In a world where marketing technologies are proliferating at a staggering rate—more than 8,000 per year, by one account—but budgets are shrinking, savvy technology teams must look beyond the traditional feature function aspect of a martech stack purchase.
Often overlooked but integral to a successful martech purchase, implementation, and subsequent use are what I will call the "auxiliary factors."
Martech purchases are often feature/function buys. A marketing leader may say, "According to the RFP comparison or pilot we ran, this martech stack has the most features and functions we need, so that's the one we will purchase."
However, there are now so many components to martech stacks—and so many vendors to potentially purchase from—that you have to account for factors beyond traditional feature functionality.
Here are five such factors to consider when choosing a new martech stack.
1. What is your ultimate goal for your martech stack?
Though your list of goals may be long, sample questions to ask may include...
- How will the martech suite integrate into my current ecosystem?
- Will it provide holistic customer understanding?
- Does it orchestrate journeys or does it blast campaigns?
- Is it operational or analytical in nature?
- How does it account for customer data from a privacy, regulation, and compliance perspective?
2. Do you need a niche or full stack?
Marketers do not operate as islands. To be successful, they rely on collaborations with departments across the organization—from R&D to Product Management to Presales to Consulting. And just as their job function is not siloed, their tools can't be, either.
A martech stack that is not enterprise-scale and doesn't integrate with upstream and downstream marketing technologies can present huge headaches to marketing and technology teams. Data movement can be difficult. Transporting information and content from one system to the next in an automated fashion can be nearly impossible.
As marketing transformation accelerates and niche solutions continue to enter the landscape, marketers are turning to the relative safety of an integrated or full-stack suite approach. That approach allows organizations to rely primarily on a single vendor for multiple interconnected capabilities.
A full 59% of 400 marketing leader respondents reported turning to integrated suites when selecting marketing technologies, Gartner's 2020 Marketing Technology Survey found—an increase from just 29% the year prior.
Choosing a vendor that provides multiple interconnected capabilities—journey management, decisioning, measurement, optimization, and data capabilities—seems to be the trend of the future due to the security, convenience, and interoperability that a single vendor can provide.
3. How proficient is its data collection and management?
Not surprisingly, data collection and management remain a challenge for marketers. In the same survey referenced earlier, one of the top impediments to increased martech use was "lack of a strong customer data foundation," and 23% of respondents cited it as a top obstacle. Even though 87% had deployed or were in the process of deploying a customer data platform (CDP), data woes still existed among respondents.
That's because although a CDP has four primary capabilities—data ingestion, identity management, segmentation, and data provision and activation—it doesn't solve all of the data quality, data movement, and data integration issues that may still exist. And sitting right downstream from data is analytics. With bad data comes poor analytical insight.
