Determining the Right Martech Investments in 2023

Every business leader is being forced to seek out innovative ways to sustain their teams and operations while growing the bottom line, and it’s no different for marketers. When considering what could ameliorate the customer experience (CX), the employee experience (EX), and drive revenue, there are considerations for marketers to make. Ultimately, the challenge is in determining the right martech investments for success.

Reassesing your martech stack

A martech stack traditionally conserves time, labor, and money, in hopes of streamlining and improving marketing activities. The aim of the stack is to consistently enhance the CX, cultivate new customers, automate content management, and make better data-driven decisions—all while maintaining efficient spending. During this unprecedented time, ensure that your martech stack’s capabilities are streamlined and cost effective by engaging more with your core capabilities to create simple hybrid structures in your stack. Between the instability of the market and growing integrations, it’s best to focus on streamlining across your martech stack.

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Determining what tools to invest in

With over 11,000 marketing technology tools out there, it may feel like options are endless, but there are a few critical areas you should stay laser-focused on when determining what platforms to invest in–data, content, and asset management. The vast amount of data, content, and assets needed to maintain an innovative brand experience means it’s critical that teams have the tools that support all areas of marketing operations and can integrate seamlessly with other business functions.

As a starting point, focus on the customer. It’s essential to be able to bring dependable customer insights into the fold by way of data collection and analytics. This means having the tools to concentrate data and metrics for automating and orchestrating the customer journey. For example, CDPs deliver prompt and pragmatic insights into customer behavior that can help you better-understand your overall customer profile and channels. CDPs are proving especially valuable in our current market as marketers balance gaining new customers while retaining their existing ones.

Moreover, as teams are tasked with executing more with less people and resources, they should prioritize investing in low code/no code solutions. Low code/no code solutions enable marketing and IT teams to collaborate with pre-built components, design systems, and functionalities that can be adjusted and develop distinctive experiences. No code solutions are great to solve common issues, like updating content.

As marketers deal with the high volumes of content across various channels, a content management system (CMS) should be the foundation of the martech stack. To retain brand loyalty, beyond content management, a CMS is pertinent to ensure maintaining a continuous brand voice across channels. Coupled with solutions that centralize your marketing team’s current operations while enabling personalization at scale, these tools not only help create unique customer experiences, but ensure customer retainment.

Maintaining marketing teams

Against the backdrop of massive layoffs across the tech industry, there is no doubt that companies are facing a mound of new decisions and challenges. With marketing budgets typically amongst the first to get cut, striking the right balance between team and technology is critical. Rather than moving to minimize your team first, consider what I mentioned above —reassessing your martech stack and determining what tools to invest in. By eliminating marketing teams, you run the risk of destabilizing customer experience, which in turn impacts customer retention, brand loyalty, and ultimately revenue.

By using the tips given, marketing teams can better maintain ROI and lead marketing initiatives more effectively–with an integrated technology stack that puts the CX at the forefront.

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BONUS READ – Jon Miller, CMO at Demandbase chats about the evolution of ABM in this webchat with MarTechSeries: