How to Build a Solid MarTech Stack

Just as you can't build a solid, long-lasting edifice on a foundation of mucky soil, the foundation of the marketing technology stack is critical to its efficacy and long-term benefit to the organization. You need to build on bedrock, and for MarTech,¹ that means customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation, and tag management.

“The stack”² at any given company was likely conceived by the chief marketing officer (CMO) and chief technology officer (CTO), but in many businesses—from startups to enterprises—it now stands alone in a marketing technology department. And given recent rapid changes in marketing technology, it may have been built on shaky ground (by today's standards). That's where you come in.

Ideally, the various tools in your stack take your data and turn it into customized marketing programs that are (1) automated and (2) measurable. Ultimately, this means happier customers because they're getting exactly what they want at exactly the right time. Plus, the CEO is happy, which means you're happy. Everyone wins.

To achieve that goal, however, you need to ensure you're building on a rock-solid technological foundation.

Bottoms Up

A foundational principle of this book and the EMF is that you need to focus on customers first. As it relates to your MarTech stack, enter CRM, the place where you keep your customer information organized.

CRM

You should be able to import data that you find, create, or buy so that it can be marketed—automatically. This ties into customer management, which can overlap with CRM but is also part of the stack in its own right. You can use an enterprise-level CRM, like Salesforce, or an SMB-level CRM like Nimble, and there are many others to choose from. The key is to start collecting your customer data so that your sales and marketing efforts will work more effectively.

Remember that it's more of an approach than a specific technology—there are oodles of great, specific options out there. There's tech to automate, sync, and/or organize everything from actual customer service to sales or tech support. CRM should be customer-oriented and usually features sales force automation, data warehouse technology to aggregate data, and opportunity management.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as e-mail, social media, and websites) and automate repetitive tasks.³ It's what gets you there, and it's made up of all kinds of campaigns, activities, and other goodies that help you follow leads while relying on the criteria you need. Lead nurturing via sales funnels, all ending with an automatic CRM update? Yes, please.

We've worked with Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Silverpop, and many other marketing automation platforms. Pick one that you feel works best for your organization.

Tag Management

Finally, tag management⁴ rounds out the MarTech stack foundation trifecta. Did you know there are well over 2,000 marketing technologies⁵ out there and counting? If you can nail these three, you are well on your way. How is that for taking away some overwhelm?

Tag management helps you deploy tags on your websites with ease. If you're not tagging, you're not providing a link between your customers and your online presence. You want to be agile, quick, and nimble. Deploying marketing technologies through a tag management system (TMS) makes it quick and painless. This also allows you to test multiple competitive tools at the same time and get real data to show you which is the best.

Analytics and Tracking: You Need to Track Your Performance, Ads, Technology, and Everything Else

How else will you know what's working—and what isn't? You need to be data-driven, so you need to have your analytics in place to track everything. By far, Google Analytics is your best weapon, which is why more than 80 percent of smaller businesses use it. They've also released Google Analytics 360, which is a comprehensive suite of tools. You might also want to check out Adobe Analytics, especially if you're an enterprise or headed in that direction.

Invest in Keeping Your Stack Open

While the large Frankenstein marketing clouds (Figure 13.2) being built through acquisition are getting great mind share, their promise of supposedly fulfilling everything an advertiser needs within one company/cloud seems to be more and more disjointed (from what the market wants), rather than connected.

For instance, advertisers who want to use Adobe's Experience Manager and Site Catalyst—but also try Oracle's new Maxymiser acquisition,⁶ IBM's Silverpop, Salesforce's Radian6, or any other number of marketing technologies from the MarTech landscape—are able to do so when they're deployed through an independently owned premium tag management tool like Ensighten, Tealium, or Signal.

New automation and marketing capabilities are being added all the time, and agile marketers need to be able to deploy whatever they want, wherever they want, and to remove it if it's not delivering. They also need to collect, own, and act on all of their marketing data. To do that, they must use tools that work well with others, rather than those that lock them into a certain “system.”

As the Chief Marketing Technology Officer at a technology consulting firm and digital ad agency, CCP Digital, Travis always suggests to his clients that they build their own custom, scalable marketing cloud, starting with the foundational tools of CRM, marketing automation and tag management. Sometimes, they don't have the resources for that; however, that is the aspirational goal. Once you have a solid MarTech stack foundation, it's time to start building up the rest of your marketing structure in earnest.

Your marketing technology stack will likely depend on your business model, size of your company, if you're ecommerce versus media or B2B, for example. Here are some other key areas of focus for your marketing technology stack aside from analytics, tag management, CRM, and marketing automation.

Conversion Optimization

Getting someone to your website is just the beginning of the battle. You can lose your prospect with an unattractive layout, long forms, or a slow site. Conversion optimization can easily double how many people fill out online forms, getting you that invaluable big data. Try out Optimizely or Conversioner for A/B testing of your pages, the complimentary Landing Page Grader from WordStream, or Ion Interactive to easily craft marketing apps with absolutely no tech background required.

