Digital marketing spend has consistently doubled every year for the past eight years. That’s because as society moves online, customer demand for digital access and convenience has steadily increased. 

Not only is it important to invest in your digital marketing in order to reach and communicate with your audiences, but it is crucial to invest in the right tools that will help you meet your goals. 

Doing so will result in an effective martech stack that compliments your user experience and ultimately the success of your marketing initiatives. 

In this article, we outline a practical approach to evaluating the multitude of available digital marketing tools. 

If you follow this process your business will be able to adopt a tech suite that is both cost-effective and optimized to help you achieve your objectives. 

We’ll even show you how to ensure boardroom buy-in and maintain momentum with successful training and integration. 

Following a well-designed evaluation process is the best way to make an informed decision regarding your martech stack. 

For this reason, it’s important to create and keep a high-level checklist and product roadmap top of mind as you explore, test, and assess new martech tools. 

To do that, look out for the following attributes: 

When it comes to cost, the most common path is to consider tools that fit within your budget to avoid overspending. At face value, that makes complete sense.

However, it’s also important to assess how likely it is that the tools will help you achieve an optimal cost per acquisition in the long run. 

In essence, face-value costs matter, but you also need to ensure you’re getting the most ROI out of your marketing spend. And in order to do that, it may make sense to invest more upfront for a greater return down the line.

Let’s examine this a bit further: 

Your branding is paramount to all marketing activities as it:

In fact, businesses that are consistent with their brand positioning across every channel report an average of 33% revenue growth. Thus, you need to be able to consistently reflect your brand in everything you do online. 

This is especially pertinent when your brand is already well-known. 

Why? Because audiences expect to see your brand mirrored in all your external-facing communications. This instills confidence in the legitimacy and quality of your offerings. 

Maintaining brand consistency across all your channels also helps to reduce friction when customers consider adopting your new tool(s) as your brand is instantly recognizable and thus familiar. 

Brand cohesion is also important within your marketing team because it ensures everyone is on the same page and replicates the same message externally. 

As well as being able to customize a tool visually, choose one that offers flexibility in functional design. This will mean that you can manipulate tools to serve your specific needs. For example:

Automating your digital marketing tools will make life easier for both you and your customers. 

In terms of user experience, automation can reduce the number of steps a customer or prospect needs to take to reach conversion. Fewer barriers means they are more likely to complete the journey. 

You can use automation to identify specific characteristics, such as age, job type, or search intent, in order to direct a user through the funnel in a relevant manner. 

On the back end, automation streamlines efficiency for your team by taking over recurring tasks such as: 

You can also set up larger activities once and then leave campaigns to run, including automated email journeys, social media scheduling, and so on. 

This gives you and your team the opportunity to expand your marketing strategy because after the initial preparation you’re able to redirect your time and energy into other priorities. 

Your martech tools can be used to manage a number of platforms and team members in one place. 

This is incredibly useful, as you no longer have to check individual tools or data sources to get a high-level picture of your marketing operation. Additionally, managing communication in one place helps to streamline workflows, reduce mistakes, and boost efficiency.

Therefore, understanding how a tool can help you to collaborate is key when evaluating your options. 

To assess this, ask yourself:

Make sure there will be adequate visibility for everyone involved in order to increase buy-in and ultimately successful implementation of the tool. 

If you’re implementing multiple digital marketing tools it can be overwhelming to stay on top of them all. 

You can avoid this headache by ensuring that your new tools merge seamlessly into your stack and prioritizing integration with your most important dashboards. 

Email lists are a common example: 

When you adopt integration in this way, you improve efficiency and monitoring tenfold. 

If you do end up with several tools in your stack, you need to understand how each is working in relation to your goals. 

Reports should align with:

Consider also automating your reporting. Manually creating reports, especially on a regular basis, is time-consuming and can be inefficient. 

Your automated reporting will allow you to easily build data-led marketing into your strategy. This way, you can avoid disorganized data dumps that feel impossible to sift through and leave you prone to making decisions based on guesswork. 

