When it comes to marketing technology, many small business (SMB) marketers are emphasizing flexibility as they try pick the right basket of tools to help them thrive in a rapidly evolving business environment.

Increasingly, this focus on flexibility means that many SMB marketers are building their own “stack” of technology tools and services selected from a range of different vendors. By doing so SMB marketers can select the best tool for each marketing activity while also identifying the most cost-effective options.

We found that these marketers are overwhelmingly embracing self-service tools, not all-in-one marketing clouds. They prefer solutions that are easy to use, affordable and work seamlessly out of the box. They want the flexibility to build powerful stacks of technology, unique to their business needs, that integrate with one click.

When you consider budgets alone, mega-vendor marketing suites immediately break the bank. More than 40% of marketers at mid-market companies we surveyed have less than $50,000 per year to spend on marketing technology. Simplicity is also crucial, whether it’s technology for landing pages, social media, content marketing, SEO, website testing, or analytics. More than 98% of marketers want products that can be set-up and used by people with minimal technical skills.

When assessing their stack’s value, respondents most commonly pointed to the flexibility to buy exactly what they need, with 63% citing this. Also important are the ability to choose the best tech for every function (45%) and the ability to tailor to every budget (45%). Ease of use doesn’t appear to factor into the value calculus as heavily, although separately the report notes that a majority of marketers feel that single vendor marketing clouds require too much work from a consultant or developer.

The use-case-driven integrated business requirements (IBR) document is key to the iterative development of the solution to integrate multiple technology solutions. The IBR has to be crisp enough for stakeholders to understand the business objectives for the iteration, but also detailed enough for the point solutions to develop functional design and to build on it. The IBR has to provide the following details:

1. Business requirements:
• Identify all technology solutions required for the iteration.
• Determine business requirements (think outcomes).
• Determine integrated test plan for the iteration.

2. Data requirements:
• Develop the business entity relationship diagram, illustrating the entities, entity relationships, and granularity.
• Determine data requirements and flows across the technology stack.

3. System integration
• Determine functional workflows (level 1, level 2) for the iteration.
• Determine interfaces for each solution in the stack.

Marketers who have started to do content marketing typically find themselves doing topic research via myriad analytics tools, managing editorial calendars in excel, handling workflow with writers and creative via email, publishing content via separate blogs and websites and promoting it with existing, but usually disconnected marketing automation and social media tools (that’s if they aren’t doing any paid promotion). At scale, this breaks down.

Enter the Content Marketing Platform (CMP) where players like Newscred, Skyword, Kapost, Curata, Percolate (whose ambitions seem to reach beyond content marketing) and more have built tools to help marketers get a handle on the creation process. But most have stayed away from competing with either the Web Content Management (WCM) or the DAM players which are made up of a group of established names.  The most common content marketing tech stacks observed in enterprise clients (clients see Content Marketing Point Solutions Bring Agility to Web Content Management Workflows) is a combination of either:

CMP + WCM + Marketing Hub/Marketing Automation + Content Marketing Point Tools
CMP + WordPress (in addition to branded website) + Marketing Hub/Marketing Automation + Content Marketing Point Tools

The first layer below the customer is Contacts. We’ve invested in a number of great technologies to help us acquire new contacts since we understand the complex organizational structures of our large customers. We’ve also invested in tools such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

The next layer in our stack is Connections. Here we identified all the different tools we use to connect with our customers, from our social channels and marketing automation to our website and interactive content.

Content. For this layer, we focused on two things: content creation (Office and Creative Suite) and content optimization. 

Customer Data. LeanData is a great addition to the stack.

Finally, the last layer is Collaboration, a.k.a. “getting stuff done.” 

Marketing technology (martech) stacks are all the buzz right now, especially following the Stackie awards given out at the MarTech Conference recently. There were some excellent visualizations of what technologies companies use and how they categorize them within different stages of their funnel.

To me, this is all very fascinating. I love checking out what other companies are using and discovering new tech solutions. But these visualizations are missing something: how do they specifically use it all?

