Laying a Strong Foundation: 9 Basic Building Blocks of an Effective Martech Stack

A martech stack refers to the range of marketing technologies that digital marketers use to manage campaigns and reach, connect, and engage with customers. In today’s world, technology is always advancing and offering new capabilities and opportunities for marketers. They have to stay on top of the possibilities martech presents to more efficiently and effectively run their campaigns, achieve results, and keep up with the competition.

Quality Over Quantity

There are literally thousands of martech tools available, and many companies simply add more and more to their stack. However, quality trumps quantity, and you don’t want to waste time, money, or effort on products you don’t need.

Bearing this in mind, what are the basic building blocks of a good, effective martech stack? What nine marketing technologies can lay the foundation for your success?

Marketing Automation – Using marketing automation, you can run marketing campaigns with a bigger scale and scope using only a small team. You can better manage campaigns, work with leads, target and segment customers, personalize marketing, and work with data. You can save on time and costs and produce more results.
Email Marketing or Cross-Channel Marketing Platform – Email remains the backbone of many marketing campaigns, and you will need a platform to manage, organize, and launch email campaigns. However, email alone doesn’t always do the job. By working in tandem with other channels, such as social, display, and the web, you can reach and engage with a wider span of customers. Doing so, however, requires a central hub to keep everything organized and ensure all marketing communications, regardless of channel, are consistent and on message for your campaigns and brand.
Data Management Platform – Data is the life’s blood of any marketing campaign. It allows you to better personalize and target customers with rich, actionable intelligence to speak more to their needs, preferences, and interests. One cannot overstate the importance of using customer data wisely, and it needs to be properly stored, managed, and updated.
Testing and Personalization Tool – A/B and multivariate testing allows you to experiment and test what content, headlines, designs, content, offers, and more are working and what isn’t. It helps you see what more strongly engages and captures customers’ attention and personalize your marketing accordingly.
Content Management Tool –You need a system to schedule and publish content onto your website and blogs.
Digital Analytics – You need a complete picture of how customers are interacting with your brand across each digital channel. You need to harness and put this data to work in real time to drive the insights required to push your marketing to the next level.
Customer Data Platform – A customer data platform (CDP) collects and pulls together data form multiple sources into a consistent database, linking this data all together to create a single, unified customer profile. Getting customer data right helps you connect with them and craft marketing that solves their business problems and makes their jobs and lives easier.
Mobile Marketing Tools and Apps – The whole world is on mobile, and marketers have to meet their audiences there. They have to adjust and adapt their website, landing pages, ads, social media, emails, and content for mobile to provide the best experience.
CRM Software – Marketing and sales need to be on the same page, sharing customer data and knowing when to hand leads over to sales or send them back to marketing for more nurturing.

Find out more about the possibilities and capabilities martech brings to the table and how Oracle CX Marketing can make a difference in your campaigns.