Navigating the Martech Landscape

The late, great David Bowie once sang, "We can be heroes, just for one day." Now, obviously, the legendary Thin White Duke wasn't singing about marketing technology — but if he was, surely that heroism could last a lot longer than just one day. We know how complex the martech landscape can be, but with the right knowledge, you can become the hero your company needs.

The State of the Martech Landscape Today

To successfully navigate the marketing technology landscape, you need to truly understand it. Martech is an umbrella term for the tools and software organizations use to manage customer touchpoints. As you're well aware, there's a lot of it out there. In fact, a supergraphic created by chiefmartech.com's Scott Brinker shows nearly 10,000 of these solutions on the market as of May 2022.

That same supergraphic splits today’s solutions into eight distinct buckets.

• Advertising and Promotion: Platforms that help you track the success of your video, social, display, print and mobile advertising. 

• Content and Experience: Solutions that provide insight into the customer experience. From email marketing campaigns and web building to SEO-optimized content, you need to understand how people are interacting with your organization.

• Social and Relationships: These martech tools help monitor customer service metrics and social media marketing. Developing a relationship with repeat customers helps the longevity of your brand. 

• Commerce and Sales: Martech that monitors your eCommerce marketing and platforms — an essential component to appeal to online shoppers. 

• Data: Platforms that put the data you collect from your marketing efforts to good use. They help analyze, integrate, visualize and enhance your digital marketing data.

• Management: Solutions that enable more efficient workflows, budgeting and talent management. Technology can help promote collaboration. 

Martech Platforms For Your Stack

Fortunately, you don’t need 10,000 martech solutions in your stack. Ensuring you have one from each category or a multi-purpose platform is the foundation of a solid martech stack. Let’s see how your platforms compare to the widely accepted core solutions every business should have.

A Content Management System is the cornerstone of your digital presence. This software allows you to publish compelling content, including landing pages, videos and resources to the web.

A Marketing Automation Platform can streamline your outreach efforts. From automating your email campaigns to monitoring the success of an advertising campaign, this system can also help turn leads into customers.

Customer Relationship Management software helps you understand how potential, current, and past customers experience your brand.

A Project Management Platform enables collaboration across departments and improves productivity.

Web analytics help you make sense of all the data you collect. It allows your team to turn information into action.

If you feel you're not doing everything you can with your marketing tech stack — you're not alone. Gartner’s Marketing Technology Survey 2022 found that organizations are utilizing only 42% of their martech stack’s potential. The majority of respondents cited challenges with cross-functional collaboration and a lack of a solid customer data foundation as the reason for not fully embracing their stack’s capacity.

So, how can you capture 100% of your martech’s capabilities and be the hero of the digital marketing team? The answer is surprisingly straightforward: Analytics.

What Analytics Should You Dig Into?

Actionable metrics help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and make improvements. These metrics, HubSpot explained, differ from the usual “vanity metrics” that only show customer engagement at a surface level.

As there are too many actionable analytics to count, here are a few to consider continuously monitoring:

• Website traffic, traffic by channel and traffic by device can give you a comprehensive view of how people are accessing your website. 

• Bounce rate helps you understand if visitors to your website leave or stick around to read other pages. It can also track undeliverable emails in your contact list.

• Conversion rate provides insight into how many visitors to your website become qualified leads.

• Engagement rate on social media is more important than likes or followers. It shows you meaningful interactions with your post versus how many views it received.

• Shopping cart abandonment rate shows you how many customers don't follow through with their eCommerce purchase.

A combination of these metrics provides a comprehensive understanding of your martech’s ROI. Platforms like Google Analytics can consolidate the most important analytics data and present it to you in custom dashboards and reports.

Analytics equals performance. By understanding these key engagement metrics and ROI, you can make adjustments to your marketing strategy to streamline success.

Do More With Less Martech

David Bowie may have reinvented himself throughout his career, but to be a hero, you don't need to reinvent your marketing stack. Remember, as the martech landscape ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, it's how you're using your marketing technology stack that makes the difference.

Unlocking the power of analytics can help your people enhance your martech landscape today. Reach out to GeekHive to learn how to do more with the marketing technology you have.