It’s important to note that true insights are rarely garnered from reports alone. Rather, the benefit of good reporting functions is the ability to analyze your data from a high-level and uncover indications where further investigation is necessary. 

In essence, the insights you uncover in your reports are what lead to meaningful opportunities to dig deeper, make new hypotheses, and ultimately valuable optimizations. 

Reporting functions also provide the opportunity to keep your stakeholders informed regularly. Share only the key metrics that are important to each recipient by setting up customized dashboards or email reports. 

Ideally, you want to choose digital marketing tools that stand the test of time.

This means that the tools you use should be geared to grow with your business. 

We’ve already touched on the customizable options that make it possible for tools to grow with you, but scalability also needs to happen in line with your plans for product progression. 

Your product road map is the perfect indicator of how a marketing tool should align in terms of vision, direction, and planned development. 

In other words, can the tool go all the way with you? 

Also, think about the short and long term goals of your product roadmap to assess how a tool can help you get there. The most important consideration is to look at the tool’s roadmap to see how they are innovating and if their journey aligns with your needs.

The evaluation of agnostic versus industry-specific tools comes into play here. 

Consider that platforms designed specifically for your industry are likely to be familiar with your product requirements and workflow needs. While this can be incredibly helpful at first, the industry-specific angle may put you in a box as you scale. 

Agnostic platforms, on the other hand, are broader and thus have greater cross-compatibility capabilities. They also update their software often to keep up with market trends, which can give you a competitive advantage over smaller, industry-specific platforms. 

Therefore, instead of focusing only on the particulars of your industry, keep flexibility, agility, and innovation top of mind. 

Now that you have your high-level checklist for selecting digital marketing tools, it’s time to get specific.

A great place to start is to reverse engineer your goals. This helps you understand how to define the feature set you need when looking at your options. 

To do this, group your goals by category and consider the KPIs you’re tracking to measure success.

Analyzing your growth helps you to determine not only your overall long-term gain but also the success of individual campaigns. 

To properly assess growth, look at how a tool:

Coupled with insights into the channels and demographics that contribute to your growth, you can intelligently tweak your wider strategy to ensure continued improvement.

Your engagement goals will be unique to each platform because each one has its own algorithm for determining engagement. 

For example, Instagram’s algorithm favors users saving content while Facebook places more significance on likes. 

Therefore, your marketing tools need to be able to show how engagement is performing in relation to your specific platform strategies. 

As such, tracking language performance helps you to determine the success of your messaging. 

For example: 

To ensure your language is consistently engaging, choose tools that give you clear visibility across your platforms and optimize your messaging as needed. 

However, be sure to maintain a holistic approach to analyzing your data. Although the metrics you track will be different, they are all part of your marketing ecosystem. 

Case in point: While high engagement may mean that your messaging is resonating, it could also mean that people are confused and trying to figure out how to get to the next step in their user journey. 

In essence, a wider understanding of your data is always crucial and may lead to more than one key takeaway.

In order to choose tools that help you succeed against your conversion goals, consider whether they allow you to calculate and represent conversion values. 

These include actual monetary values and indirect gains, such as: 

This helps you to understand how each action you promote to your audiences contributes to your bottom line. 

In this case, you need a tool that will capture the download action and assign your chosen value, allowing you to edit as necessary.

Your customer identities help you design better user experiences because you’re able to develop strategies that resonate. 

As time goes on, it’s important to retain a comprehensive understanding of these identities as they often shift and change. 

To do this, select tools that give you a detailed breakdown of the people interacting with and buying from your brand, such as:

You can also track your success in specific geo-locations and discover opportunities in new markets by using tools to gain insight into audience location data.

A digital marketing tool optimized to help you achieve these targeting goals not only supports you in maintaining success but presents chances to correct any gaps. 

For example:

Figuring out budgets is tricky and often determined by cash availability. 

Instead of focusing solely on available cash flow, it’s important to factor in elements such as time saved with automation as well as the ROI your chosen tools will yield.

