How Healthy Is Your B2B Martech Innovation Stack?

We’ve long held that the impact of technology plays a significant role in marketing impact. At this stage, every company has a website, a search program and email campaigns. B2B digital marketers are all doing the same things. Finding competitive advantage in many ways can be found at the intersection of marketing and technology – by applying nuance and additional sophistication to the everyday campaigns run by our competitors.

But what tools work best? Where should we invest our energies and precious time in uncovering that impact? It’s overwhelming for marketers today, particularly when you consider the explosion in martech tools available today.

One of the most common ways to illustrate the proliferation – and the sense that we can’t do everything at once – is the Martech 5000 chart, shown below. A collection of now-tiny logos of martech software tools, when it was first published in 2011 it contained just 150 logos. Today, despite its name, the most recent version published comprises nearly 7000 individual software tech tools to drive marketing performance.

What might be more interesting is Gartner’s subway map analogy, shown here:

Just as there’s no magic bullet in B2B marketing, there’s no magic technology tool for marketers either. Marketing is an interconnected network of strategies, messages and programs, with one initiative affecting the entire system. Search relates to UX/user experience; content affects analytics and real time data. The subway visual reinforces that interconnectedness and begins to illustrate how investment or prioritization in one quadrant begins to impact the entire marketing machine.

This emphasizes that the stack connections are what matters here, the integration of various tools, not just acquiring more software that are hard to integrate and deliver on ROI trackability.

With marketing leaders spending 25-30% of their budgets on technology, as reported by Gartner, it’s no surprise tech investments are getting more scrutiny.

The challenge is no longer whether to use technology, but where to place our bets. Are we getting impact from our spending? That same Gartner study reports that marketers feel they’re only using 58% of their stack’s potential. Marketers are being challenged to deliver an integrated Martech Innovation Stack that drives ROI, rather than a disconnected stack of tools.

The many options are one of the ways GGC is built around a “hyperspecialist” structure, with individual experts who focus on organic search, paid search, marketing automation, user experience, social media. Martech changes too rapidly for generalist digital marketers. The hyperspecialist method enables an individual to concentrate on a given area of digital marketing and develop true knowledge depth and expertise.

At GGC, we focus on drawing that straight line of accountability, from marketing to sales to ROI. Clearly that’s only possible by building an integrated ROI system on top of the right technology foundation.

So the question remains for marketers: just where should you place your bets? What investment areas will you generate the most traction for your program?

Let’s start by making a list. Read our white paper for Fifty Favorite Tools for Your Martech Innovation Stack