The current marketing trend is more about creating better customer experiences and campaigns by delivering increased relevance and personalization.

Hundreds of new marketing technologies hit the market every year, and no wonder, marketers spend aggressively to boost their marketing technology infrastructure or martech stack. At last count, the marketing technology landscape had ballooned to an overwhelming 7,040 solutions, according to Scott Brinker.

Any company on an average spends in 15 separate marketing technology platforms. For larger organizations, this number may be ten times higher! This might include customer relationship management (CRM), content management system (CMS), marketing automation platform (MAP), and various forms of advertising, reporting, data management, and analytics platforms.

Any company, whether big or small, tries its best to set-up a process for a seamless integration via their various application programming interface (APIs) and make the best use of the latest Martech. However, sometimes a fragmented approach to marketing technology creates some critical blind spots for organizations - especially since it concerns sales and marketing.

So, drawing learnings from my professional experience as I take a stab at decoding five tips to revolutionising your martech stack.

1. Analyse what’s working today

Go back to the marketing and sales team to analyze what’s getting a return on the investments. Every new software deployment comes with a risk and disruption, so think hard before you finalize a solution to achieve business objectives. For instance, gathering customer data regularly and in real-time, if possible, enabling better customer profiling, segmenting, targeting and analysis works the best, so it’s better to spend on this.

2. Get an understanding of what your existing solution providers can do today

Capabilities that your company might have had to purchase from various niche solution providers just a few years back, might even be available as part of broad data platforms through many providers now. This either comes at no additional cost or can be less expensive, saving the overall marketing budget spending. Understand the cost-per-acquisition for each marketing channel and attribute the exact source where the customer started engaging with your brand or turned into a customer.

3. Identify what’s letting you down

Take time out and engage in a conversation with team members on the implemented software, applications, and solutions. Ask them if they are facing any troubles in the implementation of the software mechanism. Without even taking a second thought, fix the existing issue and get the team going towards the target. Furthermore, use data to create predictive analytics to predict what will happen, and prescriptive analytics to suggest what we ought to do about it, rather than using diagnostic analytics (what happened in the past).

4. Reassess the manpower invested

Software investment success is every bit as much about resources as it is about money. So, it is imperative to take a note of the time spent by the team members on a software. While there are applications available for manual tasks, make sure your team members are focused on critical tasks at hand. For instance, automating some tasks that took up valuable time previously, freeing up those resources used for ‘grunt’ marketing work is always a good idea.

5. Try to simplify your martech stack

Identify broader solutions that can replace multiple-point solutions, which will lead to lower costs to deploy and manage, reduced risk, lower license fees and faster implementation time. Also, try to find one service provider that can replace two or more solutions at a time. For instance, using marketing automation platforms to deliver emails, landing pages and/or advertising to millions of customers at the push of a button can work exceptionally well.

The times when marketers with most solution providers used to 'up the game' for a robust martech stack are behind us. Moreover, the current marketing trend is more about creating better customer experiences and campaigns by delivering increased relevance and personalization. It is always better to back a return on investment and total cost of ownership instead of a meaningless expenditure of a huge budget that lacks a cohesive strategy with no technical acumen.