As a marketer, you’re probably well aware of the growing importance of optimizing your martech stack to keep up with lead and sales development. This is especially true as more technologies, tools, and solutions become available to marketers every day.
However, optimizing your martech stack can be a daunting task for many reasons: It’s challenging to prioritize the best technology choices, multiple vendors are vying for attention, and you’re constantly faced with the question of what to leave behind.
As a result, these efforts can feel like an exercise in futility that you’ll never win. But it doesn’t have to be such a struggle. Before delving into the actual steps you need to take to maximize your marketing tech stack, here are reasons why you should consider doing so.
Importance of Optimizing Your Martech Stack
Maximizes ROI on Technology Investments
Every technology investment comes at a price. Even if you’re improving your software architecture by moving to the cloud, there will still be costs associated with that move (e.g., licensing, implementation fees).
If you want to make sure those investments are paying off and getting you closer to your business goals and objectives, marketing software choices are key. By taking the time to assess which technologies are providing the most value and which ones aren’t, you can begin to make more informed decisions about where to invest your tech budget.
Enables Team Alignment
When making such decisions, having everyone on board is critical. It’s not something that can be done by one individual and left at that – optimizing the martech stack is a team effort requiring input from various organization teams, including sales, marketing, IT, and even finance.
Without a complete understanding of your business goals and objectives, along with the challenges you’re facing as an organization from those teams, marketing success will be difficult, if not impossible.
Helps You Prioritize Your Technology Choices
With so many technologies available, it can be difficult to prioritize which ones are the most important for your business. Planning before making choices will push you to take a step back and look at the big picture.
You’ll need to determine which technologies are directly tied to revenue growth, retention rates, and NPS outcomes. From there, you can prioritize based on these factors rather than focusing on surface-level benefits like new features or integrations with other tools in your stack.
Allows for Continuous Improvement of Your Technology Stack
As you optimize your martech stack, it’s important to remember that the process is ongoing. You’re not just building your stack once and then putting a stop to it. It’s vital to constantly monitor your technology stack. This will determine if the tools are still the right fit for what you need, whether they can scale with growing demand, or even how effective they were in achieving their goals in the first place.
While process improvement efforts won’t immediately impact the bottom line in terms of revenue, it dramatically increases efficiency and effectiveness over time as technologies are paired down and streamlined into a cohesive unit. As mentioned before, marketing software architecture doesn’t have to be an arduous task. You can take several steps to help make the process easier for everyone involved. These are:
Steps to Optimize Your Marketing Tech Stack
Identifying Key Business Objectives
The first step in is identifying your organization’s goals and KPIs you want to focus on optimizing. Without knowing which goals you’d like to achieve, it’s challenging to determine which tools will be necessary – and how they should interact with one another.
Auditing Your Current Stack
The next step is auditing your current martech stack. This should be done at least twice a year to ensure that you’re optimizing your martech stack based on the most recent changes in marketing and sales technologies. Doing this will help determine which tools will be the best fit for your marketing stack.
Assessing the Needs of Your Team
Once that’s done, it’s time to assess the needs of your team. These are the questions to ask yourself:
- What are the pain points that need to be addressed?
- What do teams need to work more efficiently together?
- What are the areas of marketing that need improvement?
- What are your goals for the next quarter/year?
If you have clear answers to these questions, you’ll be able to determine which tools will help improve your marketing efforts and team alignment and address any pain points that may exist.
Taking Action
This is where you put all of the information you gathered in steps one through three into use.
Start by evaluating your current marketing tech stack and determine which tools aren’t necessary or are redundant. Then, look for new tools to fill those gaps and improve team alignment.
It’s important to note that the results of these efforts don’t happen overnight – it will take time and effort to get everything in order. But when done the right way, optimizing your martech stack and aligning technology to business goals will save you time in the long run by increasing operational efficiency and marketing efficacy.