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Agile Marketing And The MarTech Stack: The Tools That Can Unlock Insight And Growth

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The truth is, very few marketers fully understand the modern marketing technology landscape. There’s no clear explanation for how it all fits together. Yet, marketing technology (MarTech for short) commands an increasingly large slice of marketers' time, attention and budget. Just like marketers have a go-to-market strategy, a segmentation strategy, and channel and campaign strategies, modern marketing demands that there is also a marketing technology strategy.

This article—No. 4 in a six-part Q&A series on agile marketing—explores why manual processes are no longer an option, and the technology-enabled tools that can help marketers leverage data to unlock insights and growth. See here for how marketers can create a MarTech Blueprint. For more insight on agile marketing, see Part 1 (here), Part 2 (here), and Part 3 (here).

Team of experts:
Jennifer Zeszut CEO, Beckon
Jim Ewel President of Peel the Layers and publisher of the Agile Marketing.Net blog
Mark Verone VP, Global IFE Operations & Automation, Gogo
Roland Smart VP of Social & Community Marketing, Oracle & Author of The Agile Marketer: Turning Customer Experience Into Your Competitive Advantage
Scott Brinker Co-founder & CTO of ion interactive; Editor of chiefmartec.com; Program Chair of MarTech, Author of Hacking Marketing: Agile Practices to Make Marketing Smarter, Faster, and More Innovative 

Kimberly Whitler: What are some of the key aspects of today’s MarTech stack? What do we have, and what’s missing?

Roland Smart: Marketers are working hard to collect and integrate data across their platforms and channels. From a MarTech perspective, this means understanding the data implications associated with the technologies in play. I see marketers building a marketing stack with the following components:

• A centralized database that contains all customer/prospect data. This can be a data management platform (DMP) provided by a vendor or a bespoke database.

• On top of that, many marketers layer some sort of intelligence service that allows them to run exploratory queries as well as regular KPI reports with data visualization, to assist interpretation and pattern identification.

• I also see marketers starting to deploy predictive analytics models to understand performance and how well strategies might compare to each other.

• Additionally, I see the need for APIs that make the data platform accessible to their other technologies in real time (e.g., to the website for real-time personalization).

• Finally, I see niche analytics tools within the technologies that make up the stack. These tend to be in the service of tactical decisions made by agile implementation teams—for instance, platforms that help marketers run tests and acquire data quickly, the most common example being multivariate testing platforms for web.

With the above in place, it’s possible for marketers to leverage data to make meaningful strides towards measuring and improving customer experience across touchpoints, channels, etc.

Jim Ewel: Today, we’re in the wild, wild west of marketing technology, as documented by Scott in his annual marketing technology landscape supergraphic (see below). He identifies 3,874 different marketing technology tools. That’s just too many for any marketing technologist to get their head around, evaluate and work with. While I love the innovation that’s going on, at some point there has to be a shakeout, and the functionality of individual tools will be integrated into a few super-tools that every marketer will use.

At the same time, we’re missing tools specifically for agile marketing. Almost all the marketing teams I talk to that are practicing agile marketing are using tools (Trello, Workfront, Asana, Jira) designed for developers or project managers, not for marketers. The terminology is wrong, sometimes the workflow is wrong, and they’re just not ideal. We need tools specific to agile marketing.

MarTech Landscape from Chiefmartec.com

Whitler: Are there new criteria for selecting marketing technologies when you have agility and speed of optimization in mind?

Mark Verone: Marketing technology tools have to be fast, real-time and easy to use. You don't have time to email the request to BI or IT, or log a ticket to get the information you need to make faster and better decisions. The tools to access data, run the analysis and make decisions need to be at your fingertips. In fact some of these tools are mobile-enabled to allow marketers to stay connected anytime/anywhere.

Often, complex methodology can be simplified if the tools are set up properly. In most cases, there’s a little pain setting up and configuring the tools, but once established, the information flow can be seamless. We live in an era where anyone can publish anything from their mobile phone, yet some sophisticated marketers are struggling with antiquated systems and they need methods that enable faster decision-making.

Jennifer Zeszut: As Jim mentioned, the sheer number of marketing technologies and tools is larger than ever before. But marketing agility requires a clean, comprehensive, integrated dataset, in real time. Marketers should be selecting tools based on data portability—how easy is it to get data out of those point-tools and into your marketing data hub?

While a fully supported analytics API is the dream, marketers know that most of their tools and teams do NOT offer that. But that doesn’t need to be a deal breaker—the best marketing data management tools can automatically integrate disparate data streams even without an API. Look for those. And, because the biggest business gains come from many marketers making many small optimizations all year long, tools built by marketers, for marketers become critical. Ease of use. Robust storytelling capabilities. These are critical if a marketing team wants to drive more business results from its current level of marketing spend.

Join the Discussion: @KimWhitler