What is a Marketing Technology Stack?

A marketing technology stack, is quite simply, a jigsaw of technology for your marketing activity. This jigsaw actually started out with a good few, heavy hitting pieces of chunky technology vendors who dominated the landscape. Progress through to 2017 and Martech 5000 was born, thanks to Scott Brinker. He developed an infamous graphic, which shows the breadth of technology providers currently within the Marketing Technology space. Fast forward 2 years and that stack had increased by another 1876 vendors.

Why did this exponential growth happen?

Our thirst for innovation and consumption of technology as individuals., Coupled with increasing marketing technology budgets (29% on average according to Gartner); has led to an empowered ability to deliver global Marketing Technology Stacks.

I am a firm believer that a good marketing technology stack is evolved or derived from the above three elements being aligned and in place, I see it deliver time and time again. If these elements are fully scoped, understood, implemented correctly and very importantly supported by the business – martech stacks are generally better adopted. To bring these elements together requires great communication, people and multi-discipline engagement and highly effective stakeholder management, particularly for any program of reasonable size and scale.

Technology

The group of technologies which make up the technology stack can be broken down in many ways. The types of technology and their subsequent modules can be a great place to start for the procurement department. Understanding the base functionality of what a Digital Asset Management system (DAM, for example) can deliver, enables individuals outside of the technology or marketing circle to be an active member of the selection panel, helping to ensure balance and outside – but important – inputs to selection. I have previously used matrices to help identify the core features of a piece of technology, and when created using plain business language, they help in determining needs vs capabilities.

Like most things in life, technology is at the mercy of trends, and there are a lot in marketing technology. What is ground-breaking one year, is absorbed into a trending mass the following year or doesn’t become mainstream. Being ahead of a trend can be exciting, innovative and pay dividends. However, it can also be a costly exercise if that cutting-edge technology does not have the research and backing of the marketing technology industry. In the last 10 years, I have seen trends such as Biometrics, mobile app approvals, AI being used in meta data and probably the most significant; APIs and integrations. Some of these have or are becoming widely used, others haven’t yet yielded the promises they originally proclaimed.

“There’s a lot of effort to try to get to standardized platforms that become the foundation of marketing systems. But a lot of these foundational systems are also opening up their APIs, making it easier for a lot of other small companies to create innovative, specialized technologies that plug into their environments.” Scott Brinker

The more mature companies spend time and effort making their APIs and associated documentation available publicly or over controlled channels to allow third parties to create, and trial solutions and proofs of concept.

Technology, and the trends which they ride on, often overlap and acquisitions inevitably occur. The partnerships which form can be in the favour of the purchaser, as the best parts of the multiple technology platforms are taken forward to form a superior product. However, a cautionary note; JV’s can also cloud the water with more variants and spin off products, which need to be researched in more detail and the back story understood, to ensure the right product is being purchased. Additionally, often at the point of JV or acquisition, the parties will make very bold claims  on benefits to clients, however in our experience the delivery of these claims typically takes much longer than originally suggested.  

Two of our current global clients are currently undertaking global single platform implementations vs implementing , numerous best-of-breed platforms with the appropriate APIs to integrate into a stack. I cannot say there is a definite trend involved in which size, industry or other delineation of company, chooses 1 large platform over multiple implementations. However, one stand out observation is that in both cases there are strong, well-formed business strategies. These business strategies clearly articulate the need for a global Project Management, global DAM and global Review & Approval capabilities. The other elements of the global platforms which we are currently implementing significantly aid and feed the key deliverable. So, will a fully integrated Marketing Technology stack be the King of 2020-2025? Signal commissioned research last year which outlined 96% of Marketers found a fully integrated solution had a wholly positive effect on delivering their business strategy. In the same research, marketers also identified one of the biggest blockers continues to be putting their customer at the centre of the marketing events.

People

Any piece of technology which is going to be implemented needs to measure up to it’s impact on a Marketing Campaign and how well it is greeted by it’s intended customers. The customer experience should always have a presence on your marketing technology comparison. We have seen this in recent years through an increasing demand and weighting for omni-channel technologies. Customers demand a unified and seamless experience across devices and applicable channels. How could your future technology align to this requirement? This could be in the form of established APIs and technology partnerships. It may be delivered with the integration of a CRM solution or a Web Analytics tool. All of these technologies give daily insights to existing and future Customers.

A reasonably new role has emerged to deliver this customer insight, inline with the marketing technology available and to ultimately deliver the business strategy. This unicorn’s name - the CMT (Chief Marketing Technologist).

The key to any Change Management, as we know, is to have the right people on the team. CMT or not. Their drive to be on the project and time to allocate to the lifecycle of the technology is a critical assessment.

Add a good spread of internal, external and partner support to the team; and it’s a winning combination. Having said all of this there needs to be a high level (CxO) engagement and alignment, at an early stage. I recently went to a Marketing Operations conference and a vast amount of feedback was around how to engage people in a change or a rollout of a project. The simple answer is; unless the management engages and buys into the project, you don’t stand much of a chance. These managers own the high level strategy, they drive cultural changes through the business and ultimately they are responsible for the budget/s to pay for the project and future licences. I am not suggesting a dictatorship, far from it. Instead, ensuring everyone is onboard for the cultural change, engaging with the user groups and finding those enthusiastic stakeholders, brings the community of users together, informs them and aligns them for success.

Process

The processes and strategy, need to be developed for the marketing and technology arm of any business. Understanding the companies’ Product or Service and where that Product or Service needs to get to, is paramount. By developing well considered and repeatable processes; a confidence in the team, the technology and inevitably a more efficient approach evolves. These processes mature and adoption rate increases. Operations become smoother and integrations (internal and external) have a greater success rate, along with partnerships. Identifying where there is a lack of a process or ‘we’ve always done it like that’ step’s takes time and commitment from the business. One of the biggest pitfalls we see, as consultants, is taking for granted that a mapped process is being followed because it is in a global or local SOP. Take a step back, listen to first hand users and gain that important understanding of what actually happens; not what should happen. That valuable insight will give you a good blueprint of what technology your business requires. Don’t forget to continually reassess these processes as well. Once they are mapped, they are not set in stone. New technology and new people will always have an impact.

Your decision to invest or update your Marketing technology stack should be well informed by the people, process and technology already in existence within your organisation. More importantly your decision should be governed by where the company wants to get those three core elements to over the next 3-5 years. This time frame is based on one area of our experience, when implementing a number of technology solutions for different customers, within the mid-sized arena (15 + markets requiring implementation). On average, to truly imbed a new platform which covers 60% + of a marketing department’s activity; takes approximately 12-18 months. This time period includes the scoping, going to market, implementing and training of a system. Post this period, users feel comfortable using the end to end workflows and capabilities delivered by the platform and can start to reap the benefits of the solution.

We, at Team6ix, would be delighted to help you navigate the slightly overwhelming Marketing Technology Stack and landscape. For any questions or a coffee and chat, please reach out to us – hello@team6ix.com