Five Steps to Optimizing Your Marketing Technology Stack

Have you ever heard the phrase “Don’t grocery shop on an empty stomach”? If you’re like me and you’ve made this mistake before, you find yourself staring blankly down an aisle, paralyzed by the sheer number of choices for any given product. By the time you actually checkout and leave the store, you either end up with a shopping cart full of food you don’t want or you’ve walked without half the stuff on your list.

In today’s ever-expanding tech marketplace, I think the same experience can occur when we evaluate and adopt new marketing technology. If you’ve done any research at all on marketing technology, you’ve likely come across Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landspace Supergraphic, which displays a staggering 6,829 technology solutions from 6,242 unique vendors. Talk about analysis paralysis!

On top of the technologies, the sheer number of blog posts, listicles, and white papers on the topic can add to the anxiety. Granted, much of the content contains good, albeit general, information. But there is no such thing as a perfect template that you can easily overlay on your business without adjustment based on your unique objectives and challenges. You can, however, make the most of the resources you already have at your fingertips, so when you are ready to make a purchase, you’ll be confident that it’s a wise decision.

Here are five steps to optimizing your marketing technology stack:

1) Take stock of your tools

Maybe you are finalizing your marketing plans for next year and need to make every dollar count in your tech spend. Or perhaps you have aggressive goals and need to increase the effectiveness of your current campaigns. Without a solid understanding of the tools and tactics you already have available, you may once again find yourself like a hungry shopper – with a marketing stack full of overlapping and underutilized technologies or one that’s missing key elements.

While the process to assess your marketing tech stack is fairly straightforward, it does require clearly defined goals and strategies. My colleague Melissa Santos has written a great step-by-step post on how to assess your stack. It starts with a clear plan, which sets the direction for a detailed audit and gap analysis of your current stack. Once you’ve taken full stock of the tech and resources available, you’ll have strong foundation to build on with quick wins and short-term initiatives.

2) Benchmark key performance indicators

It may not be the first thing you think about after you’ve assessed your tech stack, but one of the best ways to make the most of your current systems is to define and benchmark your KPIs. You’re likely already tracking some key metrics for each channel (if not, now’s the time to start!) but this is a great opportunity to take a holistic view of your marketing data from the perspective of your business objectives and start utilizing meaningful, cross-channel KPIs.

Are all of your strategic goals aligned to measurable results that you can track in one place? If you answered yes, congratulations! I want to buy you lunch and learn all your secrets. For the rest of us who answered no, the newly-acquired insight you’ve gained from assessing your stack will be crucial in understanding what data you have available – which is the first step in the journey from benchmarking single metrics like email clicks, form submissions, or website visitors to more holistics KPIs like funnel-level conversion rate or revenue contribution by campaign.

It may seem like a daunting task to go from point metrics to holistic analytics, so start small. Pick one or two KPIs that will clearly illustrate progress and break them down into smaller components. For example, instead of trying to jump all the way to tracking ROI by channel spend, start by benchmarking average cost per campaign. Then add in more granularity by channel. Then sales numbers. The more consistently you collect and analyze data, the deeper insights you’ll uncover about how to optimize the tools in the tech stack.

3) Clean up your data (and processes)

After the completing the hard work of auditing your technology and setting key performance indicators, I bet you’re thinking “I’m tired of all the prep work. When’s the fun stuff?” Well, what if I told you the next step on the way to a fully optimized tech stack is data normalization and process improvement! Riveting, right? In my opinion, this is where the fun starts – you get to explore new functionality in your current tools and start to make some quick wins.

In the 10 plus years that I’ve spent in digital marketing, I’ve yet to see a company with perfect data. But I have seen a few organizations implement tools and processes that empower their teams to solve data problems more effectively when they do arise. By using the tools that you already have available to clean and normalize your data, you’ll make it much easier to zero in on larger issues that merit your brainpower and problem-solving skills. For instance, if you’re using an MAP like Oracle Eloqua, take advantage of the powerful Program Canvas by setting up a Contact Washing Machine. Not only will it help clean and standardize data, but you’ll be set up for future success with better segmentation, higher quality leads, and ultimately more accurate reporting on those KPIs we established earlier.

You can use a similar process with other technologies too. Use your CMS tool to automate categorization and tagging of content to better align with the buyer’s journey. Or use your web analytics tool to highlight inconsistencies in query string values to ensure source data is captured consistently across channels.

Of course not every tool will have the right functionality to clean your data as needed, but the practice of digging into your tech to automate processes and standardize data will add certainty about the strengths and weaknesses of the tech stack and once again help avoid that hungry shopper scenario when it does come time to add more tech.

4) Test and validate assumptions

Continuing the fun of making the most of our existing tools, with our newly cleansed and well-benchmarked data, we’re already set up to run some tests and validate assumptions. One of the most common questions I get as a consultant is “How do best in class organizations manage _____?” While there are indeed best practices to apply for most situations, my answer to this question is almost always unique to each client. There are so many constraints and factors that make each business unique. Why would marketing tactics be any different?

So if there are any tactics that exist in the marketing plan because “we’ve always done it this way” or because “they were effective some years ago for a previous campaign”, these practices are ripe for validation or disruption by meaningful, data-driven testing. It could be as simple as email send time, or as complex as the lift generated by multiple channels on a nurture campaign. Key considerations here are:

• Start simple. Identify a few key areas to test and pilot some A/B tests. If you have resources available, you can work your way up to multivariate testing, but focus on getting actionable results.
• The results should be statistically significant. Be sure the audience and the number of responses are high enough to determine a clear winner
• Multiple tests of the same attribute should reveal similar results. Don’t test just once! Make a testing plan, test, re-test, and track results. Apply your learnings to your ongoing campaigns.

5 ) Integrate systems

If you’ve made it this far in the stack-optimization journey, you’re likely already running a well-oiled demand generation machine. You’ve not only gained a deep understanding of the tech and resources available, but you’re also making improvements to your ongoing campaigns and tracking against clean, actionable KPIs. The final step in setting a solid tech stack foundation is to fully integrate systems. We’ve already discussed ways to explore new functionality within the tools, but now is the time to ensure that data is passing between tools most effectively.

But where do you start? Let’s go back to our ultimate business objectives and evaluate how our current integrations are meeting needs. Do we have the right data in the right systems at the right time? If yes, then you’re operating a fully-optimized stack! If not, the path is clear. Improve current integrations or establish new ones. It may not be necessary to integration all of the tools in your stack. So take a look at foundational integrations like marketing automation and CRM, or BI tools and a data warehouse. From there, you’ll have a pretty clear indication of what to connect.

How to connect your platforms? That is likely another blog post for another day. But the experts here at Relationship One are always available to talk through questions you might have. Contact us for additional info.