Marketing technology stack

What is a marketing technology stack?

A marketing technology stack (or martech stack) is a grouping of technologies that marketers leverage to conduct and improve their marketing activities. Often, the focus of marketing technologies (martech) is to make difficult marketing processes easier, simplify workflows, measure the impact of marketing activities, and drive more efficient spending.

Why an efficient marketing technology stack is important

The marketing technology landscape is rapidly evolving, with a LOT of different software technologies crowding an ever-increasing number of categories. 

The amount of options out there can be seriously overwhelming, especially when most (/all) CMOs want to be ahead of the game at all times. 

An efficient marketing tech stack will help teams with: 

• Productivity 
• Efficiency
• Creativity

And that's just the marketer's experience. You'll see a really great impact in terms of user experience too. 

With so many choices, it’s essential for marketers to have a clear understanding of which technologies are most fundamental to their business goals and to understand how technology can help them positively affect their marketing efforts.

What's included in a marketing tech stack?

The type of business you have will also impact which technologies you might find important, and how they should be organized. A key difference is whether your business sells its products or services to consumers (B2C) or to businesses (B2B). B2C and B2B marketers will use different channels and techniques to acquire customers, and will have varying technology needs as a result.

When assembling a marketing technology stack, it’s important to know which technologies are foundational, and should be put in place first. Both B2C and B2B marketers should consider these technologies essential:

• Content management system (CMS) - technology that powers a website, blog, or other relevant web properties where marketers want to engage their customers.
• Advertising technology - this space is vast, but advertising is a key customer acquisition technique for marketers. Most will use a combination of SEM (search engine marketing), display ads, retargeting, and ad tracking or attribution software.
• Email - a key customer communications channel that all marketers need in their toolkit. Sometimes, email is a capability that comes built into a marketing automation or inbound marketing platform.
• Insights and analysis - at a broad level, marketers need to be able to access their data to measure digital marketing activity. Most marketers will have website analytics and their own business analytics tracked in either homegrown or third-party tools. In more advanced cases, a data warehouse can pull together data from a wide array of systems to make it more accessible or use content intelligence to provide insights on content performance.
• Experiential marketing - experiential marketing, also known as event marketing, is an important aspect of marketing for many companies. With the growing popularity of virtual events, conferences and webinars, it's important to have the right experiential marketing tools to manage these events.
• Experience optimization - this includes A/B testing and personalization software, or programs that allow marketers to take action on their analytics to make their marketing campaigns more efficient. There are many other channels that might require different levels of investment, depending on whether your marketing strategy is more aligned with B2C or B2B, and your business strategy.
• Social media - technology to monitor social activity and make social engagement easier can help maximize the impact of this marketing channel. Social networks such as LinkedIn and Facebook are also a key part of the ads landscape, and many have paid advertising options available.
• Digital asset management (DAM) - Similar to a content management system, in that it stores content, but typically focused on keeping track of and authoring static assets like images, documents and video. 
• Customer relationship management (CRM) - typically an area of focus for B2B marketers, a CRM can track marketing attribution when supporting a direct salesforce. The CRM will track all customer relationships and can provide insights on how marketing campaigns influence sales pipeline and customer growth.
• Search engine optimization (SEO) - SEO is often a key strategy for driving organic traffic to your website by ranking higher in search engines such as Google, and often pairs well with content marketing strategy. There are many tools available to help with keyword research and other SEO-related initiatives.

It’s also important to know which skill sets and team members you’ll need to have in place to ensure that your marketing team gets maximum benefit from the technologies you have in place.

Your marketing lifecycle: Other categories to consider

Here are a few categories to consider when thinking about how your marketing technology will complement your team:

• Customer acquisition - online marketing, partner marketing, event marketing, website optimization
• Brand & communications - social media, public relations, sponsorships, broadcast advertising
• Product marketing - product marketing, analyst relations, content marketing and project management
• Marketing operations - campaign performance, data analysis and insight in particular

How to build a martech stack

We've got a full guide on how to build a marketing tech stack, but here are the basic steps to take (instead of aimlessly adding new, annoying-to-integrate tools to the mix without thought):

1. Identify your marketing goals

2. Streamline your marketing strategy

3. Consider what you have in place already

4. Speak to stakeholders about their priorities

5. Break down your martech tools into key categories

6. Reveal (and fill) the gaps in your martech stack

Make your content marketing team, digital marketing team, engineering team, and sales team very happy by taking your martech stack and management tools seriously. There's no fun in marketing mess for anyone, is there?

Add Optimizely to your marketing technology stack

Optimizely is a great option for both B2C and B2B marketers as it’s an all-in-one platform that covers the entire marketing lifecycle - from content ideation and creation, through to analytics, tracking and reporting.

It avoids a lot of content chaos and marketing mess; you know, the two things that make marketers like us want to bang our heads on the desk.

Streamline your marketing technology stack with an all-in-one operating system for marketing like Optimizely.