Marketing technology stack, What does it mean? Marketing technology stack is an assembly of solution/s and platform/s to measure, analyse and activate your marketing to drive growth, hence sometimes also referred to as growth marketing stack.
According to martech5000.com there are 8000 plus listed marketing technology solutions. Yes, solutions. This bag an important question, how do marketers go about building a marketing technology stack? To answer this, I will make an analogy, build a marketing technology stack is just like cooking your favourite dish based on a recipe from the internet.
So, when you download a recipe from the internet it starts with ingredients and the equipment, same applies when building a marketing technology stack, it is important to understand the components and prerequisites. Marketing technology stack has four functional components:
- Customer data platform – customer data is at the centre of any marketing technology stack. It creates a singular customer profile across all customer touchpoints and stores this data in an easily accessible format. Creating a single view of your customer and marketing efforts is central to any marketing technology stack. This is the main ingredient of your dish.
- Website and mobile analytics solutions – these help to capture user interactions across the website and mobile app. This is also passed to CDP or marketing data platform (MPD). These are secondary ingredients you add to your dish to give substance.
- Customer engagement and activation (experience) platform – once the data is captured, customer engagement and activation help us reach the customer in a meaningful way. These are spices and flavours you add to the dish, without this while having the base and secondary ingredients, your dish will not taste the same.
- Marketing data platform (MPD) – data analytics and visualization platform help you draw actionable insights on customer and marketing platforms. Marketing data platform also draws inference based on aggregate cost and other overall metrics. This is garnishing you add to a dish to enhance the flavour and make it look good.
Once we have the ingredients, we need the right equipment. Hence before embarking on the journey to build a marketing technology stack, we need to make sure we have a CRM and CMS platform in place.
Data regulation making it difficult to collect data but it’s important for brands to embark on this journey because the impact of Covid is twofold, consumers shift to online and businesses need to drive efficiency. With The rise of flexible ecosystems and 8000 plus MarkTech Solutions, each brand can create its version of the marketing technology stack based on its objectives, challenges, and current infrastructure. Leveraging data to power automation and personalisation is an enduring journey but can be made easier.
- Interconnectivity through APIs
- Quick and cost-effective deployment on the cloud
- Process and governance designed around people
- Internal top-level alignment and in-house talent
- And most importantly right partner to advise and implement the vision
And with the right ingredients and equipment, voila we have you can build the right marketing technology stack. As an organization, you will gain the ability to create a single view of the customer, analyze and create meaningful customer segments to deliver personalised omnichannel communication.
