Every year new buzzwords can be heard being exchanged between marketing professionals and trendsetters. One you may have heard uttered at conferences and seminars this year, or maybe even in the last couple of years, is Martech Stack.
So, what is a Martech Stack?
With 87% of marketers believing that martech stack is improving marketing performance at their companies (Ascend2) it is no wonder that people are wondering what all the hype is about.
Martech stack is the abbreviation of Marketing Technology Stack and refers to all of the tools that a business may use to aid their marketing efforts. This includes email marketing tools such as Mailchimp or Omnisend, social media tools such as Hootsuite and even a company’s content management system (CMS) that hosts their website or blog such as WordPress.When used together these tools create a marketing technology stack that has become vital to the way that marketers and businesses are able to communicate with their customers.
This means that if you have an online presence or are marketing to your customers online you are already likely to have a martech stack.
Why do Businesses need a Martech Stack?
Why are so many tools now needed to simply market to customers? This is mainly due to there being more and more platforms now available for businesses to communicate with consumers, and vice-versa. It is no longer an acceptable level of activity for a business to simply email customers in order to update them with news and offers, the consumer now expects to see this information on social media, emails and on a company’s blog as well.
Whilst all these channels are needed to communicate with their existing audience, businesses are also focusing efforts on paid advertising to attract potential new customers as well as relying on automation tools to ease the workload. It is easy to see how a business may be subconsciously gaining a martech stack, without even knowing what the term means, as tools are vital in order for businesses to make all these channels work simultaneously.
So, one reason businesses need a martech stack is to give them the ability to communicate effectively to consumers across all of these channels concurrently. This isn’t always as simple and just downloading the first tools a business comes across, in fact some tools are not as compatible with others as an alternative may be, therefore an efficient martech stack may require some trial and error.
Another reason businesses need a martech stack is because of changing consumer profiles: there is no longer an ‘off-the-shelf’ way of promoting content any more, an effective martech stack will allow businesses and marketers to get personalised, targeted, messages in front of the right people which will ultimately lead to an increase in conversions and a better return on investment (ROI).
But there is a disconnect between the number of tools used and tracking…
Many businesses are failing to attribute leads properly/accurately when it comes to these tools, with many marketers and businesses simply spending on all channels without knowing which are responsible for conversions. According to Bizible, 34% of businesses don’t use any attribution model at all to measure marketing performance, suggesting that budget is being wasted on ineffective tools.
James Thomas, CMO of Allocadia, said: "The people who say, 'Half my money spent on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half' are going to get fired. Why? Because the technology to measure it is already out there."
Basically, there is little point in businesses throwing money at all available channels without being able to measure which ones are actually increasing the bottom line. This is where call tracking becomes another, vital, layer in the marketing technology stack.
Why is call tracking important to your martech stack?
Call tracking software, from companies such as Mediahawk, allows businesses to effectively attribute conversions to certain channels. A basic level of attribution can be achieved by viewing the analytics features that come with websites or certain tools, but what if someone calls from these channels? The tracking of this customer’s journey ended when they picked up the phone. However, with call tracking, if someone, for example, calls from your Facebook page to ask a question, hangs up and then visits your website to make a purchase, the basic level of tracking will attribute the call to Facebook and the conversion to your website, when in fact the social media efforts were responsible for the entire conversion. Call tracking will show that the conversion originally came from the social media channel, and not the website.
This detailed attribution can help businesses to allocate their marketing budget more precisely to the channels which are delivering the best ROI, further improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the martech stack.
