Martech is something Netsville has been following for years and it’s increasing in popularity rapidly. New tools and software are becoming available everyday and this allows marketers to operate on whole new level. Using martech can help your company achieve their goals and strategies and a much higher rate. Technology can take away the time you take to do hundreds of things and do them all simultaneously. 

It can also help you analyze what your business needs to do better and what is working through analytics. So staying up to date on the newest marketing technology can greatly improve your business and the success it has. For info about how to research and evaluate the latest marketing technology, check out this article from Customer Think below. 

Netsville is always up to date with the latest MarTech, if you need help in this area contact us today to get started immediately.

How to Research and Evaluate the Latest Marketing Technology

“Sixty-five percent of marketing organizations say they plan to increase their spend on martech in the next year,” according to the Walker Sands “State of Marketing Technology 2018.”

Unfortunately, marketers may not always make strategy-driven choices about new technology as they struggle to keep pace with the rate of MarTech innovation. According to the same research report, just 28% of marketing organizations feel their teams are keeping up with the evolution of marketing technology. 

Increasingly, B2B marketing leaders suffer from “MarTech Overwhelm Syndrome,” a form of stress caused by the growing number of marketing technologies. There are now 6,829 unique MarTech solutions available, according to Chief MarTech. The sheer volume of options can, in many cases, lead to difficulty making the right decisions about which marketing software to adopt.

A defined process for technology-portfolio management and strategic tech selection is the cure to MarTech Overwhelm Syndrome. Drawing from the methodologies of the most tech-enabled B2B marketing organizations, here’s a detailed process for identifying gaps in your tech stack and rearranging existing investments before seeking out the best tech solutions for your organization.

3 Steps to Research and Evaluate the Latest Marketing Technology

Gartner research shows that businesses only achieve 40% of the anticipated value of all technological initiatives. Poor data quality, planning and execution are the primary causes of tech-investment failures.

Analyzing your current stack and developing a plan to improve it can be a daunting task. In the steps below, you’ll see actionable steps that make augmenting your current stack with the latest marketing technology achievable.

Step #1: Create a Baseline Inventory of the MarTech Stack

Creating a baseline technology inventory of your MarTech stack is essential to understand the relative value of each investment. While developing an inventory is rarely a fast or easy undertaking, it’s an important practice to consider how MarTech investments support marketing, sales, customer success and the overarching business objectives.

Create a Technological Inventory

Collaborate with marketing, sales and customer success to create an inventory of each MarTech solution in use as a first step toward creating a blueprint. Avoid the temptation of merely creating a list. Tables and spreadsheets can enable organizations to capture important context during the inventory process, such as active users and integrations between tools.

Align Technology with the Customer Journey

By visualizing and mapping MarTech to the sales funnel, it’s possible to begin understanding how MarTech investments support the organization’s needs. Within the context of the customer journey, it’s possible to create detailed alignments of technology, data and individual processes.

Create Visualizations of Technology and Process in a Living Document

Using PowerPoint or another tool which supports the creation of visual flowcharts, take the technology portfolio inventory process a step further to visualize the alignment of software, data integration, tools and process. The goal is to understand how the existing MarTech stack supports seamless data integration and business goals. This process is generally highly collaborative and will likely require extensive feedback from members of the marketing, sales and customer success teams.

While a baseline MarTech inventory is a crucial tool for identifying gaps and opportunities for improvement, it’s also an essential key for strategic technology management and investment for the future. Your inventory should be treated as a living document and built in a format, such as PowerPoint or Excel, which supports flexibility and continual edits to reflect future improvements as software, processes and business goals evolve.

The Benefits of MarTech Portfolio Management

Sometimes referred to as technology portfolio governance, taking an active approach to managing your MarTech portfolio can lead to beneficial outcomes at every level of the organization. Not only will marketing operations leaders benefit from higher visibility and understanding of the MarTech ecosystem, but it also creates a stable baseline for strategic decision-making and data quality initiatives. These benefits include:

1. The potential for strategic tech investments.
2. The opportunity to improve and strengthen existing data integrations.
3. Vendor management and cost-saving potential for reducing tech-related wastes on redundant investments.
4. The ability to collaborate with IT experts to actively manage the marketing software and application lifecycle for obsolete technologies, information security risks and other technical opportunities.
5. The baseline for stronger regulatory compliance with greater visibility into technology deployment and data processing.

For step-by-step guidance on how to create a comprehensive inventory of MarTech and related processes, including customizable worksheets, download the free eBook: the “Marketing Tech Blueprint Workbook.”

Step #2: Identify Opportunities for Process Improvements

With comprehensive documentation in place, B2B marketing operations leaders have an opportunity to identify opportunities for improvement. These can range from opportunities to integrate or realign existing MarTech investments or time-consuming manual tasks which are opportunities for automation with new technology acquisition.

Laurie Klausner, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Entuity, was recently tasked with creating a baseline inventory of her organization’s global MarTech stack to iterate the technology continually. Klausner says,

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