In a world where marketing tech is spreading at a dizzying pace – more than 8,000 a year for an account – but shrinking budgets, savvy tech teams need to look beyond the traditional feature-function aspect of a martech stack purchase.
Often overlooked, but indispensable for a successful Martech purchase, implementation and subsequent use, I will name the “auxiliary factors”.
Martech purchases are often feature / function purchases. A marketing director might say, “According to the RFP comparison or pilot we ran, this martech stack has most of the features and functionality we need, so we’re going to buy it.”
However, there are now so many components for martech stacks – and so many vendors to potentially buy from – that you need to consider factors that go beyond traditional functionality.
Here are five such factors to consider when choosing a new martech stack.
1. What is your ultimate goal for your martech stack?
Although your list of goals can be long, here are sample questions you can ask:
- How will the Martech suite integrate into my current ecosystem?
- Will it offer a holistic understanding of the customer?
- Does it orchestrate travel or blow up campaigns?
- Is it operational or analytical in nature?
- How is customer data taken into account from a data protection, regulatory and compliance perspective?
2. Do you need a niche or a full stack?
Marketers don’t act as islands. To be successful, they depend on collaboration with departments across the company – from research and development to product management to presales and consulting. And just as their job function is not isolated, neither can their tools be.
An unsuitable martech stack that doesn’t integrate with upstream and downstream marketing technologies can be a huge headache for marketing and technology teams. Moving data can be difficult. The automated transport of information and content from one system to the next can be almost impossible.
As the marketing transformation accelerates and niche solutions continue to emerge, marketers are turning to the relative security of an integrated or full-stack suite approach. This approach enables companies to primarily rely on a single provider for multiple interconnected functions.
A full 59% of 400 marketing executives surveyed said they turn to integrated suites when choosing marketing technologies, according to Gartner’s Marketing Technology Survey 2020 – an increase from just 29% the previous year.
Choosing a provider that provides multiple interconnected functions – travel management, decision making, measurement, optimization, and data capabilities – seems like the trend of the future because of the security, convenience, and interoperability that a single provider can provide.
3. How competent is the data collection and management?
Unsurprisingly, data collection and management remains a challenge for marketers. In the same referenced survey, one of the major obstacles to increased use of Martech was the “lack of a solid foundation for customer data,” and 23% of respondents cited this as the major obstacle. Although 87% had or are currently deploying a customer data platform (CDP), respondents still had data problems.
This is because, while a CDP has four main functions – data ingestion, identity management, segmentation, and data provisioning and activation – it does not solve all of the remaining problems of data quality, data movement, and data integration. And analytics is right behind the data. With bad data comes poor analytical insight.
When considering factors that can affect your Martech success, consider the robustness (or lack thereof) of the data and analytics capabilities that come with the suite (both pre-configured and installed). If data management isn’t built in with some basic CDP-like functionality, you may need to make an additional purchase.
4. What analysis functions does the suite offer?
Perform a test of the analysis functions contained in the stack against the ones you need. Nothing is worse than growing out of a suite in a year or two because it doesn’t have the modeling, optimization, advanced decision-making, or machine learning capabilities you need when your company’s marketing use cases are mature.
5. What are the services and the partner ecosystem like?
While not always discussed in detail prior to purchase, a vendor’s service offerings, advisory services, and broader partner ecosystem have a lasting impact on Martech’s success.
Service offerings often give new buyers of martech suites a quick way to get them up and running. They allow content to be created and customized for your business – and the time to value can often be reduced. Service offerings are usually provided through the selling provider, so it is worth asking about them during the buying process.
In addition to the fast service offers, there are often longer, staggered advisory services. It is important to choose a provider who works with consulting providers, large and small, in all regions.
Consulting services also come in many different forms – from data and marketing to technology and application consulting. You should ask about it and whether you have easy access to the counselors. Consulting services can often serve as an increase in staff so that your company can implement new modules or use cases quickly and move forward faster.
Consulting services also play a role in the last point of this section: the partner ecosystem of a provider. A broad partner ecosystem enables a provider to offer its customers a wide range of providers for additional, possibly non-standard Martech Suite functions.
Whether you’re adding third-party data to customer profiles, implementing integrated applications outside of the core suite (think channel, advertising or service-related), or adding new technology components to help build the marketing ecosystem, a vendor’s partner ecosystem plays a crucial role . So it’s also worth inquiring about.
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In addition to its basic functionality, as you and your team are evaluating marketing technologies, be sure to check out the five areas of help discussed in this article. While they may seem trivial at first, a keen sense of your options in these areas will make martech life a lot easier.
More resources on choosing a martech stack
The Three Critical Steps to Building a Modern Marketing Stack
Will your platform-heavy martech stack cost you?
The Martech Buying Process: How Buyers Rate Suppliers