We need some good how-to content around using martech stacks. Originally, I had wanted to outline some step-by-step use cases for my martech stack(s), but I realized that I could write a book on it. Instead, I’m going to focus on how I use my martech stack to manage my SEO efforts.

One Place to Store Analytics

The integration of systems is a great example of how integrated analytics can dramatically improve the reporting of the individual platforms. More importantly, marketers can show their contribution to the pipeline. 

Holistic View of Your Audience

Your customer and prospect data is stored across every platform you use. When you bring together all your platforms, you can finally see a top-down view of your audience and base your marketing strategy around your true audience.

Smarter Segmentation

When all your platforms are connected, you will find that you have many more options for segmentation. Segments can now be based not only on CRM or MAP data but also on IP data, device type, firmographics, demographics, website behavior, and much more.

Ability to Personalize Content, Regardless of Channel

With smarter segments and connected platforms, you can not only define the best buyer's journey for each segment, but you can present each segment with the messages that will resonate, across any channel, whether email, websites, or face to face.

#1. The marketing technologist has “crossed the chasm.”

#2. Martech is eating adtech — and the big gulp is still ahead.

#3. Best-of-breed marketing technology stacks are thriving.

• Mythbusters: 10 Myths MarTech Vendors Tell by Theresa Regli of Real Story Group
• Best of Breed: The DNA of Unicorns by Isaac Wyatt of New Relic
• Building Your Ultimate MarTech Stack by Travis Wright of CCP Global
• One Profile to Serve Them All by Troy Steen of Dell

#4. Agile marketing is crossing the chasm too.

• A Herculean Story From Intuit’s Global Marketing Automation Rollout by Jaemi Bremner of Intuit and Pat Spenner of CEB Marketing
• Agile Marketing Measurement by Shubu Mitra of Coca-Cola and Jennifer Zeszut of Beckon
• Scaling Innovation by Christopher Penn of SHIFT Communications
• Agile Marketing: Your Key to Becoming a Modern Marketer by Brent Bird and Chris Savoie of Workfront

#5. Cognitive computing is coming to marketing frighteningly quick.

• Cognitive Marketing: The Rise of the Super Intelligent Marketer
• How Machine Intelligence Will Really Change Marketing — or — How to Market With Smart Machines Without Ensuring the Destruction of Mankind or Losing Your Job

Once you have your base component, which will typically be a CRM solution but in some cases may be a Marketing Automation platform, you can choose the tools to integrate into your stack. These may include:

CRM

Marketing Automation

CMS

Email

Analytics & Tracking

Ad Technology

Social

SEO & Content

Follow these three steps to navigate the ever-evolving MarTech landscape:

1. Build a Solid Foundation

It’s critical to have a few core solutions that represent the foundation of your ‘house’. A good way to think about this is to understand what will be your source of truth or system of record for your key functions. For many companies, this is often your marketing automation systems, customer database/CRM and content management system (CMS) .

2. Understand Where You Are and Where You’re Going

You need to know what the current state of your business is and where you plan to go. The majority of businesses are trying to grow–so make sure you consider this as you evaluate new solutions. It’s critical to think about tools that will grow with you, so you don’t have to rip-and-replace every other year. 

3. Avoid a ‘Frankenstack’

Some of you might have seen what’s commonly referred to as a “Frankenstack”, a set of individual siloed tools that an organization tries to get to work together and ultimately results in a hot mess. It can happen to the best marketers, and it often happens because of rapid growth and a lack of planning or impulsive decisions (“Hey we can use it here!”). It is painful for IT, and it is painful for marketers. When this occurs, it is often more time consuming and expensive to fix. The key here is to have a plan, involve IT, and be honest about the resources you need to maintain and manage the solutions. 

marketingIO: One Source for All Marketing Technology Challenges. See our solutions.  

marketingIO: One Source for All Marketing Technology Challenges. See our solutions.  

marketingIO: One Source for All Marketing Technology Challenges. See our solutions.