Thankfully, your digital marketing tools make it easier for you to work out how your activities and campaigns affect your bottom line. 

Instead of calculating fairly arbitrary ROIs from traditional advertising like print and radio, you can see a clear journey from digital project to profit.

In order to do this, first, calculate your marketing ROI by determining the revenue produced by your online spend. Then, determine the cost of staff time to achieve that spend. 

For example: 

If you adopt a social media tool at $100/pm, resulting in your social media manager spending only one hour scheduling per day, you save $340/pm for the same financial return. 

In this example, you have considered both time and ROI in order to achieve the best possible financial outcome. 

Once you’ve done this, you can work to steadily increase the gap between spend and profit. 

Your decision-making process will also be impacted by differing levels of vendor support.

In choosing what help you need from a provider consider, for example, whether you need a SaaS product or a managed service to help implement and guide you through the process. 

If you have in-house experience, choosing a SaaS tool shouldn’t be a problem. Most SaaS tools also offer some level of troubleshooting and support should you need it. 

However, if you’re new to using SaaS tools or need them to perform fairly complex functions, you might consider account management non-negotiable. 

Even after making this decision and picking a tool that aligns with your goals, it still might not offer your desired level of support.

In this case, if the functional benefits are mission-critical, selecting an additional service to manage one or more of your accounts is favorable. 

For example:

If you do choose a managed tool or a third-party account manager, be sure to define who will be the liaison between your organization and the support function to ensure workflows and processes are seamless. 

Once you’ve determined what you need from your digital marketing tools, it’s important that you test in real-time by taking advantage of trial periods. 

During your trials and demos focus on testing your high-level requirements. In other words, ensure that your stack fulfills your ‘must-have’ functions. If you decide to move forward you can explore other benefits later.

As part of your test process, carve out time to walk through common issues. You should do this even if they don’t take place in your trial period to see how the platform would respond. 

You should also include as many people as necessary in the testing process by deciding who:

Note: The people that produce tools are notorious for making their solution look easy (both in general and compared to the competition). They often state that it requires no internal or third party technical support. This is rarely ever the case. You will likely need technical support (both during implementation and ongoing usage) so keep that in mind as you delve in.

It’s important that you take advantage of any support on offer during your trial. Doing so will help you get intimately acquainted with the tool as an expert is essentially on call.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to utilize available training tours and videos. These usually pop up at the beginning and are worth the watch as they help you make the most of the learning experience.  

Remember that it is much easier to develop your skills from the people who created the tool than to try and figure it out all on your own. 

Don’t hesitate to utilize third-party support as well. In most cases you’ll need a combination of the two in order to use your tools to their full advantage. 

Getting the right support means that not only are you equipped to make an informed decision, you are also able to hit the ground running if you choose to purchase. 

It can be difficult to find time for testing while also keeping on top of your daily tasks.

To manage this, especially if you are testing a number of different tools, make sure you carve out time to meaningfully engage with each one. In other words, don’t try to undertake test periods simultaneously as this can be confusing for you and your team.

Instead, make sure to test how each tool performs both in isolation and when integrated with others in your stack. This helps you to weed out any tools that will hinder collaboration or lead to inefficient processes.

Set up a simple checklist to rate how each of your trials performs. 

You may also find it useful to rank your required features in order of importance. 

This way, if lower quality actions perform badly on a platform that does tick your fundamental needs, you’ll be able to weigh the pros and cons and make a decision accordingly.

Even if you feel empowered up to this point in the evaluation process, making a decision is easier said than done. 

With a bank of information and data in hand, you now need to weigh up options, including factors such as: 

To do this, return to your testing score sheets and collate the results so that you can easily compare each platform. 

Use this in conjunction with your high-level checklist to determine which tool(s) came out on top for your business goals. 

Take the time to plan how you will communicate with your company’s c-suite and other internal decision-makers in order to get your business case across. 

Doing so gives you the best possible chance of buy-in from those with the final say. 

In order to make your conversation more persuasive, use their language and focus on information that they care about. 

To do this, consider the high-level organizational goals and note which of your marketing KPIs align with them. 

