In today’s data-driven marketing landscape organizations are navigating a crowded, rapidly evolving landscape to build out their marketing technology stack. While I recently outlined the core capabilities that are fundamental to providing success for marketers, the process of building a marketing technology stack requires a key understanding of your businesses goals and needs, which raises the first question regarding building a technology stack:
How do you know what you need?
You can only discover what you need by referring back to your larger business needs and goals. Therefore, “what you need” will vary from business to business. A big-box retailer’s e-commerce site may need a product recommendation tool to help shoppers find what they need and a monetization tool to drive incremental revenue. A large brand may be more focused on layering in a DMP to better understand its audience, and personalization tools to improve engagement within target segments. More niche retailers may want location tools to drive consumers into stores. Regardless of brand size or marketing goal, marketers using a holistic marketing operating system eliminate the need of using separate providers, as the technology combines data management capabilities with digital media buying in the planning, execution, attribution, and optimization of digital marketing campaigns.
What does the stack connect to?
When it comes to paid media, your technology solution should ultimately connect to all media available via programmatic. Via your tech stack, you should be able to see all addressable inventory, understand how that available media relates to your customer’s journey, and have a clear view of which media performs the best, for whom, and at what point.
The process of buying media, running ads, and analyzing results used to be a very disjointed process. You’d have to call the agency or the ad rep, wait a week for them to return your call, and then fill out an I/O before your ads could run. Audience data had to be manually analyzed, insights manually extrapolated. From there, performance analytics solutions could be cobbled together between disparate players with paper clips and glue. Reports were cut and pasted into PowerPoint to create a “dashboard” so you could see the full lifecycle of your campaign.
With a platform such as TerminalOne Marketing Operating System™ everything can be handled from your desktop – from the selection of media, targeting, and a full suite of analytics catered to your business goals.
How do you integrate solutions into your stack?
The partner you select for the foundational layer of your marketing stack will be a tremendous help as you continue building your marketing stack. Choosing partners that will add value to your marketing practice and integrating them into your stack involves testing and vetting various solutions. MediaMath’s OPEN Partner Marketplace strives to connect marketers with data and media partners to make it easier and faster to work with your chosen partners. MediaMath clients are able to incorporate partners’ best-of-breed solutions into their marketing with out having to manage multiple vendor relationships on their own.
For all the reasons outlined above, we advise marketers to select a technology solution like TerminalOne Marketing Operating System™ that drives efficiency for marketers by combining essential marketing capabilities into one solution.
This post is the ninth in a series for marketers with an understanding of programmatic technology who are looking to step it up. Keep up with this series by following the Step It Up Series on the blog.
Do you have what it takes to integrate programmatic technology more deeply into your business strategy? Take our quiz to identify your level of programmatic sophistication and get to the next level.