The Questions to Ask When Considering a New MarTech Tool
ANA instructor Mary Czarnecki offers five questions to guide the consideration of any new marketing technology (martech) tool that could be added to your stack — questions drawn from Czarnecki's on-demand training course, "Modern MarTech: Harnessing Technology to Enhance the Customer Journey."
- What are your strategic marketing goals? Martech tools should only be selected based on their ability to contribute to such goals and, ultimately, to the organizational goals that they ladder up to.
- Is there alignment between sales and marketing teams? It's critical to understand who needs to be involved to achieve each strategic goal and establish joint processes for evaluating, purchasing, and implementing the tools that will be used to accomplish them. Also be sure to jointly establish the metrics that will be used to evaluate the tool's performance.
- Do you clearly understand your current martech environment? Ensure that you are not acquiring redundant tools and that new tools actually do fill important gaps in your strategic capabilities. Also consider how a new tool will integrate with existing ones. Conducting regular martech audits is critical to such assessments.
- How does this martech solution align with your sales funnel? If the new tool doesn't have a role to play in your sales funnel, it shouldn't be purchased.
- Will this martech solution improve your current process? Ensure that you have team members with the necessary bandwidth to whom you can assign responsibility for implementing and managing the new tool and for training others on it.
The martech audits mentioned above should be conducted with an eye, in part, to identifying elements of your stack that are no longer necessary. To guide this assessment, Czarnecki provides an additional five questions to consider. It may be helpful to respond to each question with a numeric score, from one to 10.
- Impact: How much impact does the tool have in helping you achieve your marketing objectives?
- Usage: How much time and resources are spent using the tool?
- Adoption: How well are the tool's capabilities being leveraged by the team?
- Integration: How well is the tool integrated with other tools within the martech stack?
- Investment: How much of your marketing budget is spent on the tool.
The guidance above represents just a morsel from the banquet of insights and best practices offered by the ANA's on-demand training course, "Modern MarTech: Harnessing Technology to Enhance the Customer Journey."
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE COURSE AND REGISTER, CLICK HERE