Now that I have your attention with a stacked up deliciousness, let me talk about Marketing Technology stacks.
In simple words, MarTeck Stack is stack of software, apps and tools a marketer has to use to achieve certain marketing goals. It will be easier to grasp with an example.
So imagine you are a life coach teaching about 'How to beat procrastination'. You know probably the first thing you need is a website, because everyone and almost every business has a website these days! People kind of question your reliability if you don't have a website or have a free or dodgy looking website. Yes, people do judge a book by its cover, unfortunately.
So most of the time you 'start' a business by creating a website first.
In order to create a website, most people nowadays relies on WordPress due to its flexibility and versatility. About 450 million websites are running on WordPress platform! Though it doesn't mean that building websites on WordPress is that easy. So some people prefer drag and drop builders like Wix and Squarespace.
If you have chosen any of these platforms, that will become the first app/software on your Martech stack.
Let's say you chose WordPress like all other 400+ million users. Then there are again so many software for WordPress built for designing websites, for improving SEO, to collect data through forms and so on. Let's not add them to our stack yet, even though there are many plugins on WordPress that will help with Marketing tasks.
Now that you have a website, you need people visit your website. For that you need to advertise.
Most of the people now have a Facebook account and Facebook kind of owns the social media scene by acquiring Instagram, WhatsApp and more. So if you advertise through Facebook, you'd reach millions of people.
You can also post your content on Facebook or similar social media platforms to reach people just like your friends and family organically, without spending on advertisement. But there are so many platforms and you are just one person to handle it all. Hence you work smartly by finding an app that posts your content on various platforms all at once. And you can schedule too! So one day you'd sit down to schedule all your social media content for the whole month and this app will take care of the rest.
Now that social media scheduler become the next item on your MarTech stack.
Let's say, you have advertised about your course through Facebook and you're giving away your free ebook on 'Beating the procrastination' in exchange for their contact details.
So someone clicks on the ad and comes to your website and fills out a form. They have entered their name and email address.
They do expect the ebook to reach their inbox right away. If they don't find it instantly, chances are that you might lose a customer. After all they signed up to beat procrastination and they do have the right to receive the free ebook at the next instant.
In order to serve that, you need to have an automatic email sending platform. Most popular one of course is MailChimp. Though there are so many new comers and highly complex software available for email marketing. Marketo, Infusionsoft, Klaviyo and the list goes on.
Once you capture an email, you use it via a smartly designed email marketing campaigns to send out personalised emails either to create brand awareness or to sell something.
So an email marketing solution becomes the next big thing on your marketing tech stack.
Surprisingly your one of your social media post went viral and now everyone wants to beat procrastination and they want to do it now! All those people are pouring onto your website. The email app is doing its job and sending out emails. But you now have no idea about your customer. Are they all equally interested in beating procrastination or not. You have no way of knowing it. right?
No, you can tag them as a warm, hot or cold lead depending on their action if you have a CRM (Customer relationship management) software. Many of the email apps nowadays has some sort of CRM capability. But there are dedicated CRM software available these days such as Hubspot, pipedrive, Monday, Zoho and so on.
With CRM software you can track what marketers call as Customer journey and offer your customers special deals depending on their position on the journey.
Now you're really understanding what Marketing Technology is and how powerful it is. With that knowledge you've added a CRM software to your Marketing Technology stack.
Now that you found out your real fans, the hot leads, you want to give a webinar for them to create a more personal touch with your video presence. Every kid born after 2020 knows about Zoom. (Kids before 2020 knew about skype 😉 )
You need to have Zoom to organise a webinar. Though there are many other webinar platforms such as GoTo webinar, Webinar jam, etc Zoom definitely leads the pack in terms of popularity.
Because you wanted to do live webinars, you've downloaded Zoom and purchase a license and hence added it to your never ending MarTech stack.
After finishing the webinar you just realised that only 70% of the total invited showed up for the live webinar. Now you need to enter those details onto your CRM because Zoom and CRM doesn't talk to each other and hence your CRM isn't aware who attended and who didn't.
Now we need to make these two talk to each other or manually enter those details.
Manually enter it?! In the era of MarTech?! No way! Enter integration apps like Zapier!
There are apps that uses API calls and other complex methods to connect two non-talking apps to connect and talk. You can add a tag to your CRM users with 'Attended' and 'Didn't attend' right after the webinar automatically. You can also pull the data from one app to another, import them to yet another app, or to export them somewhere else. The possibilities of integration apps are endless. Every day they are adding a new integration or a new process.
Thus integration apps become a necessity in your martech stack.
WordPress, Social media scheduler, Email marketing app, CRM, webinar platform, integration app etc can be part of your MarTech stack because your Marketing goals are something unique to you. But for someone else that stack could be completely different.
Your marketing tech stack depends on your goals, marketing strategy and so on. You might have a shorter stack or a longer stack. It all depends on your particular case. Also depends on your budget.
With a more expensive software, you maybe able to skip a couple of steps and make your process more streamlined. But if you don't have the budget, you might want to find a way around.
Here at DaMarTech we focus on finding the best MarTech Stack for you which is also cost effective. Monthly subscription from each of the apps can get accumulated pretty quickly and would become a financial burden if it is not giving you the right returns.
So it is not about how many apps you have. It is about how efficient your apps are in your stack and are they giving the ROI.
What is your MarTech stack?
