What is a Martech Stack?
A Martech stack is a group of technologies a marketing team uses to execute their marketing campaign efficiently and effectively.
Key functions of a fully functional b2b martech stack include:
-
- Task Automation
- Streamline workflows
- Data-Driven decision making
- Tracking and measuring
Why do you need a Martech stack?
“According to “MarTech: 2020 and Beyond.” MarTech now accounts for 30% of the overall marketing budget spend in North America”
Handling everything manually for modern marketing is time-consuming and inefficient. By automating certain tasks you free up your team time and it helps them to plan more effective and efficient strategies to stand out in the market.
Beyond timing, it also optimizes your process and boosts your campaign. With sheer time you need tools that can convert data into actionable insights in no time. Martech helps you to plan and make choices according to data-driven insights and helps you analyze your marketing campaign better. With the right tools, your team can create more strategic campaigns, increase engagement, and more conversion.
Steps to Build your martech stack.
“According to a martech survey, more than 50 percent of marketers’ stacks feature six to 10 solutions, and 40 percent use more than 10 solutions.”
Now, we know the resultant chaos of this leads to the famous “Marketer’s tussle”, especially when it comes to knowing what should be your top 6 or top 10 tools of choice. After all, a futile martech stack is even more dangerous than no martech stack at all. As the momentum then goes towards managing the incurring costs as well as strategizing your campaigns for ROI. Hence the importance of choosing it wisely.
Martech stack is one of the most important strategies you implement in your company. Marketers report that they plan to spend more on the martech stack than they did last year. To help you improve your martech stack, here are some ways to help you out in selecting the right martech companies/software/tool this year.
- Assess your current martech needs: In the beginning, you need to analyze the tools and have a broader analysis to better understand the tools you need. You must look for your website, landing page, and many more. What marketing strategy do you need? Do you have an app? What mobile marketing strategy do you have to implement? These questions and queries will give you a perfect idea of the tools you need.
- Take Inventory: Prepare a list of all the technologies you are using for your marketing efforts from all apps and the cloud. Your list should include the main focus of your marketing campaign and take a thorough look at the list prepared by you and your research marketing team. Look for the companies that rank and provide you the best affordable services. Implement them and there you go all set to win the marketplace.
- Gap points: In this step, you have to be honest about the tools you need which will fill the gap present in your previous martech landscape. You must look for a talent gap in your team? Is your business growing on SEO? Does everyone in your company know SEO? These types of questions will help you to avoid buying a program that does not fall in the challenge area of your business.
- What’s best: Compare the tools you have selected with the other platforms and vendors present in the market to make sure you use the best one to meet your requirements. Compare pricing, features, and compatibility of your selected martech tool. Prioritize your comparisons and evaluations of platforms based on your marketing goals.
- Implement and Adapt: Mostly the martech tools are highly customizable. Once you select the right tools for your company, implement them and adapt the programs. Make adjustments to your martech stack as per your business requirements.
Top 5 Martech Companies of 2021 for your Martech Stack – Martech Cube’s Picks
Now you know the need and how to build a martech stack. Here is the guide to help you build a perfect and effective Martech Stack with a holistic weightage on the marketing capabilities that render the same.
- ZoomInfo: ZoomInfo helps companies achieve profitable growth. Its platform puts sales and marketing professionals in a position to identify, connect and engage with qualified prospects. Zoominfo’s mission is to provide insights into their ideal customers. It empowers their marketing strategy.
Zoominfo provides the following features:
- Sales Solution: Sales Solution provides real-time sales intelligence service. Zoominfo provides the most actionable and accurate data available in the market.
- Marketing Solution: ZoomInfo accelerates your marketing funnel by finding and converting your ideal customers faster. With Zoom Info you can take an account-based approach to your marketing campaign. You can generate more leads with the help of Zoominfo FormComplete.Zoominfo Websights helps you to know who all visited your website.
- Company Contact Search: With Zoominfo you can get company contact and account data easily. Zoominfo provides you with up-to-date contact information from the email to a phone number. ZoomInfo helps you understand your buyers’ behavior. Zoominfo has the most advanced company contact search and it helps you find the best ideal customer.
