Marketers today use a range of marketing technologies, apps and online tools to optimize their marketing processes. From automating mundane and repetitive tasks to scaling marketing operations, martech serves a variety of uses and the right martech stack differs for every company based on their goals and future plans.

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Marketers now have over 7k+ martech solutions to choose from. With the constantly evolving martech capabilities in today’s martech platforms and the martech segment’s business dynamics when it comes to acquisitions and integrations; it is commonplace for marketers to face a few challenges when identifying the martech stack they need to employ to drive their marketing goals in unison. 

Building a near-perfect martech stack takes time and it requires marketing teams to constantly evaluate what they need and what their current stack can’t do from that list. 

While evaluating your martech stack to optimize your marketing growth, here are a few top mistakes to steer clear from:

Investing in too many Martech Tools

The global martech space is burgeoning with new innovations, acquisitions, partnerships and funding. Experts have also predicted that collaboration will be the new name of the martech game. 

Most martech platforms and tools today offer plugins or integrations to allow users different / multi-platform capabilities within a unified system. From a growing martech universe of over 7k products, marketers cannot possibly invest in all of them, but they can make the mistake of investing in too many of them. 

Having a few core marketing technologies that drive your core marketing efforts allows marketing teams to not only keep information more accessible and centralized, it helps strengthen marketing operations and internal processes. 

Before thinking about a new martech investment, always consider the top features you are buying it for, ask yourself whether an existing martech tool in your stack can perform a similar function, will the new tool integrate with other systems easily, is there another option that offers more features that can actually replace some of your multiple martech tools and reduce the total tools in use?

Always make sure marketing objectives and future plans are put in place before martech investments are made, this is where marketers can align the choice of martech to their goals. If you have a goal to run and execute 10 webinars through the year for instance, you need tools that offer the right kind of webinar support features including a good webinar hosting platform.

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Having a Lack of Centralized Data Processes and Systems

A unified customer data platform or customer relationship management tool can help collect and organize customer data, insights and signals across various touchpoints and channels. Not unifying this data and ensuring multiple customer facing teams access the right analytics and metrics to know where their campaigns and processes need improvement is the biggest flaw marketers can make today with their martech. 

The goal of these systems is to help teams organize and structure their customer data to evaluate what is working and what works as per which part of the customer journey. CDPs like Segment and mParticle or CRMs like HubSpot, Salesforce offer strong capabilities and are widely used by global marketing and sales teams. 

A growing need for marketers to invest in the right martech stack that includes a system that prevents data siloes revolves around the need to capture the most relevant insights on customer interactions with your brand in multi-channel environment. Data siloes don’t allow visibility into marketing performance and marketing impact or growth. 

Not Aligning Team Inputs with Multi Team Goals

Internal teams and business leaders should work together to invest in martech. Retaining inputs from CTOs, CIOs and Sales Heads, CSOs can help optimize internal collaboration and martech choices while also helping multiple teams align their goals and key information. Data silos are one crucial mistake that every marketing and sales team needs to avoid, team siloes are another. 

If CSOs and CMOs for instance, have a unified vision and well integrated martech and salestech stack, it can lead to tighter, more impactful customer journeys and customer experiences. 

There are several best practices that marketers can follow when optimizing their martech investments. The fundamentals lie in knowing what to invest in, what purpose you want it serve, assessing whether your team can optimally use or learn-to use your martech, tracking the right data and marketing performance to evaluate both processes and martech ROI.

Your marketing goals are crucial to your business and your martech investment can help shape the right marketing operations to drive those goals. 

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