3 Considerations to Select Marketing Tech

August 27, 2021

Choosing the right marketing technology is one of the key elements in running successful marketing programs at scale. The right marketing technology gives each company an edge and allows them to properly target and distribute their content to prospects, consumers, investors and other stakeholders. At scale, a well-selected marketing tech stack can fuel your revenue exponentially and drive a well-orchestrated customer experience.With all those benefits, it can be tricky to find the marketing tech that will function perfectly for your organization. Every company structure and use cases are different, and as such the marketing software will have to be tailored to your company’s go to market.Here are 3 key considerations to select the right marketing technology for your organization.

Alignment

There are two areas of alignment – external and internal. From an external point of view, you will want to ensure your marketing tech enhances your marketing strategy and aligns to your marketing objectives. For example, if a key marketing objective is cross-selling products, then you need to ensure your marketing tech can help manage product storyline communications at scale by persona. Think Advertising to Landing Pages to CTAs in a dynamic unified infrastructure, so you can map the customer journey at the product level and identify customer behaviors that trigger interaction and, ultimately, sales.

From an internal perspective, you want your technology to support existing marketing processes and your marketing team’s people. Technology can be customized to align to your processes, so don’t let the tech dictate the way your marketing organization works. Map your people, process, data and technology prior to entering a technology selection process, so your technology choice reflects the way your company functions.

Another layer for internal alignment is understanding how your marketing technology selection will impact non-marketers in your organization. You’ll need to map those interactions as well. Think, subject matter experts from your company writing, producing and distribution content or the Sales Team interacting with sales enablement tools that marketing is feeding content into. What are those experiences like and how does marketing technologies impact those teams and their underlying technologies?

The Legacy System Conundrum

Naturally, another key consideration is your existing technology stack. But don’t just focus on your marketing stack, but also the other systems across your organization (e.g., finance, HR, operations, etc.) that need to interact with marketing systems for data and customer success / account management processes. By aligning all the systems in terms of multi-departmental processes and data, you will find not only an elevated customer experience (read: NPS score) but also new efficiencies in driving your go to market. A simple example, is company hierarchy data, how do you cleanse it, ensure your CRM, Marketing Automation, Finance systems are all aligned on this simple data set universally to ensure consistency. Tactically, if you knew that one division was an existing customer, how would that influence the way you spoke to prospects in other divisions of the same corporation? You need consistent data across all your systems to get there.

Don’t Forget New Tech’s Organizational Impact

A well thought out roll-out process for new technology is paramount to success. All too often, companies stand up new technology and don’t work across teams to ensure adoption and engagement. This is the downfall of many technology implementations. Many consultants also miss this opportunity to engage end users and those impacted by this new technology. And this isn’t just training on how to push the buttons in the new tech stack. But your internal team and constituencies need to be educated on the “Why” just as much as the “how” and “what”. It is this business value that started the exploration for a new solution in the first place.

Standing up marketing technology is a journey – not a sprint. It is change management. Make sure that you include all the decision-makers and those impacted by the tech in the selection, customization and implementation processes. Form a tiger-team or workgroup to ensure that not only is the tech stood up correctly for your needs but also to ensure organizational adoption.