Welcome to another episode of 7-Minute Marketing with Pam. My name is Pam Didner. I love sharing a little dose of B2B, digital, content marketing and sales enablement, seven minutes at a time.
One of the mandatory requirements for modern marketers is to understand the technology side of marketing or martech. Modern marketing can’t function without technology. There are technologies and platforms behind any digital communications and even for offline marketing. Just take Facebook ads as an example. They have evolved so much, from simple banner ads to processes like using messenger to share content and timely updates with your subscribers.
Social media platforms are continually evolving and coming up with new and creative ways to sell ad space.
To help manage those techniques, new platforms and tools are being created all the time to manage the new capabilities. You require technology upon technology to manage your marketing efforts. You can’t just launch one tool, check it off the list, expect everything works the same anymore.
A great example is voice recognition. We, marketers, literally just spent the past 10 years optimizing our websites for text search. Now comes Alexa and Google Home, in the near future, it will be our jobs to create voice-centric content and make sure that they are optimized for voice recognition. So, we have SEO and SEM, guess what, we may have voice search optimization and voice search marketing. You know it’s coming. Guess what, we may need a new set of martech just to manage voice recognition. Martech evaluation never ends
We need to constantly stay on top of new technologies and evaluate and re-evaluate your martech. It’s exhausting. According to Martech 5000, there are more than 7000 tools and platforms available as of 2019. There is a tool for almost any marketing and sales function or tactic you could ever imagine.
Here are several steps to help you keep your MarTech stack up-to-date
- Clearly articulate your pain points and challenges. Know what you want to solve. How you define your problems will guide the subsequent research
- Google search on your pain points and see what tools and platforms are available
- Research the potential platforms and understand their pros and cons
- Contact vendors and request demos
- At the same time, talk to your colleagues and industry peers and get a sense of what they use
- Pilot or do free-trials before you make a purchase decision
That is one approach for evaluations based on your pain points and challenges. Over a period of time, you’ll end up with multiple tools that may perform similar or overlapping functions. Then, you need to re-evaluate the overall MarTech stack, kind of like spring cleaning, to determine what you want to keep or delete.
There is no simple answer to this question.
My advice for keeping up with technologies is to pursue continuous learning. The more you understand about how technologies work holistically, the more you can connect the dots and the more strategic you become.
The best way to go about creating and updating your MarTech is to know and understand what’s out there.
If you want to talk about your company’s MarTech stack, reach out anytime. Love to have a chat.
Again, if you like the podcast, please share with your marketing colleagues and friends, and leave a review and comments on iTunes.
Before you leave, make sure to check out the previous podcast episodes!
Keep learning, my friends. You’ve got this.
What can Pam Didner do for you?
Being in the corporate world for 20+ years and having held various positions from accounting and supply chain management, and marketing to sales enablement, she knows how corporations work. She can make you and your team a rock star by identifying areas to shine and do better. She does that through private coaching, keynote speaking, workshop training, and hands-on consulting. Contact her or find her on LinkedIn and Twitter. A quick note: Check out her new 90-Day Revenue Reboot, if you are struggling with marketing.
