Identifying your marketing tech stack is an important part of an overall marketing strategy. This is the technology infrastructure that enables your marketing and allows it to scale. Just as you make investments in layers of technology to build a digital product or website, you need to make similar investments in your marketing.

The Huge Growth of Technology in Marketing

At last night’s Customer Advisory Board meeting at #Agility2015, Ensighten CEO Josh Manion pointed out how the Marketing Technology landscape is erupting with exponential growth of solutions. The famous Technology Landscape map illustrates this, growing from around one hundred brands back in 2011 to around 1,800 brands in 2015.

Simpler times, back in 2011.

Get out your magnifying glass.

This trend is going to continue, and CMO’s are expected master the investment and deployment of these technologies. Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff, famously paraphrased Gartner research, in saying

“The CMO is expected to spend more on technology than the CIO by 2017.”
Source: Forbes

Today’s CMO needs to get really comfortable incorporating a marketing tech stack into their plans, and explaining how that infrastructure underpins the success of the overall marketing program. They need to build or leverage two key areas of skill:

Marketing Tech Strategy
Think of this person as your architect. They can identify business needs and pair that with the best fit technology. They are familiar with the marketing use cases, and with a reasonable set of solutions, and can see the opportunities and potential pitfalls of the various options.

Technology Implementation
This is a person who is the expert in applying the technology. At a minimum, they have a deep, technical understanding of how the platforms work. In many cases, they also know how to do some front end coding and in some cases are familiar with dev deployment procedures, including how to QA.

Are these new roles?

I’m seeing more and more of this new breed of marketers taking on tech-related roles that didn’t even exist, not so long ago. Their skill set is technical, but their focus is on solving business issues, rather than building the core product or website.

For smaller organizations, these represent digital marketing skills that need to be integrated and addressed in a more simplified way. For larger organizations, or ones with big ambitions for growth, these skills may represent a whole team.

Here at ROI, our verticalized experts identify technology that will work for the specific needs of the vertical channels. For example, we know our Email team will have the best idea of needs and capabilities for this channel. We also have lateral experts to identify where there is technology to address overlapping (or sometimes conflicting) needs, like in the case of building a personalization strategy, which needs to operate across several channels.

If you’re scratching your head over what the right marketing tech stack is for your business, get in touch.