- Buyer Intent Data: ZoomInfo reveals intent signals from companies on your terms. Discover signals from active buyers on a weekly or daily basis. With Streaming Intent, you can receive intent data in real-time — as the signal is detected.
- CRM Lead Enrichment: Zoominfo enrich will always keep your CRM and Marketing Automation accurate and up to date. It brings lead enrichment to your tech stack. It provides you in-depth data about your customer and buyer which helps you win.
Act-On – Act-on is a marketing automation platform that harnesses behavioral data to tailor every customer experience. It helps your brand to grow your way. It creates an exceptional brand experience and helps you grow your business around every corner of the world. Act-On believes in making their marketing automation platform day by day as the consumer gets smarter.
These are some solutions provided by Act-On:
- Customer Relationship Marketing: You can expand your customer base and broaden your brand’s appeal with Customer Relationship Marketing Feature. With Act-On you can deliver automated customer relationship marketing campaigns based on your customer behavior. It helps you to plan an efficient Customer Experience strategy to improve customer satisfaction and adoption. Around 63% of marketers are creating content focused on their buyer’s persona.
- Customer Experience Marketing: Improve Customer centricity and customer satisfaction with Act-on Customer Experience Marketing.
Cake: Cake is a performance marketing software. It brings clarity to your digital marketing campaign for clients around the world. It helps you to measure the impact of your marketing efforts and calculate digital spending.
These are some of the features that Cake provides:
- Affiliate Marketing: Cake provides reliable affiliate marketing solutions to manage and optimize partner’s campaigns for the highest performance. It ensures accurate measurement, Data Security, and support to build networks. This solution elevates your performance through real-time insights. It maximizes profits and increases profit margins.
- Multichannel Marketing Software: Marketing Attribution Software for performance marketers to optimize digital campaign performance and boost return on ad spend. Cake collects first-party data across all channels to identify the impact of cross-channel strategies on the customer journey.
SharpSpring: SharpSpring is a revenue growth platform. It fuels your brand’s growth with end-to-end marketing automation and CRM. Sharpspring helps you to reach your right leads with targeted communication. It converts deals faster with revenue-generating features. It captures leads through marketing automation and with various other processes it builds a Loyal customer base.
These are some of the features provided by SharpSpring
- CRM (Smart Mail): Email is a key aspect of every business’s sales and a=marketing strategy. SharpSpring CRM helps you to keep up. Smart Mail makes communication between you and your customer easy, effective, and quick.
- Chatbots: Chatbots improve the user experience on your website. It automates communication with prospects. Yahoo Finance industry says that by 2026 the Chabot industry will grow to over $10 million. In a world where digitization is growing rapidly, it is important to make your customer a priority. Chatbot provides 24*7 customer service enhancing Customer Experience.
ActiveCampaign: ActiveCampaign is a Customer Experience Automation Platform. It provides email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools to deliver Rich Customer Experience.
These are some of the solutions provided by ActiveCampaign
- Email Marketing: ActiveCampaign sends personalized emails according to the contact’s interest. It makes every campaign you start feel personal which attracts customers.
- Marketing Automation: It makes it easy for you to run your marketing campaigns by running some time-consuming tasks on automation. It sets up a welcome series of email automation, segmentation of contacts and makes the workflow simple for which one can take a lot of time.
- Smart CRM: A CRM with email and sales automation helps you to keep all your customer data organized. It takes follow-up at the perfect moment and manages your pipelines. This helps you to build a loyal customer base and helps you to deliver rich customer satisfaction.
Accelerate your Company’s Growth With The right Martech Stack!
Building the right martech stack for your company is no picnic. But it’s all about integrating the right technologies so they work cooperatively effectively rather than working independently. As businesses move towards the digital era, they need more effective tools for their marketing strategy.
Always remember when you choose your martech stack, do remember the technology you choose must connect to your strategy and not the other way around.
Check Out The New Martech Cube Podcast. For more such updates follow us on Google News Martech News
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chandrima Samanta
Content-Editor at MartechCube
Chandrima is a Content management executive with a flair for creating high quality content irrespective of genre. She believes in crafting stories irrespective of genre and bringing them to a creative form. Prior to working for MartechCube she was a Business Analyst with Capgemini.