Technology has always played a significant role in changing customer expectations about brands and has influenced the buyer behavior. Luckily, for marketers, technology is also creating new areas of opportunity to enhance brand value and drive higher return on investments. By now, you must be aware that marketing technology is capable of automating, streamlining, measuring, and personalizing. As you gear up to usher in Christmas, make sure your enterprise stocking is bedecked with a gamut of must-have technologies that help you provide the experience your customers identify your brand with. With the number of incredibly overwhelming options present today, there will be several solutions customized to your needs. Here’s the must-have martech stack that you must stuff in your enterprise stocking. Wish you a merry building of your marketing technology stack to suit every requirement.
Why you need a mar tech stack?
The right marketing technology stack will ensure that you get in front of a relevant target audience at the right time with an appropriate offer. The term ‘martech stack’ almost sums up marketing’s trajectory in future; most importantly the convergence of marketing and technology. Interestingly, in 2016, the martech landscape almost doubled and there are no signs of the trends changing in 2017. Before you start evaluating the technologies, you need to ascertain your business needs and decide what you want to accomplish.
Let CRM benefit your business
As 2017 approaches, companies need to ascertain how their digital investments will evolve. It is being predicted that investments in customer relationship management software will grow considerably. As sales and marketing teams become integrated further, CRM emerges as a critical resource. By 2017, the CRM market is predicted to be at $36 billion. A CRM solution will help you to gather valuable insights and work smarter. With actionable, real-time insights, not only can you decipher the patterns in sales, but also track the best methods for reaching out to customers. Selling a product is only half the battle. The real challenge lies in delivering personalized and excellent service. A CRM solution allows you to input specific customer information such as customer profiles, customer preferences, and unique behaviors which further shapes your service and sales strategy. Some apparent benefits of using CRM include:
- Reduced cost of customer acquisition
- Enhanced customer support
- Higher rate of customer retention
- Increased revenue at low cost
- Holistic view of business
- Centralized customer interaction
Adopt marketing automation
As digital marketing channels evolve, marketing automation software continues to play an integral role. If used effectively, marketing automation systems will deliver qualified leads as well as provide data which helps close sales. With a marketing automation software, you can expect increased marketing efficiency, enhanced agility, a more holistic view of prospect behavior, and improved lead conversion. One of the most significant assets of marketing automation is increased customer engagement. A higher engagement rate eventually leads to higher retention and drives brand loyalty creating an overall positive customer experience. It has been witnessed that close to two-thirds of the “very successful” companies use marketing automation extensively and even with limited use, some companies witnessed significant results.
Email marketing tools
As we move from one year to another, we predict that email will continue to remain an effective channel for marketers. Close to 73% of marketers rank email as “excellent” when it comes to return on investment. This Christmas add more than just regular profile-based segmentation. Some factors you need to consider are what time of the day do subscribers open your mails and what types of mails do they actually open. Some may prefer more frequent emails while the rest may like few specific mails. Understanding the subscriber’s interest is the need of the hour. Over half of email users usually prefer to open their emails on mobile phones. Most delete a mail in case it is not displayed correctly. Thus, it is essential for marketers to adopt a mobile-first email marketing strategy. For higher engagement, interactivity in emails has already made a debut.
Consider an effective content management system
The future belongs to those marketers who get their content marketing right. Brands have understood the importance of content and how it impacts the bottom-line. To have your brand focus on more structured content while ensuring that it is aligned with your marketing objectives, put content technologies in place that allow for your messaging to be easily communicated across platforms. An effective content management system should cover all the channels. If well-implemented, your content marketing tool will improve user experience, increase the potential for customer advocacy, and drive customers towards conversions.
Social media marketing technology integrations
Social media marketing is here to stay. Now, you can sit back and chuckle at those who claimed that social media marketing is just a fad. However, social media continues to evolve. To achieve your business goals, you must ensure that you keep up with the latest technology that lets your business transcend this world. In 2016, Facebook clearly stood out among the other social media platforms with 1.79 billion monthly active users in the third quarter. Most experienced professionals continue to invest time in social media marketing. Over half the marketers who have been using social media for minimum of two years have reported that it has helped them improve sales. Most marketers plan to increase the use of video marketing in 2016. Two ways in which most organizations have benefited from social media marketing are increased traffic and exposure. In 2017, it will not be enough to target social media ads. To draw the attention of the audience, they must stand out.
Use DMPs to maximize your data’s potential
Data Management Platforms (DMPs) or Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have become increasingly important for a digital marketer. They help advertisers to build audience segments following which they can monitor the performance of these segments. You need to embrace DMPs if you want to rethink the relationship between marketing and advertising. DMPs are not new, but with personalization being the latest trend, their role is fast expanding.
Create collaborative teams and manage projects better
In the fast-paced world of marketing, it is not easy to manage teams and projects. Marketing organizations today, are fast adopting tools which help in team and project management. The best tools for your business depend on your priorities, team size, and goals. A good marketing project management solution will be embedded with scheduling and task management, file and document sharing features, analytics and reports, custom workflows, and project templates. For managing a project better, online collaboration tools are a good choice. A good team management software enhances collaboration and gives leaders a complete view of the team’s work. Make sure that your martech stack includes the best team and project management tools, which redefine how teams work and ensure the success of projects.
Even as marketing departments decorate the holly, take a close look at these marketing tech stacks. There is no single approach to design a marketing technology stack. As technology constantly changes, you need strategic insights, strong customer focus, and marketing expertise to zero in on the right martech stack. This Christmas could just be the one when you gift your business the tech opportunity to discover new ways of disrupting marketing.
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