Strategy
September 17 2019
How can we optimize the use of our MarTech stack?
Let's consider three overlapping aspects of Martech: Capabilities - Those that are technically possible in the existing Martech stack. Competencies - Those that we can do and know how to do. Value - Those that will improve our business and create value.
In a perfect world, these circles would overlap completely. In practice they do not.
Features & Value
Functionality in MarTech products has become incredibly sophisticated. Which means that most marketers and specialists have to constantly upgrade their skills to learn how to use them. While some features are valuable for certain companies and business models, not all of them are valuable for all companies.
There are some features in your current MarTech stack that, if used, would create business value for your organization. But the exact amount worth using will undoubtedly change over time as your business, customers and stack evolve.
There arise 2 questions to answer: Are there opportunities to learn new skills with unused features in our MarTech stack that would be valuable to our business? Drop all features and products that do not help you create business results. Just because we have skills to use certain features in our MarTech stack, it doesn't mean we should use them, unless we know we get value from them.
Value creation
Everything we do costs something in time, effort, resources, complexity and/or impact on customers. So if it doesn't add value, it is at least an opportunity cost for other value-adding activities that we could invest in.
Instead, invest in the activities that your MarTech stack enables, learn how to use these capabilities or take in external help to exploit the potential. Mapping the MarTech stack in this way also helps to justify why new MarTech products can be useful. Even if we don't fully utilize the features of the products in our current MarTech stack. (Read more about how to build an effective stack here)
If a tool can deliver positive business value to our business - and it's something that the tools in the existing MarTech stack can't provide - consider adding this new tool to your stack. To develop our knowledge and add value to the business, it is important to optimize the use of your MarTech stack. The most common pitfall is to use features and systems just because you can and have the opportunity. The blog post was inspired by this article.
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