It’s not unusual for organizations, in response to internal pressure, to jump right to “we need an XYZ platform” instead of taking the time to establish marketing objectives and technology requirements. Unfortunately, without doing the work to map requirements against business objectives leads to a bloated technology stack with overlapping functionality, poor utilization of the platforms in place, and increased cost
As you begin to think about your stack strategy and plan, start by identifying the business and marketing objectives that you are trying to achieve, and then define and map the marketing functions that will need to be supported by technology for each objective.
For example:
Business objective: Reduce costs
Marketing objective: Reduce the cost of customer acquisition
Marketing function (technology-driven): Measure marketing technology effectiveness
With your marketing functions defined, the next step is to define the target and purpose of each function. This begins to create a framework that can be used to help identify tool requirements and the teams responsible for managing them.
Some examples:
- Measure marketing technology effectiveness across the organization in order to identify and eliminate tools that are not delivering desired results.
- Deliver email — For B2B and B2C audiences, to drive repeat purchases.
- Engage in social channels — For proactive (marketing) or reactive (customer service) efforts to drive engagement with existing customers.
- Manage data across channels (omni-channel) — For internal teams to ensure that there is messaging consistency across the delivery of all communications channels.
Generating an objective-driven technology requirements framework adds value throughout the many stages of auditing, building, and maintaining a MarTech stack. During the stack audit, this framework can be used to organize findings, identify teams to interview, and formulate questions to ask to uncover all of the technology currently in use (technology sometimes hides . . .). When audits are complete, having a finished framework makes it easy to pinpoint functions that are not currently supported by existing tools and to identify areas of overinvestment.