Enterprise businesses should consider Maxymiser, which was recently acquired by Oracle, Monetate, or the original Adobe Target. With the right conversion optimization tool, such as Adobe Target, you can change the content of a site based on the content of the visitor coming to your site. This is huge. For example, look at Figure 13.3. This is a layered look at Facebook; on a typical ecommerce site, you can switch out any of those areas for other content based on what you know about the visitor. Facebook is a complex site, as everyone has a completely unique, personalized experience. All of these areas are different based on your user profile.

Monitoring the MarTech Stack

Looking at other sites' MarTech stacks can help you imagine your own. Here is a great example of a MarTech stack that is organized well, according to data pulled by Ghostery. Figure 13.4 refers to HomeDepot.com. They have many of the right pieces in place.

Here is another example: FoxNews.com (Figure 13.5) You can see that they don't have a tag management solution serving as a centralized hub for managing vendors and customer data, so many of their tags are all over the place.

These Ghostery graphics can also be fascinating for competitive analysis as you work through the competitor research node of the Insights Layer. One more example (Figure 13.6) is the worst marketing technology stack that we've seen so far and it may come as somewhat of a shock given the nature of their business. Whoever is managing TMZ.com is clearly a fan of duct tape, Band-Aids, hope, and prayers, because it sure doesn't look like there is a solid plan behind their stack. They have Google Tag Manager, but nothing is deployed through it. This stack is cringe-worthy.

Another great tool for competitive analysis is BuiltWith. It allows you to see all of the technologies on any site, which sites have those technologies, and which other technologies are present on those sites.

Figure 13.7 shows which technologies are present on sites that are also using Ensighten technology.

There is no doubt about the exponential growth in the marketing technology landscape. It is very obvious both in terms of the sheer breadth of the types of marketing as well as the number of marketing technology vendors. It just continues to explode (Figure 13.8).

From 150 marketing technology vendors in 2011 to 5,500-plus in 2017 and counting. Just 5 short years ago we were still striving to define the role of a marketing technologist, where marketing technology should sit within an organization, and who owned the budget (the CMO or the CIO)? Look at where we are now: most Fortune 500 companies and beyond have either a chief marketing technologist or at least a marketing technology function within their respective models. Several have implemented a chief customer officer to ensure that all of the silos are aligned with the same end game in mind and yet there is still plenty of progress to make. We have come a long way in a short time, however, and we hope that your efforts to raise the digital sense of your organization continue that trend.

Despite that exponential growth of MarTech, the response from brands and marketers has been rather slow and algorithmic. Technology has overshadowed the fundamental promise and has made us technology obsessed. There has been a rush to adopt a high number of these marketing technologies, putting a tick on most areas. Yet in the rush to go after these shiny objects, we are missing three key aspects of marketing and customer experiences and genuine relationships. Two glaring needs remain for further focus and integration:

• The need to deliver human experiences that will change behaviors and lives and inspire participation
• The need to “apply” these technologies to drive tangible business growth

Needless to say, the whole landscape has been so overwhelming, that marketers don't know where to start, how to plan, prioritize, budget, and scale especially if the technologies themselves change and evolve every few months. They either diversify or consolidate.

MarTech That Drives Business Growth

While the solution may be easier said than done, here are keys to pierce through the clutter and focus on the “application” of these technologies to drive business growth and transformation (see Figure 13.9).

Find the “human” within your marketing technology landscape. We need to flip the equation, shift from a technology-led approach to a human- and consumer-obsessed mindset. The opportunity is in the “application” of these marketing technologies to solve business challenges like:

• Increase market share
• Maximize lifetime value
• Increase share of wallet
• Drive household penetration

Or drive behavioral change for instance:

• Drive trial
• Increase loyalty
• Build trust
• Or resolve for issues such as stigma as a behavioral problem, related to adoption and usage for certain type of products

Design a stack that will address these needs. The KPIs should center on the customer need and the business challenge. Instead, most times we focus on delivering a personalized experience to an underdefined persona or adopting programmatic media buying capability because it seems more efficient. That needs to change.

Agile Is Your Savior

There is no such thing as a static road map. With an ever-changing landscape that diversifies faster than it converges, does anything like a road map exist anymore? How do you plan, prioritize, and budget for these technologies? The competitive ecosystem gets more fragmented each day, and smaller players are able to move faster as they have no historical baggage. So how do you compete and stay ahead of the curve? These are very real challenges that require a fundamental shift across a few aspects:

Marketing Technology Frameworks and the EMF

Within your overarching EMF you must establish an internal framework that allows you to map and prioritize the marketing technology landscape against your needs. A process to execute a current state assessment across different dimensions:

• Mapped against consumer journeys—the most efficient process
• Mapped against key technology categories and buckets—you could summarize the entire landscape within these categories; data, media, content and commerce
• Mapped against horizontal layers

Relying on a MarTech framework like the one in Figure 13.10, you identify the high-, medium-, and low-focus areas based on business priorities and consumer needs. No more “business or functional requirements”—move away from a technologist waiting for requirements, the traditional specifications and needs. The marketing technologist needs to think and operate like a product owner, a product evangelist who understands the only requirement—the most optimized, secure, and reliable customer experience.

