Mastering MarTech: Integrating Tools for Enhanced Business Insight

What is MarTech?

MarTech is defined as technologies, tools, and platforms that are used to perform or optimise a business’s marketing activities.  When you integrate the various marketing tech used by your business this is called a MarTech stack.

For example, the most commonly used MarTech platforms tend to be email service providers such as MailChimp and Klaviyo which are two of the most popular amongst B2C clients our team has worked with, or Hubspot for B2B clients.

These platforms provide businesses with the ability to send email marketing campaigns to segments of their customer or subscriber base to drive sales.  Most of these platforms (2024) have automation functionality that takes the strain off your internal marketing team, facilitating responsive email workflows that serve the right content to the right people, at the right time, triggered by customer or subscriber behaviours.

Benefits of integrating your MarTech:

1. Insightful data

You have a depth of customer data that informs and drives not only your customer retention activities, but it can also inform future customer acquisition campaigns. 

This means that marketing teams will have in-depth knowledge of the behaviours of your most valuable customers, with the granular data required to attract and retain more of this customer segment, ultimately driving revenue.

2. More powerful segmentation

When your marketing tech integrates fully, you will find that your audience segmentation abilities improve tenfold.  You will be able to use data from across your stack to fuel customer acquisition campaigns.  For example, you will be able to create customer segments on the cusp of disappearing, providing the opportunity to re-engage these customers before you lose them.  You will also be able to tap into customer LTV (lifetime value) reporting, ensuring that you prioritise acquiring the customer segments which make you the most money.

3. A single source of truth

Most marketing professionals will have come across consistency issues in reporting across the wide range of platforms and tools they use.  This will not give the marketing team or C-Suite confidence in campaign or customer insights and can stall growth.

Having a fully integrated MarTech stack will create unified data which will give your team a single source of truth, which gives your team confidence in the data used to inform marketing activities.

4. Agile, efficient, and resilient

Audience segmentation and reporting across the breadth of your marketing activities become both reliable and efficient, saving your team admin time they can spend focused on revenue-driving initiatives. You also create a more resilient MarTech ecosystem which not only facilitates seamless scalability, it also minimises potential downtime. 

Integrating your platforms and tools:

There is an extremely large and diverse number of marketing platforms and tools available and it can feel overwhelming when starting the process of creating a highly effective and efficient MarTech stack.

There are two options available to you; you can hire a MarTech consultant to help you source and implement your MarTech stack, or your internal team can facilitate this process in-house.

Option 1: Hire a MarTech Consultant 

There are pros and cons to either option but for those either on a tight timeline, complex requirements, or with an inexperienced internal team, it may be in your best interests to seek professional help.

The Pros:

• MarTech consultants have a depth of experience across a wide range of platforms and will have the experience to avoid common pitfalls within this process
• Hiring a professional will allow you to get your MarTech stack up and running much faster than managing the process in-house. MarTech consultants are well-versed in this process and will be able to set realistic timelines.
• If you have complex requirements it can be challenging for internal teams to zoom out and identify the best solutions for your business.  A MarTech professional will be able to take a holistic approach to your requirements to get the best solutions to stand the test of time.

The Cons:

• As with getting professional assistance with any process, there is a cost attached and this can be prohibitive to many small businesses.

Option 2: Manage this internally 

If you have an internal resource who would be perfectly placed to manage this process internally, then it is important to 

1. Identify the core platform that your business can’t function without.  This is commonly a B2C business’s eCommerce platform or your sales platform for B2B businesses.
2. Once you have identified your core platform, you need to ensure that all of your other MarTech solutions integrate with this as well as each other.  
3. The best way to do this is to prioritise the functions each of the remaining platforms achieves for your business.
4. Start with the most important functions required to operate your business and work backward from there.  This way, you will not need to make any compromises on platforms that perform the most critical functions for your business.

This process ensures the best chance of providing your business with rich, insightful data to drive revenue growth. 

Need help with MarTech?

Our team makes this process seamless, from sourcing the right platforms and tools for you, to quickly getting your MarTech stack to speak to each other so they can start providing your business with rich business intelligence.  This process facilitates true data-driven decision-making and will have an immediate impact on your bottom line.

Let's collaborate and pave the way for a brighter, more digitally-integrated future.  Think big, soar higher with Evolare Digital!