For example, if your CFO wants to see an annual increase of $1 million in net profit, show them that your digital marketing tools and adoption initiatives will contribute to this goal by: 

You can then move into selling your marketing tool choices by demonstrating exactly how they will help your team achieve the above. 

As part of this process, assign a monetary value to each initiative or tool by working out the percentage of actions that are likely to lead to a sale in a 12-month period. This helps your CFO to visualize how the customer journey contributes to achieving their annual goal.  

Then, when you are discussing budgeting requirements, focus on this ROI first. In other words, present the monetary gains a tool will afford your company before citing how much it will cost. 

You should also refer to how much the company will save by using a tool. To do this, outline for your decision-makers how much time your team members spend on small but essential tasks. 

Correlate this to their salary value and show how much of that time, and therefore money, your tool can save through automation and delegation. 

With your decision made, the next step is implementation. A well-planned and executed implementation process can be the difference between success and redundancy for your chosen tools. 

That’s because your tools can only yield results and integrate seamlessly into your team’s workflows when implemented correctly. 

Make sure that this is a collaborative exercise, both internally and with any third-party organizations that are supporting the process, to ensure everybody is on the same page. 

This phase of adoption will look wildly different across organizations.

For example, the larger your business, the more data you likely have, and therefore the more complex migrating to new martech tools will be. 

But even in smaller businesses, it’s important to get this step right to ensure your tools run smoothly day by day. 

If you’ve chosen tools with adequate integration then it is likely that the migration process will be automated. 

But even so, you should utilize the expertise of platform vendors in order to migrate accurately and efficiently. Remember that this is part of their day job, so ask them for help if it’s needed. 

They can also advise you on the best way to organize and transfer information, as well as how to set up your account so it’s ready to receive it. 

If you’ve chosen to onboard a tool that does not include account support, consider working with a provider or consultancy to help manage the process with and for you. 

Whichever avenue you choose, a key consideration when undertaking migration is if your business can afford digital downtime. 

For digitally optimized companies this is usually prohibited because there is no ‘out of hours’ time period (e.g. customers access services online continuously). 

However, if your business operates strictly during certain hours and customers will not be inconvenienced by a maintenance period then you may be able to get away with some downtime. 

If your old tool must stay online while you migrate over to a new one, consider the following: 

In many instances, it may be best to take a phased approach so that if challenges arise you are dealing with less data correction. 

For example, if you are facing digital downtime on certain functions of your website, migrating functions one at a time will cause less inconvenience to your customers. 

To achieve this:  

Your marketing tools are only successful if they are consistently used and interacted with as intended. 

For this reason, it’s imperative that you build team training into your implementation plan as positive staff buy-insignificantly impacts how successful it will be for your business. 

Therefore, during training make sure to:

In the first weeks and months of using your new tool, it’s also important to schedule evaluation time to see how your staff are using and enjoying it. 

In particular, take note of any insights they bring and improvements that can be made. 

Successfully evaluating and implementing martech tools will help you prepare for the already growing investment increase and customer demand in digital marketing. 

Don’t forget to start with a top-level checklist to make sure any platform you onboard is: 

Then, follow the seven steps laid out in this guide to intelligently evaluate, test, implement, and optimize your digital marketing tools.

The marketing technology landscape is evolving at a rapid pace. While a robust marketplace may seem favorable, this actually makes choosing the right tools for your business a challenge. 

Why? Because investing in a shiny new tool without an implementation and management strategy is like buying an expensive Ferrari and storing it in the garage. You may take it for a spin time and again, but you rarely harness its incredible power. 

In order to avoid this outcome, you must first understand what you need and why you need it. From there, it’s all about calculating what you will use your marketing technology for, how you will implement it, how it integrates with your existing systems, and the strategy for ongoing management and optimization.

In this article, we’ll discuss how to align your new and existing marketing platforms with your business objectives. We’ll also give you some unique tips for how to leverage your platforms’ capabilities to maximize output and improve your digital experiences. 

