Taking your marketing global requires having the right martech toolset in place. But how do you choose the right tech stack to help you scale?
You’ve defined your digital strategy, developed your campaigns and started rolling them out and now the business wants to take them global. To execute a campaign at scale, first and foremost, you need to have the necessary technologies in place. In 2023, the martech landscape is crowded, with more than 9,000 technologies all competing for your attention.
So how do you navigate this minefield and onboard the right tech to help you scale?
Try to think of these technologies based on how they support different stages of the buying journey. Starting with awareness, you’ll need to know who is in the market for your products and/or services and you’re likely deploying your messages across social channels and your website.
So how do you work out which accounts are in market for your products and services?
Intent platforms like Bombora, Expandi Cyance or Engagio provide behavioural information collected about an individual’s or an account’s online activities, combining both topic and engagement data. There will be B2B businesses who are in research mode for products or services you offer. Platforms like Bombora, Expandi Cyance and Engagio shine a light on who these businesses are and which products or services they are interested in. This allows you to home in on those accounts who are actively in market and tailor your messaging based on what they’ve shown an interest in. No more wasted marketing dollars targeting companies who are just not interested.
What about social, how do you efficiently manage all the different social channels?
Platforms like Hootsuite or Sendible enable the management of all social media channels, the scheduling of messages and publishing of new content from one platform. These tools integrate with all the major social media networks and 100s of applications giving you everything you need to grow your social media presence. Add all your social networks and save time managing your social media posts and content.
That’s all very well but how do I know how effective my efforts are?
Web analytics platforms, like Google Analytics are commonplace in this area, but you can end up drowning in numbers. Remember that data is only meaningful if it provides the information you actually care about. For that reason, it may be worth considering investment in technologies like HotJar or Clicktale which provide data in more user-friendly formats such as heat maps and visitor recordings.
For your middle of the funnel activities, email marketing is likely to play a big part in your strategy, so you’ll want to streamline the production process. You’ll also want to ensure your data is clean and normalised so you can be targeted in your approach.
How do I automate these activities?
The purpose of marketing automation is really as it says on the tin – to automate your marketing activities, particularly email marketing, as much as possible. Utilise platforms like Marketo, Eloqua or Pardot to nurture your prospects and allow them to research your offerings at their own pace before handing off to Sales. Not only does this save marketing time, it also provides Sales with leads that are actually ready for a conversation and insight on what they have been researching. You can also make use of features like dynamic content to create fewer versions of emails when deploying in multiple languages or to different audiences and templates to avoid the need to start from scratch each time.
What about segmentation, how do I ensure I target the right personas in my target accounts?
CRMT’s Normalator platform normalises free text for cleaner, more manageable and searchable data. A good example of this is normalising free text job titles into Job Role and Job Function values which can then be used to drive segmentation. You can also setup normalisation rules using wild cards and regular expressions through the easy to use rule builder. These rules listen for new data that meets the rule criteria and automatically normalises it – saving you time and manual effort. Integrations are available with marketing automation platforms Eloqua, Marketo and Pardot.
How do I launch these campaigns on a global scale, and quickly?
Our very own Demand.Center platform brings structure, efficiency and scale to marketing campaign production, rapidly improving the quality, consistency and speed-to-market for your campaigns. No more emails, spreadsheets and Word documents – Demand.Center is your one stop shop for requesting and managing campaign production.
At the bottom of the funnel, you’ll want to make it as easy as possible to interact with Sales, make a purchase and ensure a smooth lead handoff process. You’ll also want to understand how your campaigns performed so you can take learnings forward into planning.
How do I make it as easy as possible for my prospects to interact with Sales?
Take away the barrier (and resource overhead) of cumbersome forms and instead use the bot or live chat features conversational marketing platforms like Drift offer. Drift brings everything together with a few simple clicks and allows you to customize messaging that aligns to your specific campaigns. You can also receive alerts when customers and target accounts are on your site, ultimately decreasing time to revenue and improving your brand experience.
Ok so I created a bunch of leads, how do I ensure a smooth hand off process to Sales?
CRM platforms serve a critical role in tracking sales opportunities, stages, accounts, and customers. Setup for success with efficient lead management and lead hand off processes into the Sales team. You can also customise your reporting dashboards, integrate your existing Martech and automate repetitive tasks to more efficiently manage your sales cycle.
I’ll want to take learnings forward into my next campaign, how do I access campaign performance data?
Business intelligence platforms like Tableau, Domo and PowerBI enable marketers to import and analyse data from a variety of different sources such as emails, events and videos. These platforms provide real-time business intelligence so Marketing and Sales teams can act on insights they may not previously have had access to, in order to improve the performance of campaigns. Uncovering that critical insight on an account will help to decide on the next best action and may just mean you close the deal more quickly.
Now you’ve put in the blood, sweat and tears to create the campaign, make sure to use technology as an enabler for successful execution. By investing in the right technologies, you’ll not only help Sales achieve growth targets, but also ensure that Marketing learns fast, adjusts often, and knows your market like the back of their hand.