How to Build Your Martech Stack in 6 Steps

In today’s increasingly online world, modern marketers must embrace a rich array of technologies to court digital audiences. From email marketing to social media and more, the channels that brands employ are sophisticated and numerous.

The online marketing strategies driving conversions now are nearly all centered around producing optimized digital content with a multichannel approach that ensures an improved customer experience and easy customer relationship management.

The field of martech has emerged as a natural response to this diverse advertising climate and continues to exert its presence among businesses performing strongly. The notion of a technology “stack” is increasingly integral to effective marketing practices and describes the web-based tools, software, and systems that make up your organization’s infrastructure. This article will serve as a guide to understanding and building a marketing technology stack of your own.

What is a martech stack and why is it important?

In essence, a martech stack is an ordered collection and synthesis of online platforms that emphasize digital marketing functions in support of your business. Integrating internal processes via a “stack” of programs—including a content management system (CMS), account-based marketing (ABM), customer relationship management system (CRM), social media, and marketing automation—is the new normal for marketing campaigns. These applications and programs ideally evolve in tandem with your business’s growth and goals.

Content marketing is a swift and volatile world. The key to building a successful tech stack is creating an infrastructure that’s flexible and attuned to tweaks, changes, and adjustments. This programmatic symmetry is achieved by optimizing and integrating tools to maximize return on investment (ROI) across platforms and hunting efficiencies unique to your organization’s ethos.

It’s important to recognize the distinction between two elements that comprise your martech stack: software and tech.

The software component relates to programs that contribute to the back end of a site working smoothly. Your company’s chosen operating system and any apps that manage basic digital processes will be in your software stack. You might consider hiring an independent data management professional to assist your content marketing officer (CMO) in creating and implementing this side of your martech stack.

The tech component refers to elements impacting the infrastructure of your business. These items govern and streamline the back end of your business’s network, servers, and computer systems.

Martech effectively blends these two elements into a cohesive stack designed to bring greater efficacy to your organization’s marketing efforts. Your martech stack should be as original as your business and tailored perennially toward enhanced performance based on the customer data it will provide. There are also a few tools that all strong martech stacks should contain.

Martech tools your stack might include

No matter the size of your company or budget, there are a few things you should view as mandatory when building your martech stack. Incorporating only the following may not be everything your business needs for an optimal multichannel approach, but consider these the skeletal framework:‍

• CRM: As any business leader knows, everything positive comes from the satisfaction (and presence) of customers. Your organization must have a central hubspot where information about current and prospective clients is functionally stored. Think about designing a CRM that is not just a standard data repository but rather a usable, active platform that “talks” freely and productively to the other platforms in your martech stack via its application programming interface (API).
  
  The CRM is unlike storing client information in a document or spreadsheet in several ways. The most vital difference is that the CRM will have its contents updated in real time by the other platforms in your martech stack. For example, suppose you’re using Salesforce to monitor conversions. In that case, that data will feed into the corresponding client slots in your CRM and can be utilized in a number of ways, from generating graphics for marketing teams to analyze to informing your next merger.
  

• CMS: Content is king in the successful digital transformation of your organization. Your CMS is an interior program that hosts your business’s website. You’ll want this to be user friendly and functional to the needs of your business. Some businesses elect to go with a popular commercial CMS platform, such as WordPress, while others may choose to hire a remote developer to create something from scratch. Whatever you choose, remember that this is where all your website pages will be generated, uploaded, and kept current. If you plan to have a company blog, it will be hosted in your CMS as well.
  

• Social media tools: Social media has evolved from pure entertainment to a mandatory promotional component, driving businesses across the globe. No martech stack is complete without a social media marketing component containing Twitter and LinkedIn, at the bare minimum. There are various ways that the feedback from your company’s social media pages enhances your business, such as helping you track trends and metrics and locating potential partners, customers, and new marketing channels.
  

• Email marketing tools: As email marketing has come to dominate the world of advertising, your martech stack needs to include a highly robust system of technologies that accelerate your business’s ad goals. Like most everything else in building a strong stack, email marketing tools can be as complex or simplistic as your business requires. Whether you choose to subscribe to one of the many software as a service (SaaS) companies, like Infusionsoft, or hire a software developer to create something unique, make sure that the spine of the system rests firmly on analytics so that you can optimize the results.

