30-second summary:
- Create a roadmap that includes goals and owners. A clear marketing roadmap guides organizations to properly integrate more useful technology – such as a customer data platform – into its martech stack.
- Identify your data strategy. Customer data is essential to understanding today’s buyer. It is important to understand how it is collected and used.
- Evaluate your martech stack. More is not always better. A roadmap ensures that your goals are set and that the right technology is in place for your goals.
- Select the best tools. More and more organizations are taking a cutting edge approach when building martech stacks, moving away from the single vendor standard.
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Consumers are spending more time online than ever. Recent data has revealed that 2020 has seen an 18% increase in e-commerce sales, which means brands will need to put even more emphasis on their digital sales and marketing capabilities. It is essential to engage buyers at the right time with a relevant offer or message. To do this, organizations are turning to marketing technology (martech) to increase their capabilities and establish themselves during this competitive time in business.
However, just adding more tools from a current vendor or adopting the latest technology on the market – like tools that harness AI – won’t reduce it. The only way to reap all the benefits of a complete martech stack is to clearly identify your business goals ahead of time and find the right set of technology tools to help you achieve those goals.
Start with a technology roadmap
Developing a technology roadmap creates a framework for business owners in each organization to describe and understand the tools they have in place, ensure that these tools support their business goals, and form a business plan. implementation and learning.
A roadmap also ensures that key business groups agree on owners, deadlines and results. The documentation also prevents Martech’s “creep”. So what are the pieces that make up a thorough martech roadmap and how can an organization manage and create one effectively?
Outline a data strategy
One of the biggest benefits of an effective, results-driven martech stack for businesses is the ability to better understand customers through data. If you fully integrate your martech stack, you can also truly deliver a great customer experience.
This is where the martech roadmap comes in. One of the first things marketers should do when developing their roadmap is to determine a data strategy. Doing this is essential not only to be data ready, but also to be powerful.
By identifying where your data is currently coming from, missing touchpoints, how that data will be used, etc., you’ll get a better idea of how you can use that data to improve customer engagement.
A martech roadmap can help brands unify a martech stack so that every tool works together. One tool that helps marketers achieve this stack integration is a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
CDPs collect and unify data from multiple channels and sources, such as your mobile app, e-commerce website, and call center, allowing you to create a single view of the customer. By integrating a CDP into a martech stack, you can get a better idea of what the customer expects from your brand.
However, for a CDP to function effectively, it must have access to data collected by other technologies within your stack such as CRMs, social media monitoring, and email marketing tools. This can be extremely difficult if there is no roadmap in place for data integration and management.
Identify the necessary marketing tools
Once an organization has identified its data strategy, it needs to determine if it has the right tools to nurture it.
Recently, Gartner revealed that more organizations have taken a cutting edge approach when building their martech stack instead of using an all-in-one solution. This is a big change from the single integrated suite – a long-established standard in the marketing space.
A cutting edge approach allows marketers to tailor their martech stack to their specific needs. With this approach in mind, a martech roadmap is essential for identifying weak points in your marketing strategy and evaluating the tools needed to best address the gaps.
For example, when evaluating the results of your marketing strategy, you might find that your existing email marketing software, which is from the same vendor as another tool in your stack, is not as performing as you expected.
Your roadmap can determine the purpose of this tool, why it doesn’t meet that goal, and what the next tool your team explores needs to deliver to achieve that goal. And the cutting-edge approach gives your team the flexibility to explore the best tools to meet that need without limitation.
Building a martech roadmap means re-evaluating each tool across your martech stack to identify your ROI and provide a real-time view of how your martech stack is functioning.
Time is money
Recent data shows that there are over 8,000 martech tools currently available. This can make it difficult for marketers to know which marketing tools they need and which are not.
With this influx of new technologies, it’s no wonder that many organizations are constantly adding and removing applications from their martech stack. This is not only a tedious process, but it can also cost organizations hundreds of thousands of dollars.
A martech roadmap can earn that money and time by looking beyond the latest innovations, and instead focuses on specific business goals set by an organization.
Since a roadmap helps you understand the value of each marketing tool, you are less likely to move on to the next new technology that hits the market. Constantly changing products not only disrupts internal processes, it can also lead to frustration for those who use the tools on a daily basis.
A marketing stack must meet the demands of both your customers and employees. It’s no secret that a martech stack is an essential part of any successful organization – it can make or break if organizations are successful in this ever-changing digital world.
However, no martech stack will reach its full potential without a specific roadmap that helps organizations navigate and maximize the resources they invest in.
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