
5. Shortlist vendors
Once we have received proposals from several vendors, we will run through them with you and together we will shortlist the vendors who can best meet your requirements.
6. Vendor demos
The demo stage is a chance to see if the vendors can deliver on the promises laid out in their proposals. Live demos should include all stakeholders and offer a chance to test features in a sandbox environment, with an opportunity to ask questions and receive feedback on the spot.
7. Negotiations
After the demo phase is complete, you should have a good idea of who the best vendors to partner with are. As experts in adtech and Martech selection and negotiations, we will assist with contract negotiations and all the legalities involved.
Why choose us
With years of industry experience behind us, Indaru can help you determine whether your existing MarTech stack is the correct mix of tools for your business or help you start from scratch.
With no particular affinity to a specific vendor, we can offer impartial advice purely based on our evaluation of your business and our ability to find the MarTech tools that will add value to your marketing strategy.