With all the complexities that come with marketing technology, Emily Gravel shares her insights on wrangling your martech beast at the Get Stacked 2020 conference. Kavita Singh reports.
Step 1: Understand the beast
A lot of us have seen the endless marketing technologies from the Chief Martech Landscape 2020. As a marketer, you might see all the categories and wonder if you have to know all of them. The answer to that is no.
Every business is different and, therefore; every business should have different technology needs and with that comes the different types of tech stacks.
There are 3 types of stacks:
Your band aid stack: A band aid stack is when you buy a technology to fix an issue, and then you move on. Oftentimes, teams will forget about a technology once a problem is solved, but it is important to use the technology to build up their current marketing processes and then roll it out for a lot more marketing strategy and programmes.
Your over customised stack: One person knows how to use this tech and if one thing breaks, the whole thing does. Essentially, you’re using the tech in the way it could be used, but you’re retrofitting it into what you need it to be doing. That one person might be able to fix it, but if they’re not working there, you’re the one held responsible for it now.
Your IDGAF stack: Most of the time, this is someone who feels tired and defeated. The marketing operations person is so worked up on different projects and they end up giving the go ahead to run whatever technology without really assessing it.
While each type of tech stack has potential for issues, a tech stack dictionary is one way to wrangle your beast. For each technology, you’ll need to organise your martech beast by describing your technologies. Make sure this is available to all stakeholders, so they know all the details of each martech. Be sure each tech:
- Includes the what, who, how and why
- Is clear and concise
- Is in a consistent format
- Is easily accessible
When you’re building this dictionary out, the key component is people. Get the right people in the room and ask the right types of questions. The types of people you’ll need boils down to four types:
- The thinker: the person who is listening and ready to pose questions
- The owner: they know the software inside and out
- The visionary: the software’s biggest fan in the company
- The validator: making sure nothing will break
Step 2: Train your beast
She says: “Just like having a messy room upsets your parents, grandparents or your spouse. Having a messy instance of any of your technologies is upsetting to your users. A few years ago, we decided to clean up our room using Marketo and we used these three steps in order to make sure that we got it right.”
- Naming the convention: At Carbon Black, Emily and her team would use region, programme type, month, date and event date. Keeping your name and convention clear and consistent is an easy way to find things when it ends up getting ‘a little messy.’
- Foldering: This helps users make it easy to access information they need. If users want to look back on previous years, it will help to label by year and quarter in addition to its programme type. Archive your folders regularly, and make sure your view is just as clean for you as your end users.
- Oversight: You’ll be able to keep things nice and clean by utilising templates, which can come in three different forms.
- Asset templates: emails, landing pages, banners, advertisements
- Programme template: email registration pages, promotions
- How to guide: A how to guide to keeping the ‘room’ clean. Having this information for your team will be essential for training.
Don’t forget to include your team at every step as they are instrumental to making this process work. In addition, when it comes to training people, it is important to implement service levels. These include:
- Full service: Marketer submits requirements, and you build the entire programme
- Light service: marketers set up the majority of the programme, but you bring it over the line
- Self service: Marketers set up the entire programme and you double check.
Emily encourages marketers to strive for self service by utilising training documentation to get them from light service to self service.
Step 3: Unleash the beast
This is an opportunity to crash test your technology. This is an opportunity to pressure test technology that you have in your stack and make sure it matches up to what you’re looking for. Build off the conversation you previously had with your team.
Emily uses PathFactory as an example as she says: “The tool was a recent addition for us and at the time, it was ready to basically prove that it was going to fulfil its promise of bridging the gap of our marketing funnel and increasing sales conversions. Once we picked the tech, it was time to build out our programme.”
They built out nurture campaigns on an individual’s funnel stage and topic of interest by providing them information that was only relevant to the stage that they were in. In WordPress, which is Carbon Black’s website, they have integrated PathFactory into their web pages to display related content to whatever page that they’re looking at. The build out took about a month and once this was all done, they had four different teams all on board.
After the launch, the company started to make sure that they were measuring appropriately using Marketo. Be sure to keep track of successes from a marketing sales and business perspective. While it was a success for Carbon Black, it is okay to miss the mark because you’ll be able to regroup from it.
Emily adds: “It’s okay if it goes poorly because it’s an opportunity for you to understand one, what you use to implement and why it didn’t work. And then to figure out if you actually need the technology. My suggestion would be make sure that you pressure tested technology at least twice before deciding to let it go.”
