Whether you already have a sophisticated stack in place or have just started planning to build a new stack from scratch, it’s always a good idea to start with an internal audit, even before thinking about your martech strategy.
Taking inventory of your current situation might help you to review the platforms and processes you already have in place, but it might also help to uncover capabilities you didn’t know that your current solutions could provide.
To understand how you could use your current stack to its full potential, and see where the gaps and overlap are, it’s key to take a critical look at your stack and conduct a thorough audit.
WHERE TO START:
- Apply a strategic approach when you start auditing your martech
- Get clear on what works now and what would work in the future
- Look at your stack holistically rather separately
KEY POINTERS:
- Platforms
- Processes
- People
PLATFORMS PERFORMANCE
Auditing platform performance will help you get a clear understanding of what works and what needs improvement when it comes to martech. This is valuable insights that will enable you to start planning your short and long-term priorities.
There are many ways to run an audit across your martech stack, regardless of the approach you choose; you’ll need to create a framework for assigning value to specific capabilities that are important for your business. Start by defining the key areas you’d like to measure about your martech platforms; we suggest including elements such as support, cost, adoption, etc. You could either use a spreadsheet to document the process or adopt the framework that we’re recommending here. This auditing framework is focused on taking an inventory of the existing tools and grading them based on pre-defined criteria. This particular example uses a scale from 4 to 10 (if you have any platforms that are performing below 4, it might then require immediate attention and review). The purpose of this exercise is to bring everyone on the same page and provide a clear understanding of your current martech capabilities and limitations.
PROCESSES PERFORMANCE
Don’t buy tech and expect it to solve your problems. Before even considering to purchase and add new technology to your marketing stack, it’s recommended to put in place (or review) processes that will help your team work more efficiently and identify areas of improvement and potential gaps. Establishing robust governance processes when it comes to martech will help to bring cohesion and alignment across teams and platforms.
PEOPLE PERFORMANCE
When auditing your martech capabilities, it’s important to involve all relevant stakeholders in this process. Have a clear understanding across the company about how you manage martech in terms of involving key stakeholders and giving project leads ownership, facilitating knowledge transfer from the subject matter experts, gather and acting on the user feedback loop and capturing opportunities to innovate.
Employee experience is a key area to audit when looking at measuring your martech performance. It’s very important to consider the employee experience when assessing user adoption and training effectiveness with martech.
Creative collaboration solutions are the future in martech, and the rise of chatbots, machine learning, and cognitive capabilities will help to build an effective common ground across teams.
CONCLUSION
Martech success requires significant recourses and effort. Therefore, you’ll want to frequently review and evaluate your marteck stack and be aware about its current state.
A comprehensive audit of your martech ensures your strategy is on track and your platforms, people and processes are performing to their maximum potential.
These audits will not only give you the foundation for making the best decisions regarding your stack, but will help you make informed decisions about developing capabilities and uncovering opportunities for improvements.