Choosing Software for Your MarTech Stack

February 28, 2023

Congratulations! This is an exciting time for you and your business. You’ve had quite a year of growth and now you’re ready to take things to the next level in 2023. Luckily, we’re here to help you figure it all out as you take crucial steps toward success

However, in the marketing world, the Super Bowl keeps our eyes glued to the screens for different reasons than most. In reality, it gives us a rare chance to get a glimpse into the minds of some of the biggest, most successful brands in the world. According to Nielsen, arguably the most trusted information, data and market measurement firm in the country, an astounding preparing your martech stack for the new year. As a reminder, your marketing stack is a list of the tools that you’ll use to make your marketing campaigns a success. However, with literally thousands of possibilities, it can be difficult to streamline what technologies and platforms you should include in your unique martech stack. There’s no reason to be overwhelmed by this though. We’ve got your back and we’re happy to be your guide through this process.

Here are some things you can do to set up your martech stack for 2023.

Put Your Customer First

Understanding your customer is arguably the most important part of any successful company. Start by examining the customer specific goals you set for this year. After all, if you don’t have a clear picture of where you are, it’s hard to decide where you want to go. Asking these kinds of questions are essential in order for you to form new goals and decide what should be included in your marketing stack:

What percentage of customers made a purchase or contacted you when they visited your website?
What were your customer engagement (likes, clicks, shares) statistics on your social media platforms?
What types of content drove the most views last year?
When you sent emails to customers, what was your average open and click-through rates?

If your results indicate that you have a lot of work to do to attract customers, it may mean that you need to spend more time really understanding who your target audience really is and what they truly want. In order to effectively do this, your stack has to include tools that are geared toward marketing automation. According to Salesforce, marketing automation is “technology that manages marketing processes and multifunctional campaigns, across multiple channels, automatically”. This allows companies to be efficient, eliminate manual processes, and learn more about their audience.

One excellent tool that you can look into is HubSpot. This inbound marketing software does a little bit of everything and specializes in easy-to-use marketing automation tools. This will allow you to present different experiences to different customers in order to achieve your desired goal.

Simply put; today’s customer has higher expectations than ever before. They understand the marketing process more than customers in years past and want an experience that’s both seamless and engaging. As a brand, it’s your job to build meaningful relationships throughout the customer journey. In order to do this, you need to understand the interests that drive conversions of your customer. You have to know what communities they are a part of and what social issues they care about. The more you know about your customer, the easier it is for you to gain their business and trust.

Create New KPI’s

After you understand and define your customer goals and choose tools that help you better reach your target audience, take a broader approach to create new KPI’s and goals for your company overall. In order to do this, reflect on past marketing goals and results and ask questions to review your progress. Did you reach previous goals? If not, why? What tactics did you use? What worked well for you? What didn’t work at all? Did you have all of the resources you needed for success? What do you need to produce better results next time? It will be impossible to create new KPI’s without this level of reflection.

Also, remember that it is important that you have KPI’s that are achievable and make sense for your company. As you begin to set up your marketing stack, your unique goals will come into play because you can use them to guide the tools you need. Just think about it in non-marketing terms for a second. If someone wants to lose weight, then they should change their diet and exercise, right? Well the same train of thought applies for your martech stack. If you want to increase productivity, then you need software that makes your team more efficient and eliminates pointless tasks.

Here are some buzzwords that can help you choose what software and platforms you add to your stack. If your goals are geared toward any of the categories below, then you know you need tools and software that can help you improve in that category.

Increasing productivity
Project management
Improving collaboration
Automated reporting
Data visualization tools
Streamlining processes
Automating tasks
Budgeting

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Choose All-in-One Solutions

Do yourself a favor and take a technology inventory of all the tools, platforms, and software you are currently using and which departments still have a need for it. After this exercise, you can begin to see what’s missing. If you’re still a bit unsure about what

should be included in your martech stack after this exercise, there is one cheat code you can use. Simply cover all of your bases by including a few all-in-one solutions. This gives you some room to figure things out as you go and ensures you’re prepared for whatever comes your way.

We already mentioned HubSpot, inbound marketing software that allows you to do everything from marketing automation to ABM to tracking leads, but there are tons of other options as well. With Monday.com, you can improve collaboration, project management, and streamline your processes with one solution. If you’re looking for help with advertising campaigns, search engine optimization, or analyzing your digital marketing performance, Marketing 360, a premier cloud-based marketing platform would be the perfect asset to your martech stack! When you rely on solutions that are versatile and can tackle a variety of needs, it gives you the flexibility to work on new goals as you go. This is one major advantage of adding these kinds of solutions as you set up your martech stack for 2023.

After following these steps, you should be more prepared than ever to jump into the new year with a renewed focus and all the tools you need to influence positive growth. Remember, while your goals may be clear, you also have to make sure they align with your marketing budget. In our next blog, “Preparing Your Rocketship: Get your money lined up”, we’ll dive into ways you can raise money and set your budget to ensure optimal performance

See you soon!