Every Silicon Valley technology company loves to brag about its “technology stack” – all the services, platforms, widgets and tools that define its technological presence online. And now that type of thinking is starting to cross over into the marketing industry, as the line between “marketer” and “technologist” continues to blur.
In fact, the talk now is of the “marketing technology stack” – which basically refers to all the technologies used as part of your everyday marketing activities. It’s the group of technologies that marketers leverage to conduct and improve their marketing activities. The basic marketing technology stack would consist of your content management system (CMS), your advertising technologies, your email tools, any insight or analysis tools, social media integration tools, and any SEO tools.
Using a fun tool like BuiltWith, it’s easy to determine at a glance what the marketing technology stack of a company contains. For example, when you run BuiltWith for the BBC UK, you can find out information about their web server, their email server, their CMS, their advertising services and their analysis and tracking tools.
While some of the items inside the BBC’s marketing stacks is just wonky tech stuff, some of it is actually fascinating. It turns out, for example, that the BBC UK uses MailChimp for its email, just like tens of thousands of smaller companies. And it uses Google Adsense for advertising, just like many smaller companies. It’s also experimenting with a tool to track real-time user behaviors on its website.
If you’re not satisfied with the performance of some of your marketing tools, experimenting with your marketing technology stack is a great way to find possible new solutions. Whatever industry you’re in, you could see what tools your competitors are using and give those tools a test-drive.
Ultimately, all marketers are going to be technologists. The trend is already happening. Like it or not, we’re all headed to the cloud, and we’re all becoming experts with social, mobile and big data. Think of how big marketing automation is these days – that’s a sure sign of how important technology is for marketers.
So get a handle on your company’s marketing technology stack! When you get used to thinking in these terms, it will become easier to spot emerging technologies that can really push your business forward in three important ways:
(A) they can make a complex or difficult process easier and more user-friendly;
(B) they can help you measure the impact of your marketing activities, so that you know what’s working, and what’s not; and
(C) they can help you spend your marketing dollars more efficiently.
And that’s really the key to a successful B2B marketing campaign – maximizing your sales as easily, conveniently and cheaply as possible! That’s the true value of a great marketing technology stack – you can swap elements in and out as needed, all in an effort to generate the best possible marketing results.
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.