Marketing technology (martech) strategy is the plan businesses put into place to build and enhance the systems and tools to execute and improve sales and marketing efforts. It includes selecting the right technologies, integrating them with existing systems and continually optimizing these tools. A martech strategy ensures the technologies in your martech stack increase efficiency, provide the right insights and drive more effective sales and marketing results.
A future-proof martech strategy means creating a plan that remains effective and relevant as technologies evolve, business grows, and market conditions and customer expectations change.
The advantages of a future-proof martech strategy include:
- Cost efficiency: Adapting to changes helps to reduce long-term costs associated with replacing outdated technologies.
- Competitive advantage: Routinely evaluating new tools and methods enables your business to stay on top of customer expectations and trends, setting it apart from competitors.
- Risk mitigation: Preparing for technological disruptions, changes in regulations and shifts in customer behaviors helps avoid operational interruptions or setbacks.
- Innovation and growth: Regular exploration of new technologies or marketing techniques fosters a culture of innovation.
- Scalability: An agile technology infrastructure can scale up––or down––with the business, supporting changing operational or data loads without decreasing performance.
- Compliance: Evolving with data privacy laws and regulations helps a business to maintain customer trust and avoid legal penalties.
- Success: Maintaining a steady pace of growth, innovation and customer engagement ensures sustained success in digital marketing efforts.
Elements of a future-proof martech strategy
Building an agile martech strategy isn’t a one-time effort, but an ongoing process that involves re-evaluating your business and marketing goals and the systems that help you meet them. It includes re-evaluating your technology budget to accommodate opportunities to refine systems for better efficiency, effectiveness and higher ROI. It’s a rigorous and complex process.
Here are a few key considerations:
- Start by understanding the business, sales and marketing objectives your martech must support. These goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, reasonable, and timely), such as a 10% increase in high-quality leads in 90 days, a 50% improvement in web traffic by September 30, 20% more wins closed by the end of the year, etc.
- Determine which tools and technologies are necessary to meet these goals—which ones should be retired, kept or added. This might include customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, content management systems (CMS), automation, email marketing, social media, data analytics, reporting and advertising platforms.
- Ensure these tools can adapt to your business growth. This might mean considering cloud-based platforms or composable architectures. Cloud-based platforms enable easy integration and updates. Composable martech is a modular and customizable technology that breaks tools down into smaller, interchangeable parts that can be reconstructed or modified as needed.
- Build systems that are secure and can withstand cyber threats, data breaches and software downtime. Your technology should be compliant with data privacy laws and regulations. This may mean plugins to conduct legal reviews, monitor content, identify risks and ensure compliance.
- Consider the long-term costs and benefits of tech investments, ensuring tools add value to your efforts. Identify any short-term solutions that might lead to long-term problems.
- Ensure system components work together seamlessly, supporting the flow and management of data across the different platforms. Your martech should facilitate a data-first approach to digital marketing, preventing silos and gathering insights from marketing efforts to adjust campaigns for better performance.
- Take a customer-centric approach to your martech strategy, understanding the customer lifecycle and ensuring your technologies enhance outreach at key touchpoints across the customer journey.
- Include plans to ensure compliance and data security with changing laws and data privacy.
- Continually measure, analyze and optimize performance. This might mean leveraging advanced analytics, AI and ML to predict and analyze data, identifying patterns, market trends and shifts in customer behaviors. These capabilities provide deeper insights into your marketing attribution and support data-driven decisions that are highly relevant to your target audience.
Best practices for a more resilient martech strategy
Visualizing and managing technology debt
Tech debt is a situation that occurs when businesses opt for a quick solution rather than an effective one. It can result from disparities caused by legacy technologies as well as from feature bloat––investing in systems that are overly complex or incompatible with business needs. It can also result from deliberate decisions that prioritize speed over quality and from inadvertent or unavoidable mistakes. Tech debt can include automated workflows and actions, user accounts, assets, templates, and data that are no longer relevant or effective. All these items can quickly accumulate, leading to disconnected systems, inaccurate data, ineffective campaigns and additional work.
The impact of tech debt can be steep, leading to higher maintenance costs while decreasing the efficiency of your technology, the effectiveness of your marketing strategy, production and ROI. Moreover, tech debt impacts your ability to adapt to market trends and shifts in customer behaviors.
There are several approaches to monitor, manage and reduce tech debt, including:
- Application performance monitoring (APM) tools: Digital marketers use APM tools, like LogRocket, New Relic or IBM Instana, to score the health and effectiveness of martech tools and monitor, identify and fix software performance issues.
- Prioritizing debt reduction: This means keeping a matrix that ranks tech debt items by urgency and impact. This means understanding the influence they have on meeting your sales and marketing goals, as well as the impact they have on your operational costs and ROI. To maintain a steady pace of tech debt reduction, businesses must allocate time and resources to fixing priority issues. It’s an ongoing process that includes constant evaluation and maintenance to fix urgent issues, retire outdated workflows and repair small problems before they become big ones.
- Martech audit: Perform regular martech audits to understand what tools you have in place, how they work together and how data flows from one tool to the next. This analysis helps maintain integrations and ensures data accuracy. An audit also helps to understand if your tools have the right capabilities to meet your business and marketing goals. By understanding how capabilities align with your evolving objectives and strategies, businesses can determine if they would be better served by an upgrade or addition. Preventing tech bloat by identifying overlaps in capabilities, and functionalities that are underutilized, overly robust or complex, an audit helps businesses determine what systems to retire or replace.
Adopting an agile methodology for dynamic martech adaption
An agile methodology is key to a future-proof martech strategy. It is an iterative and collaborative approach involving monitoring, tracking and adjusting priorities based on changing conditions. An agile martech strategy is attuned to:
- Market trends: Keep an eye on the rapid pace of market trends so your business can adapt quickly to the emergence, evolution and depreciation of technologies or methods, cultural shifts and global events that impact the market and buyer behaviors.
- Buyer preferences: Martech provides the perfect tool for an agile strategy: data. By gathering and analyzing insights on buyer behaviors, businesses can stay ahead of emerging trends and changing expectations.
- Competition: Emerging and innovative technologies intensify competition. Martech provides real-time information about the competition, enabling your business to stay proactive and swiftly respond to changes and opportunities.
User feedback and training
Future-proofing your martech stack requires frequent check-ins with martech users––sales, marketing, IT teams and other users––to understand their day-to-day challenges. Find out what takes too much time, what adds more time to their workflow, if they’re using workarounds or manual processes, and whether they trust the data. Then align these challenges to the capabilities of the tools and to the goals they’re trying to meet. Evaluate the tools they’re using and whether they’re matched to user proficiency. Consistent user feedback aids in understanding gaps in (ideally continuous) training, tool capabilities and goals to identify areas for improvement.
Get started future-proofing your martech strategy
Building and maintaining a future-proof martech strategy is an iterative and complex process. But the payout is well worth the effort—it’s cost-effective, ensuring your martech investment is always adding value to your business, improving processes, and contributing to a higher ROI. Moreover, it gives you a competitive advantage by enabling your business to adapt quickly to changes and opportunities in market trends, innovative technologies and buyer expectations.
If you’re ready to get started future-proofing your martech strategy, partner with B2B digital marketing experts. Learn how Elevation Marketing can help you build a more resilient and agile martech stack that keeps you out in front of the competition.
