What Is a Martech Stack?

A marketing technology stack, or martech stack for short, is a collection of tools and technologies that work together to make your marketing processes more efficient and effective. These technologies can make processes easier, give you insight into your operations and help you devise better marketing strategies overall.

A martech stack can be an extremely useful resource for a business to have. Your marketing technology stack can incorporate tools for content management, analytics, social media and more. The best thing is that these stacks can be completely customizable to the needs of your business. If you’re looking into building your own martech stack, there are some important considerations to keep in mind. Read on to learn more.

How Do I Choose the Best Tools?

As we mentioned, your martech stack can consist of any number of tools that help your marketing processes run better. If you’re just starting to look into building a martech stack, you might be wondering how you should go about choosing these tools. You don’t necessarily need to take an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach when assembling your stack. In fact, you could be spending more money on resources if you do. Your martech stack should be specially built to fulfill the needs of your business and the departments that are going to use it.

There are a number of factors that go into deciding which tools are the best for your stack. Remember, your stack is going to be unique to you. You shouldn’t be basing it on those of other companies, because they likely have different processes and operations that their stack helps with. That same stack might not work well for you. 

Here are some things you’ll want to keep in mind.

The Type of Business: Your type of business will partially determine what technologies you implement in your stack. If you’re a B2B company, you’re going to need a different stack from that of a B2C company.

Your Marketing Strategy: Have a general idea of your marketing strategy and which tools you need to fulfill the goals of that strategy. With a strategy outline in mind, you’ll be able to more easily pick the tools to help support that strategy in the best way possible. If your goals are already established and clearly defined, you’ll have a much better understanding of what kind of tools can help you reach those goals.

Consider Your Budget: Remember when we talked about the “everything but the kitchen sink” approach? While it might be nice to have more tools than you need, this is ultimately superfluous and can quickly blow a budget. Make sure you have a budget in mind going into the martech stack process. This way you can eliminate tools from your consideration if they’re not completely necessary. This will save you money and streamline your martech stack.

Talk to Your Team: Your team knows where their pain points are. When you’re assembling your stack, talking to your team is going to be one of the best steps you can take. Ask them where they’re facing problems in their processes. Ask them what is difficult and what takes the most time. This will help you build your stack according to what is essential to your team rather than just getting general tools that won’t help you or your employees.

An Example Marketing Technology Software Stack

All martech stacks should be unique and customized to your company, but it doesn’t hurt to start from a general template. Looking at an example of a martech software stack can give you a good jumping-off point, so you can keep anything that works for your company and get rid of everything that doesn't. It could also give you some ideas for software you might not have considered. 

The following are examples of typical technologies you might find in a martech stack.

Content Management System (CMS)

A content management system, or CMS, is crucial for any company with a website or blog. Content management systems give you the tools and software to build websites and manage them. This is the technology that powers a website, blog or other relevant web properties where marketers want to engage their customers. This makes content creation and content management much simpler.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

As your business grows, it often becomes more difficult for your team to keep track of customers and maintain nurture campaigns. With a customer relationship management system, your team can track their customer relationships, give you data on customers, provide leads and sales opportunities and much more. A good CRM is a great way to keep your customers happy and make it easier for your team to streamline customer-related processes.

Sales Management System

A sales management system is a more sales-centric version of the customer relationship management system. These systems have special tools that help your sales team monitor their deals, track their individual performance, look at sales forecasts, automate administrative tasks and more. If you have a sales team, a sales management system will be an invaluable resource for them and will empower them to drive sales.

Conversion Optimization Tools

In marketing, conversions are typically the end goal. You want your customers to buy your products and services if you’re spending dollars on marketing campaigns. With conversion optimization tools, you can better understand the customer journey and how they interact with your marketing efforts. Conversion optimization tools can provide insightful and actionable data that your marketing team can use to hone and perfect their strategies.

Web Analytics

Website analytics tools are essential for marketers to understand how their campaigns are performing, where traffic is coming from and more. Without web analytics, a marketing team is left to general guesswork about how well its marketing campaigns are performing. There are a number of web analytics tools out there, so it’s important to integrate the ones that are most relevant to your marketing team.

Marketing Automation

There are tons of tedious, repetitive tasks that take hours from your team every week — sometimes every day. But many of these tasks can be automated. Things like automated email marketing, customer behavior targeting, and lead prioritization can all be done by an automation tool. An automation tool can take tasks like these off the plate of your employees and let them get back to strategic and billable work.

Social Media Platforms

Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are essential pieces of many marketing puzzles. If your advertising or marketing teams use social media in any capacity, make sure you give them the tools they need to track engagement and make effective posts and ads.

Enhance Your Marketing and Sales Strategy with Flockjay

If you’re wanting to add technologies that help your sales team work with your martech stack, take a look at Flockjay. Flockjay provides sales elevation tools that give your sales team the ability to grow and develop on a community platform. Interested? Learn more about Flockjay!