• Optimization tools: Understand that your martech stack will always be a work in progress. Optimization tools will allow you to experiment with your company’s content and identify strong points or gaps. There are countless optimization tools on the market that you’ll need to evaluate to see if they’re relevant to your business. A general tool, such as Optimizely, allows you to toy with campaigns, customer journeys, subject lines, visualizations, and calls to action (CTAs) to learn what digital marketing works best for your organization.

6 steps to build a martech stack for your business

Now that you have a clearer idea of the basic structure of the martech stack that your company needs, you can get down to the business of creating it. Here are six steps to help you start right and finish strong:

1. Assess your current marketing technology needs

In the beginning, your team needs to have a martech conference about what your business needs are to be competitive in your field and where you want to go with your marketing technology. Is your business website outdated, or do the landing pages need a refresh? Do you have a mobile app presence? Do you need an email marketing strategy?

These are the functionality conversations that will inform the groundwork for selecting your CRM, CMS, social media, and other components. Take stock of your customer base and use the information you have from your current marketing department about demographics, lead generation, conversion histories, and prior ad success to make these early assessments on what your business needs. Build your martech stack from that kind of questioning to ensure that what you create is realistic and relevant to where you hope the business will go, and how you want your marketing technology landscape to serve you.

2. Inventory and analyze the tools you already use

After plotting what you hope to gain from your marketing technology, closely inspect the tools that you have to help get you there. Have every marketing operations team member relay details of the tools, apps, programs, and platforms currently used.

Are these tools outmoded? Can they be improved on? Are they fully functional for your business’s stated goals? Remember, building a martech stack doesn’t mean you have to tear down everything in your existing marketing platform. Look at the systems you possess that can be built on, upgraded, and enhanced.

3. Identify gaps and pain points

The next step after looking at what you have is being honest regarding what you don’t have. Take the time to highlight specific gaps in your organization’s current martech landscape so that you can build your platform knowing what requirements your business has.

What are the sticking points in your current setup? Are they more related to items like SEO or messaging? What technology tools do you feel everyone on your team should know? Is there a latent technical talent gap that needs addressing? Where do you think time or money is lost unnecessarily?

Supplying objective answers to these questions helps you avoid buying programs or building systems that don’t properly address the real challenges your business faces.

4. Consider flexibility for the future

Bear in mind that agility is the name of the game as you construct your business’s martech stack. You’re not building a stone monument that will stand in one form forever but rather a flexible floor to add, subtract, replace, and renew continuously. You want to shift everything in the direction of API integration and set up a stack that is malleable to data, which will inform its later iterations.

Some changes may require the addition of team members with specializations in areas not previously familiar to your staff. Calling on the unique contributions of independent talent to help your team maximize adaptability can save you stress and time, as most companies don’t have personnel dedicated to this arena of success.

5. Compare platforms and vendors

As with any major company expenditure, you’ll want to do your research on the available platforms and vendors popular with competitors in your industry. Make time to collaborate with your team in trying out and comparing systems and tools. Decide whether pricing, convenience, capabilities, or other factors will be the driving force behind your martech selections.

For example, if you have a CMS that you love and that your team members are comfortable using, you may only want to look at optimization tools and CRM designs that correlate to that CMS. By contrast, you may be building your martech stack from the ground up and care more about having the same access to programs that your competitors are successfully using. Prioritize your comparisons and evaluations of platforms and vendors based on your original marketing goals.

6. Implement and adapt

Most marketing technology platforms and tools are highly customizable. Once you have decided on the best combination for your business, you can implement and adapt the programs you’ve selected. Your current IT team may suffice to implement your martech additions, or you may be better off enlisting the help of an independent marketing attribution professional to get things off the ground. Make adjustments to your martech stack as needed to support your business’s stated goals.

Support your stack with martech experts

Whether you need a sleek, new social media presence or you require help finding the right CMS to boost your ROI, having a martech stack that synthesizes all programs as seamlessly as possible is the ultimate goal.

You can leverage Upwork today to fill any martech gaps from a global pool of independent, vetted professionals. Upwork also provides professional resources related to training teams, hiring remote talent, and optimizing your organization’s transition with a digital-first approach.