Any marketer who hasn’t been living under a rock these past few years has heard of martech stacks. However, just hearing about them won’t amount to much. You and your coworkers may be suffering under the weight of having a poorly integrated set of marketing tools and not even realize it.
If you’ve spent no time on your martech stack until now, and have no clue what all the hype is about, then this article is for you. By the end, you’ll understand why so many companies invest their valuable resources into building their martech stacks and why it might be a good idea for you to do the same. However, there’s one question we should answer before that.
What’s a martech stack?
For the uninitiated, “martech” stands for “marketing technology”, meaning any tool or software used with marketing in mind. A martech stack, as you may imagine, is a collection of all the tools a company uses to fuel its marketing activities like planning, budgeting, publishing, etc.
Now, it’s safe to assume that as a marketer, you’ve been using some marketing tools too. However, there’s a big difference between an assortment of random software and a fully-fledged martech stack.
Integration. A good martech stack is much more than just the sum of its parts. It stands to reason that each tool has to work well by itself, but the real magic is in aggregating a collaboration-friendly and silo-free software set. In doing so, you’ll afford your marketing team options and comfort outside of realms they ever thought possible.
And that’s all thanks to the 5 commandments of marketing technology and operations.
The New Rules of Marketing Technology & Operations
To me, 80% of being successful with martech isn’t the technology, but the people and the process we implement around it.
In our recently held webinar on Building the Ultimate Martech Stack in 2022, Scott Brinker of Hubspot and chiefmartec.com fame outlined his 5 rules of marketing technology and operations and detailed how they impact a company’s marketing as a whole.
His rules are:
- Centralize everything you can
- Automate everything you can
- Decentralize everything you can
- Humanize everything you can
- Embrace continuous change
Now, you may be thinking: “But these rules contradict each other!”. And yes, we’d be inclined to agree, Scott included. But when you think about it some more, you find that in reality, despite them being seemingly mutually exclusive, these 5 rules are the key to effective marketing, as well as the reason why so many companies bother building a martech stack.
Allow us to explain.
As you can see in the image (gracefully supplied by Scott Brinker), the combination of the rules outlined above and the various marketing technologies available allow companies to pursue efficiency, innovation, brand recognition, and authenticity at the same time.
How? To find out, let’s take a closer look at each one.
a) Efficiency
Marketing technology is excellent for improving your department’s efficiency. It centralizes information, streamlines workflow, and allows for the automation of simpler tasks. More than that, not only does it standardize the tools and processes used, but also how these aspects are tracked. In doing so, it enables your team to do more in less time and scale as necessary.
b) Innovation
From a more granular standpoint, martech stacks can drive similar effects in individual teams. Although still subject to the grander organizational strategy, smaller groups can utilize their efficiency through automation to explore and improve their internal processes and even add tools specific to their use case.
c) Brand Recognition
Although we tend to associate these words with customers, brand recognition equally relates to employees. Many marketers fuss about company culture and brand recognition, both internally and externally, but may fail to notice that the tools and channels they use to communicate are a direct reflection of those very things. So building a martech stack with this fact in mind can help tweak the way customers and employees view your company.
d) Authenticity
Authenticity is concerned with the special one-to-one, “mano y mano” interactions between employees and customers. Sometimes companies get too over-excited with automation and end up losing users to the clockwork of their automated processes. However, if used correctly, a martech stack can help your employees, be it marketers or salespeople, access all the information they need to empower them in helping their clients.
By these powers combined, we have the true reason why you should build a martech stack — but knowing why is only half the battle. Next on your journey is learning how. Which, as luck would have it, you can do in our recently released article on The Processes Behind Building a Martech Stack in 2022.
Or, if you’re hungry for more information and don’t MarMind a longer read, you can learn about the various types of martech tools available and their specific use-cases in our free downloadable e-book – 7 Focuses of Modern Marketing!
Author
Peter Fechter
Peter Fechter is Digital Marketing Manager at MARMIND and is mainly responsible for website and lead management. When he's not busy creating content, he creates new campaigns.