As a company grows and evolves, the goals and objectives revive. This allows an opportunity to evaluate the tools you have in place, whether they meet your needs, and what upgrades or new tech stack may be necessary to meet your organizational goals and requirements.

That’s where marketing technology assessments come in: The goal of a MarTech audit is to determine if your current setup is working for you.

What Is a Marketing Technology Audit?

A Martech stack audit assesses your current digital marketing technology and how it contributes to your organization and revenue goals. It helps you understand what tools you have in place, how they work together, and where you may need to upgrade or add new systems based on your goals and requirements.

What are the benefits of Marketing Technology Audit?

A MarTech stack audit assesses your current digital marketing technology and how it contributes to your organization’s revenue goals.

What to Know Before a MarTech Audit?

There are some basic things you need to know before you audit your MarTech Stack:

⦁ The different types of tools used.
⦁ The reason for each of the tools being used.
⦁ The functionality of each tool
⦁ How each tool should be used
⦁ The integration between these tools

5 Steps to Auditing Your Marketing Technology Stack

Auditing a marketing technology stack takes time and requires a robust strategy. Here are the exact steps you need to follow.

1. Get a Buy-In from Everyone

Bringing together stakeholders from marketing, sales, operations, and finance is essential. They know and understand what needs to be accomplished for their success.

2. Gather Information 

Collect details such as vendor names, tool names, owners, costs, usage purposes, integrations, and security requirements. Also, collaborate with stakeholders to gain insights into tool usage, benefits, challenges, and integrations.

3. Organize the Inventory

Categorize MarTech tools based on categories like department, marketing function, contract type, or cost.

4. Identify Gaps

Address key questions like: Are any platforms redundant? Are there two tools that perform similar functions? Assess their strengths and weaknesses and analyze channel alignment with marketing goals. Track platform spending and ROI and pinpoint where upgrades or new systems are required. You can replace or update platforms that underperform and opt for cost-effective alternatives when platforms offer similar functionalities.

5. Plan and Review

Regularly update your MarTech stack to keep it in line with long-term goals and evolving needs. Ensure your stack remains current with advancements in technology.

Conclusion

Periodically auditing your organization’s MarTech stack ensures you use your tools best. In a landscape where new technologies emerge daily, it’s important to understand what you have in place and whether it’s still relevant. Anytime you feel the organization setup is not working as expected, look for an audit consultant.

Digital Di Consultants can help you audit your marketing tech stack and plan your future MarTech strategy roadmap. Book a call with us to optimize your stack for operational performance and financial efficiency.

FAQs

1. How Often Should You Conduct a MarTech Audit?

How often you want to audit your MarTech stack depends on your capabilities. You can do it annually or if you feel the processes are not working as expected. With the right marketing automation consultant, a sustainable process, and clear governance, your team can effortlessly capture important information about their tools and vendors.

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Understanding Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed to automate repetitive marketing tasks. This allows marketers to more efficiently nurture leads, convert sales, drive ROI and adapt campaigns without manual oversight of routine processes. automation helps businesses scale their marketing and standardize processes using digital data and tracking.

Platforms provide features like email templates, landing pages, lead scoring, campaign creation workflow builders and integration with sales and CRM systems. Leading automation providers include HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot. Tools provided by these b2b marketing consultants and digital data consultancies act as a marketing automation specialist to help streamline campaign management.

Demonstrating Marketing Automation Through Real-Life Examples

Here’s a common example of marketing automation:

A prospect fills out a form to download an e-book from your website. They provide their name, email and other information. Your automation platform automatically captures this lead information and initiates a pre-set workflow.

This could involve adding them to certain email lists and nurture tracks and excluding them from others. It may score their lead based on information provided. A digital data consultancy could help analyze the lead scoring methodology to determine the optimal thresholds for identifying marketing qualified leads. Over the next few weeks, a series of 5 carefully timed emails is automatically deployed to nurture that lead. The messages educate readers further and aim to convert them into marketing qualified leads by directing them to book sales appointments.

Automated lead scoring also helps determine if they become viable sales qualified leads to contact directly. If lead scores don’t rise sufficiently, the automated nurturing cycle repeats to continue engaging them. If lead scores hit thresholds, the contact is automatically handed off to sales reps as a highly qualified lead.

What Makes Marketing Automation Useful?

There are many powerful reasons brands make automation for marketing a centerpiece of customer engagement:

• Consolidates customer data from all channels and CRM in one place to enable smarter marketing and sales decisions and tracking. Provides a holistic view of the customer journey.
• Automatically nurtures leads over time to become sales qualified without direct manual oversight.
• Frees up significant time for marketers and sales teams to focus on more valuable priorities than basic lead follow-ups.
• Helps ensure standardized, respectable contact with every lead to represent brand effectively.
• Enables running and optimizing many outreach campaigns simultaneously.
  Gives insights needed to determine the highest converting marketing assets and tactics.

Platforms and Tools

Many software options provide automation for marketing capabilities. When reviewing providers, it can be helpful to consult with a b2b marketing consultant to explore which platforms would best align to your budget, target customer profiles, in-house expertise and existing martech software stack. A marketing consultant that specializes in b2b can provide valuable outside guidance when it comes to selecting and implementing the right automation tools for your business needs and growth goals.

Here are some top marketing automation platforms to consider:

• HubSpot – Comprehensive inbound marketing and sales software with intuitive automation workflows. Strong mid-market presence.
• Marketo – Fully-featured marketing automation for enterprise brands. Complex but powerful. Adobe also offers Marketo Engage in its Experience Cloud.
• Pardot – Salesforce’s marketing automation offering tightly integrated with Salesforce CRM. An enterprise-ready solution.
• Ontraport – Affordable and intuitive solution well suited to small businesses’ needs.
• Zoho Campaigns – Capable marketing automation with approachable pricing for mid-market firms. Integrates with Zoho’s wider business app ecosystem.

The key is choosing a platform aligned to your resources and needs that can ultimately scale with business growth over time. Many platforms offer free trials to experience capabilities firsthand.

Next important steps involve mapping your ideal automated workflows, importing contacts, configuring lead scoring methodologies, establishing data tracking, designing campaign templates and assets to feed the system, integrating complementary technologies, and equipping marketers to run the software day-to-day.

While the setup process takes concerted planning, refined automation for marketing ultimately lets your business engage customers like never before possible at scale. Approach the beginnings thoughtfully, map it to long-term strategy, and marketing automation will produce game-changing results.

The post Beginner’s Guide To Setting Up Marketing Automation appeared first on Digital Di Consultants.