Optimize the use of your MarTech stack

MarTech stands for Marketing Technologies and is used as an umbrella term for integrated marketing technologies. These simplify and organise marketing activities, and streamline data, prospect management and reporting through the lead funnel. Examples of these systems include: social media tools, content management systems, analytics tools, customer data platform, data management platform, CRM and Marketing Automation tools.The MarTech landscape is changing at a rapid pace and the number of categories is constantly increasing. With so many niche systems designed to simplify different parts of the sales and marketing process, there is a risk of collecting systems according to immediate needs, rather than building a thoughtful mix of systems and technologies (MarTech stack) that supports the long-term goals of the company. Moreover, studies show that companies use on average 15-20% of the potential and functionality of their MarTech stack(source)But what is the reason we don't use the potential?The simplistic explanation may be that we either don't know how to use the tools or we buy systems we don't need.The solution should be simple: learn to use the systems we have and don't buy new systems until we use the full potential of the systems we already have!

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How can we optimize the use of our MarTech stack?

Let's consider three overlapping aspects of Martech: Features - Those that are technically possible in the existing Martech stack Competence - What we can do and know how to do Value - What will improve our business and create value

In a perfect world, these circles would overlap completely. In practice, they do not.

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Features & Value

The functionality of MarTech products has become incredibly sophisticated. Which means that most marketers and specialists have to constantly upgrade their skills to learn how to use them. While some features are valuable for some companies and business models, not all of them are valuable for all companies.

There are some features in your current MarTech stack that, if used, would create business value for your organisation. But the exact amount that is worth using will undoubtedly change over time as your business, customers and stack evolve.There are 2 questions to answer:Are there opportunities to learn new skills with unused features in our MarTech stack that would be valuable to our business?Drop all features and products that do not help you create business results.Just because we have the skills to use certain features in our MarTech stack, does not mean we should use them, unless we know we are getting value from them.

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Value creation

Everything we do costs something in time, effort, resources, complexity and/or impact on customers. So if it doesn't add value, it's at least an opportunity cost for other value-creating activities that we can invest in.Instead, invest in the activities that your MarTech stack enables, learn how to use those capabilities, or get external help to exploit the potential.Mapping the MarTech stack in this way also helps to justify why new MarTech products might be good. Even if we don't fully exploit the features of the products in our current MarTech stack. (Read more about how to build an effective stack here)If a tool can deliver positive business value to our business - and that's something the tools in the existing MarTech stack can't provide - consider adding a new tool to your stack.To develop our skills and add value to the business, it's about optimising the use of your MarTech stack. The most common pitfall is to use features and systems just because you can and are able to.The blog post is inspired by this article.