People, process, data, and technology are the four words every marketing technology lead hears in their sleep. But we can’t deny the importance of these critical components in ensuring that your MarTech stack is set up correctly and truly aligned with your organization’s business goals. Though typically, we find that they are overlooked when companies are vetting or even setting up new MarTech tools.
Why It Matters
There are no ‘drag and drop’ MarTech solutions out there for all companies. But there is typically a perfect match for your company that can help increase your marketing maturity and contribute directly to the achievement of your business goals. If you align your business goals with the right tool, you’ll see a direct and positive impact across the organization.
Business Value
Growth Stack Integration
Evolve and optimize your growth stack.
Learn More →A MarTech stack or tool that prioritizes your business goals and aligns with your needs can streamline organizational inefficiencies, setting you up for long term success and growth. Of course, you don’t have to select a single tool. You can select a few tools that are efficient in different areas. A word of caution: always be wary of purchasing too many tools. This can cause more issues than it fixes. By selecting the right tool(s), you can save person-time and money while also setting your organization up for future longevity.
Challenges
Global Leader in International Learning Takes on Growth Stack Integration
The world leader in international learning tapped Convertiv to digitally relaunch their "Gap Year" division, including everything from brand to growth stack. Faced with tracking, reporting, and marketing automation data gaps, Convertiv helped assess and implement an updated reporting structure to measure key business questions while re-invigorating their lead nurture programs through content alignment and automation.
View customer story →It may sound easy enough to line your objectives up with the right tool, right? But there are so many other challenges that organizations face when trying to select the right tool. Here are a few other factors to consider:
- Lack of subject matter experts to help champion the tool(s)
This is always really hard. There isn’t always going to be a subject matter expert who can take full control of the tool and utilize it in the most efficient manner. But this is a must-have with any tool. Always have a resource or group of resources that know the tool inside and out. - Legacy tooling is already in place
Often, companies will have older tools in place already. Many of these tools cannot integrate with each other out of the box. This leads to disjointed data and misalignment of teams across the organization. - Mis-alignment between Sales and Marketing
This is a common blunder that occurs virtually everywhere: the siloed teams. Without clear communication between Sales and Marketing, it’s extremely challenging to create an appealing, fluid customer journey that aligns with the company’s objectives. This includes simple things like common funnel reporting to revenue by channel.
Typical Approaches
Across the industry, we see companies using the same selection criteria: does it cross off most of our points, and is it inexpensive? More times than not, that’s as much as the tool is evaluated before the decision is made. It can work in rare cases, but there is so much more that should go into selecting your tools than what it’s going to fix on the surface.
Our Approach
Convertiv takes a multifaceted approach to both tool selection and configuration. It begins with an assessment of the current toolset, along with an in-depth landscape analysis to understand what similar organizations are using.
During the assessment, we take a pulse on the current configuration to see where the inefficiencies are and where things are going smoothly. This ranges from simple automations and campaign listeners all the way to data ingestion and cross-tool integrations to ensure baseline reporting configurations are in place. Next, we interview key stakeholders and subject matter experts to align the company’s business goals, sales goals, and marketing goals and confirm that they can all be met. This is where the true pitfalls beyond tool features and functionality are revealed. Finally, we deliver our assessment and recommended approach.
Next Steps
On some occasions, the current tools meet the needs of the business, and there is no need to change. This happens often, and it’s a great thing when it does. It means you already have the tools to build a viable MarTech stack in your lap. In this case, we do our assessment and create a Best Practices Guide that can be used by current and net-new users to ensure that the tool is used as responsibly and efficiently as possible. When new tools are needed, Convertiv aligns the overall objectives with the tools available across the landscape (e.g., Marketing Automation, Analytics, Content Management Systems, CRM Software, etc.) and ensures that the stack is as dynamic and capable of evolving with an ever-growing market.