Always-On Assessment, Evaluation, and Adoption

There cannot be an end date to your road map. You need to be always assessing and evaluating new capabilities, technologies, and partnerships. Dedicate a small percentage of your resources to scouting, industry analysis, thought leadership, and building external partnerships.

No Single Platform Winner aka “Marketing Operating System”

Many had hoped the big four—IBM, Adobe, Salesforce, and Oracle—would do to marketing what Apple and iPhone did to the smartphone industry; provide a marketing operating system (mOS) that could provide a development kit to marketers and technologists to build on. It would provide all the fundamental pieces including the universal view of the consumer, the necessary connection points across different components. The marketer could extend and build more creative applications on top of it. That did not happen. The landscape exploded at a faster rate than these players could build, acquire, and integrate. So how do you survive in all this fragmentation until there is a consolidation in the future?

Answer: make APIs and service-oriented architecture your best friend. Invest in and establish an API service layer in a loosely coupled architecture giving you extendibility and flexibility to plug in and plug out technologies as necessary. Believe in “data is the new oil,” the only lynchpin that can wire your ecosystem, and tie the customer journey together with your customized MarTech stack. We recommend using a service layer such as Cloud-Elements.com to connect your entire app ecosystem.

Build, Buy, or Rent?

It's fascinating to see how many organizations still invest in building commoditized capabilities that are available outside at probably half the cost, while containing more advanced feature sets and that could be adopted and scaled at 10 times the speed. It's the traditional false notion of “control” and “ownership.” Unless:

• it's something you will sell in the market at scale,
• it's your core competency and it represents who you are,
• it makes you unique and differentiated, or
• no one else can solve it for you

“DO NOT build it; just rent it or buy it. The price for commodity capability in market is cheap. Your strategic headcount is priceless. Apply that in your core competency. You may not find the perfect match but by the time you build perfection on your own, the world would have changed another 10 times. In marketing today, the need for speed is much higher than the desire for perfection.”

—Mayur Gupta

Mobile Marketing Technology Stacks

VB Insight recently did some new research about mobile marketers about mobile marketing in general. Hundreds of respondents told us that more than half of their significantly sized budgets are going into mobile.

Where Are Marketers Spending Their Mobile Dollars?

1. 43 percent are spending their budgets on user acquisition.
2. 20 percent on branding and awareness
3. 12 percent customer retention
4. 5 percent customer advocacy

It is surprisingly bad that companies are pouring so much into acquisition when customer retention and advocacy are what drive the long-term value of your company. You want to build great long-term relationships with your customers. Keep them. Loyal customers are gold. And listen to this shocking stat: Sixty percent of the mobile marketers who responded to the VB Insights questionnaire shared that mobile was a complete silo as a channel strategy in their organization. “Many organizations miss mobile and lack mobile expertise in-house,” Stewart Rogers said.⁹

During a recent VB Engage podcast, Roland Smart, VP of Social and Community at Oracle, said, “Marketers, in general, are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of marketing technologies that are coming into the market. A significant share of that relates to mobile. And because of that, there is not enough maturity within their organizations. Many people at the organization have no idea on how to maximize these mobile marketing technologies. Many marketers are still thinking solely about campaigns, which is incomplete and suboptimal.”¹⁰

He was alluding to the fact that even a lot of marketers lack digital sense. Roland Smart is a smart man (pun not intended). He is a fellow Wiley author of the book The Agile Marketer. Get it, if you want to have your mind blown.

Drive Internal Buy-In and Stakeholder Influence by Measured ROI

Just like marketing and sales, marketing technology needs to be measurable and accountable to deliver the major business objectives within your EMF. Quantify the impact of your marketing technology investment. This is the proof point of tying marketing technologies to business objectives and consumer behavioral change. The only way you drive influence internally within the leadership is by measuring, analyzing, and continuously optimizing the ROI.

Within the S-Curve of innovation for marketing technology, we are only through the early stage of adoption. We have overcome reasonable technology obstacles and have seen early returns and efficiencies. The real application and exponential “business growth and progress” is yet to come, but well underway. In the coming years with a clear alignment around the customer as the number one asset and the EMF as a model to build on, we believe marketing technology leaders will continue to innovate and shape the future of marketing with their cross-departmental peers in unprecedented ways. We hope to learn and tell your stories of brilliance in future editions and podcasts.