How to Build Your Marketing Technology Stack: Your Due Diligence Guide

4 minute read

Upland Admin

As your marketing programs begin to grow, you’ll recognize a need for new tools and technologies to manage your processes. For example, let’s say that you start a company blog and begin to generate traffic. You may decide to ramp up the volume of your content production to bring more people to your website.

However, you can’t just choose any tool that looks like it could be a fit. You need to consider your entire marketing tech stack.

The reason why is simple: marketing doesn’t happen in a vacuum. To perform efficiently, tools and systems need to integrate and share data with one another.

To perform efficiently, tools and systems need to integrate and share data with one another.

As you build your technology stack, you need to do your due diligence. Can you effectively share data between systems? How equipped will your software be to handle your workload as your marketing strategy evolves over time?

Here’s a three-step due diligence process to ensure that you’re headed in the right direction.

1. Assess Your Software’s Lifespan

You need marketing software that can help you now. But you also need these systems to evolve with your business over time. As your strategy grows, your tools will need to keep up. Otherwise, you’ll risk outgrowing your systems too quickly—as a result, you may open doors for even more inefficiencies.

When you build your marketing technology stack, take the time to evaluate whether your software can evolve with your organization’s needs. Ask prospective vendors to share case studies from bigger companies. Rest assured that you’re choosing tools that can stick with your business for the long run.

2. Evaluate How Systems Talk to One Another

Your marketing tech stack encompasses an ecosystem of interrelated tools. That being said, your software and systems need to play nicely with one another. From sharing data to integrating operations, the subtleties matter; unexpected hiccups can easily derail your marketing efforts.

Related: How Technology Has Fractured the Customer Experience

Before investing in software, make sure to seek feedback from technical and IT teams. Understand how data is being stored, how information lives in transit, and what steps you’ll need to ensure that systems are streamlined. In an ideal world, data will flow freely across your marketing tech stack with no interruptions to hold you back.

3. Allow for Contingencies

Your marketing tech stack should be just as easy to disassemble as it is to build. Over time, as your marketing strategy experiences new twists and turns, you may decide that it’s time to replace your existing software with new options. But if your data and campaigns are too entangled with the system that you’ve built, the transition may be difficult—or downright impossible. 

Your marketing tech stack should be just as easy to disassemble as it is to build.

What would happen if your favorite software were to go out of business? What if your favorite tool gets acquired by a larger organization and quality starts to deteriorate? What if an even better solution comes on the market?

You can’t predict the future. As much as you love the systems that you have in place today, you need to make sure that your company is equipped to evolve—and that you’re not too dependent on a tool or set of tools. When doing your due diligence, make sure to assess how straightforward a particular tool will be to replace. What are your contract terms? Where will your data live? What will be the information migration process? Account for these contingencies to ensure a smooth transition in the future. 

Final Thoughts

The process of building your marketing technology stack should not be straightforward. To create a future-proof, and scalable, ecosystems of tools, you need to be thorough and catch potential errors now, before they have a chance to amplify.

The key to designing your marketing tech stack is to always expect the worst for every component that you’re considering. Only then can you be confident in your tools to dynamically support any marketing strategy. 

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