Marketing teams are finding out what their martech can do right now

by Amy Gesenhues

Before the coronavirus outbreak, Daryl McNutt, senior vice president of marketing for TapClicks, and his team members worked in different offices across the country, with some who worked remotely. Now, with the full team working from home, McNutt says his team is getting much more acquainted with their martech stack. As the marketing lead for a marketing technology company, McNutt oversees a martech stack that includes 33 different tools used across the company's five brands.

Today's current economic conditions are forcing many marketers to reconsider their existing processes while simultaneously having to tighten their budgets. Like McNutt, marketing leaders are searching for new ways to maximize the platforms already in use to get more out of the tools they have without adding more processes or marketing tech to their already expanding list of responsibilities.

We've been making a conscious effort to dig into all the tools we have access to and use the full scope of their capabilities so we can consolidate the stack, he said.

 

Finding efficiencies

We use Raven Tools for SEO, but we've recently started to tap its social analytics capabilities, which we've found to be extremely helpful and lightweight, said McNutt, Using a platform we're already familiar with in a new way has helped us operationalize this analytics data more quickly and effectively.

Another platform McNutt has started using more than ever before is HubSpot. It has blog hosting capabilities that present a great alternative to WordPress, said McNutt, As we cut back on using multiple tools, HubSpot's CRM and content management solutions have also been helpful add-ons.

McNutt says he's even discovered more features within TapClicks own set of tools, including its orders and workflow functions for Google Ad campaigns. It streamlines the system, said McNutt, We used it before, but not as diligently.

 

Reporting: More important than ever before

For McNutt, reporting has become a priority making sure both team members and company stakeholders are aware of how campaigns are performing and the data being collected. He says an important factor that has now come into play is data-integration capabilities across the platforms they are using.

The ability to centralize data into one place helps our team work more efficiently. This also helps us better manage our resources in terms of the footprint of our marketing stack, said McNutt, We try to optimize solutions and tools that work together and leverage the data they already provide so we can avoid building out a huge CDP.

He says some data integration capabilities may not go as deep as a point solution would be able to go, but they definitely get the job done. The challenge now is being able to unify large volumes of data and make it functional.

We're looking at ways we can automate manual tasks and evaluating manual processes for improvement so we can extract the most value from current investments and resources.

Instead of building out stacks, the new rule of thumb is efficiency: Consolidating platforms and taking full advantage of available integrations and add-ons for your existing marketing tools. That also means reaching out to your current list of vendors to find out if there are any features being offered free of charge or at a discounted rate during the coming months. McNutt said his company is currently supporting its customers by giving them access to tools in its own martech stack, like Raven and iSpionage, to try for free over the next three to six months.

Article originally posted by Martech Today on April 9, 2020