A Brief Introduction
Marketing technology has done nothing but expand for the past decade. Now in 2020, Chief MarTech’s annual Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic lists more than 7,000 tools across 24 different categories. That is a staggering number of options that has as much potential to overwhelm the people using it as empower them.
When is enough, enough? Where is the line between building a tech stack that enables your team to do great marketing and throwing a bunch of shiny things on top of each other until they just get in the way of clear strategy and effective multichannel marketing?
How do you integrate offline and online marketing to engage customers in the real world when much of the tech stack is focused only on digital marketing?
Those are the questions we wanted to answer in our MarTech 2020 survey (click here to see the full results). In the responses, we found a real marketing landscape that makes a lot more sense than the out-of-control MarTech super graphics we’ve all seen.
It turns out that most marketers value focus and efficiency in their technology stacks. Rather than building leaning towers of digital interdependency, the marketers who responded to this survey are opting for efficient, focused marketing tech stacks that enable them to market better not just online, but offline as well.
Today’s Marketing Tech Stack
Despite an explosion of new technologies, we found that marketing tech stacks remain small and focused. Marketers are avoiding too many technical investments and are more likely to use stacks that are lean:
1. Most marketers use fewer than five pieces of technology in their tech stacks, and 90% keep it under 10 total tools.
2. Marketers use tools that support multiple channels more than tools that are used for a single channel.
3. The marketing team controls these tools, not the IT department, with 68% of marketing departments responsible for MarTech procurement and oversight.
4. Marketers use the tools in their tech stacks monthly, and very few tools go unused.
5. Most companies use MarTech to support both digital and offline marketing.
The key to an effective marketing technology strategy is keeping your tech stack small, but robust enough to engage customers and prospects both online and offline. Efficient, nimble tech stacks allow marketers to focus on their customers and seamlessly engage them wherever they may be.
Based on this data, we’ve identified five rules that we’ll highlight over the next 6 weeks that marketers can follow to build technology systems that empower marketing departments to operate at peak efficiency, leaving more time for creativity.
