A marketing stack, also known as a marketing technology stack or martech stack, is a collection of technologies used by marketers to perform, analyze, and improve their marketing activities. The focus of marketing technologies is to make difficult processes easier and to measure the impact of marketing activities and drive more efficient spending. The stack and how it is organized is based on the type of business and what they find most important to their marketing efforts. The technologies used in B2C and B2B businesses will differ greatly since they use different methods to gain customers.
When assembling a marketing technology stack, it’s important to know which technologies are foundational and should be put in place first. Both B2C and B2B marketers should consider these technologies essential:
- Content management system (CMS) — technology that powers a website, blog, or other relevant web properties where marketers want to engage their customers.
- Marketing operations - campaign performance, data analysis, and insight in particular, marketing operations (or marketing ops) is a key role that will help enable the rest of the marketing team to make smart decisions with your marketing data. Many marketing experts advise that this is a key role to have in place when growing the team.
Other levels of the stack might include direct mail, marketing events, email marketing, and automation, customer support, social media management, search engine optimization (SEO), and analytics.
Developing a marketing stack allows a business to gain an understanding of which technologies are most beneficial to their goal. The stack will also make achieving the goal easier by providing marketing automation. The stack must start with a strong foundation, and then each level that is built up must be able to support the next layers. Creating and maintaining a marketing stack can help marketing teams achieve their goals, trace customer journeys, and streamline their processes.
