In January 2024 there are currently 14106 martech solutions available to build your stack
Step 1 - work out your definition of martech
As the name suggests, martech is not all tech. A great starting point is to understand what type of technologies are considered to be marketing technologies, and sanity check this against your own organisation. The MartechMap divides these into the following high level categories. We've also added the subcategories which makes for a big list but might help you place the technologies you are using.
- Advertising and Promotion
- Display and Programmatic Advertising
- Mobile Marketing
- Native / Content Advertising
- PR
- Social & Search Advertising
- Video Advertising
- Content and Experience
- Content Marketing
- CMS & Web Experience Management
- DAM & MRM & PIM
- Email Marketing
- Interactive Content
- Marketing Automation & Campaign / Lead Management
- Mobile Apps
- Optimisation Personalisation and Testing
- SEO
- Video Marketing
- Social and Relationships
- ABM
- Call Analytics & Management
- Customer Experience Service & Success
- Influencers
- CRM
- Advocacy Loyalty & Referrals
- Community & Reviews
- Events, Meetings & Webinars
- Social Media Marketing & Monitoring
- Live Chat & Chatbots
- Commerce and Sales
- Retail, Proximity & IOT
- Affiliate Marketing & Management
- Sales Automation Enablement & Intelligence
- eCommerce Platforms & Carts
- eCommerce Marketing
- Channel Partner & Local Marketing
- Data
- Marketing Analytics Performance & Attribution
- Audience / Marketing Data & Data Enhancement
- Ipaas Cloud / Data Integration & Tag Management
- Business / Customer Intelligence & Data Science
- DMP
- Dashboards & Data Visualisation
- Governance Compliance And Privacy
- Mobile & Web Analytics
- Customer Data Platform
- Management
- Agile & Lean Management
- Collaboration
- Talent Management
- Budgeting & Finance
- Projects & Workflow
- Product Management
- Vendor Analysis & Management
Step 2 - check what you currently have
Once you have your categories or even sub-categories (see above), then try and map your existing technologies against this. Perhaps you already know them all or perhaps you'll need to ask around a bit to get the right name for the tech or even find out if you have any tech in a particular space. This doesn't have to be super detailed. Here's a diagram for our Appius martech stack.
We adopt and use lots of other technologies for our clients but the solutions above have all passed our selection process and we feel comfortable integrating them in technical and strategic terms. However in a year's time the diagram will be different if we keep making sure we are using the best possible tools for us.
So back to you. Are there any obvious gaps jumping out at you already? Maybe you don't have any solutions under 'Data' but everybody is talking about it? Maybe you don't have something you would refer to as 'Marketing Automation' or a 'Web Experience Platform'? Perhaps you have some of these but you don't think you have been able to use them or get the best of them? Maybe you have got to that place with them in spite of a lot of effort and cost, and you would give them a bit of a red flag on your list as something that just doesn't seem to be working well for you.
Step 3 - think about your martech challenges and opportunities
Before you start to make any decisions as to what to review or add, it's time to think about what your challenges and opportunities really are. These will give you the sense of prioritisation for what to review and add, and also the martech projects that will really create digital transformation. Here are some challenges we commonly see in the martech area:
- You can't deliver a personalised experience including cross sell, up-sell and retention for your users based on their individual needs, products and place in the lifecycle
- You cant really measure ROI, ROAS or revenue generated in a meaningful way from marketing effort and spend, to final sale or lifetime value
- You are facing a major platform upgrade or website redesign project, and want to take the opportunity to evaluate market leading licensed and open-source CMS platforms
- You have noticed that your technology platform costs have increased significantly, and you want to understand how to improve the ROI from this marketing technology spend - or perhaps you are being asked to cut costs without impacting results
- You feel your needs have outgrown your existing technology stack and are need support to conduct a fit / gap analysis and shortlisting process for alternatives
- You are working with lots of tools that have overlapping capabilities, or have multiple departments using different technologies to fulfil similar use cases - and you want to streamline
- You need to make a decision between remaining on a self-hosted version of your platform or migrating to cloud based SaaS and PaaS based options, and want to understand options and benefits for your organisation
- You want to create a single view of customer insight but have siloed data across Analytics, CMS / Experience platforms, Marketing Automation, CRM and other systems
Which of these might apply to you? The opportunities that come from targeting these challenges are the stars that will guide your ship in the vast ocean of technologies that we see in the MartechMap. Formulate your stakeholder meetings and projects around these. Take stock of the technologies you do or don't have that should be addressing these challenges for you, and what kind of organisation buy in, ownership and operational processes might be needed to really get the best of the martech.
Step 4 - get help if you need it
Agencies, consultants and consultancies live and breath this stuff. They will tend to have far greater exposure to different martech challenges, solutions, successes and failures than you are likely to have from your single organisational perspective. An outside perspective can be a powerful thing. Martech decisions are extremely valuable but also very costly in terms of licensing and organisational effort. If you feel you know the answers then validating your thinking with an outside expert can help you move forward with confidence, and may even help with your internal buy-in from above and alongside you in your organisation.
Need more information?
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