Be open-minded and critical of your current stack
I’d suggest that identifying weaknesses in your deployed martech is the first step towards making informed decisions. Why? Well, this avoids basing your decisions on the subjective opinions within your organisation. Yes, your team will give you valuable insights into how frustrating ‘x’ application feature is, but that doesn’t tell you how effective the suite of tools, in isolation and collectively, are in achieving your operational and activity KPIs.
To identify the weaknesses, I’d recommend conducting a comprehensive review of your current systems, analysing their performance vs your business goals, and identifying areas where improvements are needed. This will also give you the basis for a solid gap analysis, therefore allowing you to identify where additional investments are needed. Also look at how your martech is either a facilitator or barrier to hitting those KPIs. Be highly critical of your technology stack and look past the external factors which are often the scapegoat when reporting missed targets.
That review can take many forms, but I’d always put in place a formalised review process that looks at how reliable connectivity is with other martech, and how you are able to attribute marketing successes back to insights or automation found within solutions. You could look at questions such as:
- Did you lose customers due to them having a poor experience?
- If a poor experience is proven, can it be attributed to a lack of connected martech strategy?
- Do you have poor visibility of user engagement on your digital marketing platforms as your analytics software is providing zero actionable or predictive insights?
There’s loads of questions to ask, and your stack is most likely unique – every client I work with has different connectivity, ownership and indeed challenges – but by closely examining the tools and platforms you are currently using, you can gain valuable insights into their strengths and weaknesses. And use this information to inform your decision-making process about where new applications would accelerate your marketing’s performance.