In the first blog of this two-part series, Shane answered questions that can help you define parameters for your martech stack. In this blog, he provides guidance on choosing the right tools for your current marketing strategies and future ones.
Q: How can you design your martech stack to support your marketing vision?First, it’s crucial to start by outlining all the steps involved in fulfilling that vision. Once you do this, you can get a better idea of what you need to do to complete those steps and what kinds of tools are necessary.
For example, let’s say I want to dominate search engine results in the digital marketing landscape. Some of the major steps involved in fulfilling this vision would be:
1. Conduct competitor research to see where the competition currently ranks and what strategy is working for them.
2. Research industry keywords to understand user intent and discover the most searched keywords.
3. Brainstorm engaging topic ideas by identifying top-performing content in my niche.
4. Create high-quality content to improve search engine visibility and shareability.
5. Distribute my content through multiple channels to draw in traffic. This could include email newsletters, guest posts, social media, content syndication platforms, etc.
6. Gain more high-quality links from relevant, authoritative sites.
7. Run search engine ads to get a stronger head start and attract a highly relevant audience.
8. Analyze my performance to see what’s working and what isn’t, and using these insights to inform/optimize my existing strategy.
From this brief outline, I can get a fair idea of what kind of tools will help me with each of these steps. This would include:
1. A comprehensive SEO reporting tool that lets me track rankings, analyze my backlink profile, and conduct keyword research. I would ideally look for one that also lets me research my competitors’ SEO strategies.
2. A content research tool that gives me in-depth insights into the top-performing content in my niche. It should be able to help me identify which pieces of content are getting a lot of shares and engagement, so I know what’s resonating with my target audience.
3. An email marketing tool to automate the email content distribution process. This will help me schedule and send out my emails at the best times, helping me get more opens and clicks.
4. A social media marketing tool to effectively distribute my content through social media. This should help me schedule my posts to reach the audience when they’re most likely to engage. It will also give me more insights into how my posts are performing, allowing me to optimize my posting strategy accordingly.
5. A host of content optimization tools to help me create better-quality content. This can include tools to improve readability, tools to detect and prevent plagiarism, tools to create catchier headlines and subject lines, etc.
6. An analytics tool to understand how much time people are spending on different pages and how they’re engaging with different types of content. This would be extremely helpful to identify which pieces of content people love the most.
These are some of the basic tools that I need to include in my martech stack if I want to dominate search engine results. However, it’s important to note that the list doesn’t have to be limited to just these tools forever. I could keep adding tools depending on the strategy I’ve developed to fulfill my vision as well as tools to help me execute any new tactics I include in my strategy.
This is where having an integrated cloud marketing platform, like Oracle Marketing Cloud, is beneficial. Cloud can inherently scale, and keeping data in one place makes it easier to add new tools and capabilities.
Q: What is driving the need for an integrated martech stack and why is this a part of the dream?Marketers dream of maintaining a seamless integration between their most trusted tools to increase efficiency and effectiveness. There are several driving forces for adopting an integrated martech stack.
When your tools are working together, they also perform better because they’re getting the exact kind of support they need from the other tools. So, for example, an automation tool that can seamlessly integrate with your social media tools and email marketing platform will streamline your brand-consumer communications.
When the new tool you introduce to your martech stack works well with your existing technology, more people will be encouraged to use it. So, taking an integrated approach helps you improve technology adoption rates as well.
Q: Could I make a case for cost control as well?
Yes. We now have access to a lot more microservices and APIs designed to solve very specific problems. So if all these microservices and APIs can seamlessly work together, marketers no longer have to invest in large, multi-purpose platforms just to gain access to certain features.
They can just select the most crucial tools and integrate them into a quilted martech stack, saving money and resources.
Considering all of these factors, an integrated martech stack is an essential part of the dream because it improves your chances of fulfilling it. Not only can you work more efficiently with seamlessly integrated tools, but you’ll be doing so with a unified team and at a reduced cost.
Q. Are your business goals supported by your martech stack?Yes. We’ve built our martech stack gradually over the years, after thorough research and several trial runs with the sole purpose of supporting our business goals. We now have a full-fledged martech stack to support every aspect of our strategy, from search engine optimization and marketing tools to content research and distribution tools. And we continue to add to the stack as our strategy and goals evolve along with organizational growth.
Q. What are you usually trying to accomplish when you make adjustments to your stack?We create or update our martech stack with the primary goal of simplifying certain tasks and streamlining our marketing efforts as a whole. This is one of the reasons why it’s so crucial to take an integrated approach because we want to make sure that every single addition to our stack makes sense in the bigger picture.
Successful marketing requires the use of innovative technology, but you have so many options to choose from. Then once you’ve chosen, how do you get all your technologies and tools to work together? Find out with “The Guide to Building Your Marketing Technology Stack.”
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