Knowing what you want from a new marketing platform is key when considering the technologies on offer. Ask yourself high-level questions (with short and long-term goals in mind) such as:

Once you have a clearer picture, figure out how you will center your processes and automation around your new (or existing) technologies to ensure your investment yields the maximum reward. To do this, follow three steps:

Auditing your existing processes is key to uncovering future needs and opportunities. After all, if you don’t know what isn’t working, or has been underleveraged, you won’t truly know how to fix it.

The best way to go about this is to identify what gaps new technology can fill. The last thing you want is getting stuck with something you don’t need or that overlaps with an existing tool. In fact, you may already have what you’re in the market for and simply need guidance on how to get the most out of it.

As you audit your stack, consider the following:

Many businesses are presented with industry-specific options, such as real-estate customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. While these are certainly tailored to your specific needs, they may not have the capabilities of an agnostic platform like Salesforce. 

When considering industry-specific vs. agnostic platforms, keep the following in mind:

Consider how these platforms will contribute to a better customer experience and business growth. Specifically, how will you actually use them, and to what end?

For example, if you’re investing in an SEO tool to improve the technical health of your website (and subsequently the user experience), how will you implement the changes needed to improve performance? 

Or, if you’re investing in a paid media tool to reduce campaign costs and improve click-through rates, what steps will you take to increase conversions of the additional traffic?

Related Companies, a privately-owned real estate firm, came to us with these very questions. They decided to invest in digital outsourcing to help get their digital efforts on track. We first assessed gaps in their existing platforms and user experience, ranked them by priority, and then recommended avenues to optimize and enhance. 

Ultimately, we helped them understand what tools they needed to procure in order to reach their goals, and then laid out a strategy for using them to their full potential. Check out the full case study to see the results. 

Without a clearly defined deployment, updating, and management plan in place, you miss out on long-term results. You may get lucky and cultivate short-term gains, but they likely won’t be enough for a substantial return on your investment.

Along the same thread, figuring out “how will we make this work” is the key to getting the most out of your marketing platform. This comes back to choosing the right technology to grow with your business and adapt to your changing needs. 

In order to ensure you are leveraging full platform capabilities to maximize output, make sure to:

Your marketing technology is only as powerful as the people deploying it. Even if you choose to automate several functions across the organization, those still need to be set up in a way that aligns with your needs. Documentation ensures that everybody is on the same page. 

And training, whether in-person or video calls, adds context around your documentation and allows for follow-up questions and real-time feedback. 

Make sure to consistently update your training to ensure it doesn’t go outdated and answers FAQs and use-case queries as they arise.

This may seem obvious, but if you end up using technologies beyond their intended capabilities, you could damage the user experience and jeopardize your reputation.  

For example, investing in a chatbot to manage all customer inquiries, no matter their priority level, removes the human element that is absolutely necessary for customer service. Consider the point of the technology, what needs it fulfills, and apply it strategically. 

If something isn’t working, don’t simply buy a new tool to fix the problem on the surface level. 

For example, if your landing pages aren’t driving conversions, don’t invest in landing page templates right off the bat. Instead, get to the heart of the problem to identify if it’s the copy, call-to-action (CTA), or a technical issue that’s hindering results.

Then, make the necessary changes and A/B test with a tool like ABTasty to see what sticks. If nothing is working, then you can consider investing in a new tool that promises to deliver.

There are many best practices to keep in mind to help you get the most out of your marketing technology stack.

If you can find an avenue to automate, use it. This will help to reduce human error, save you valuable time, and cut costs. 

For example, if you buy an email marketing platform, manually setting up each and every campaign will eat up your time. Instead, leverage its automation capabilities (if applicable) to schedule outreach based on predetermined factors of your choosing (e.g. user behavior, triggers, segmentation, personalization). 

Next, it’s critical that you bring in the right technologies at the right time. This is where a digital roadmap comes into play. 

For example, we helped UF Health Cancer Center prepare for the launch of a marketing campaign promoting an innovative treatment. We advised them to produce targeted educational assets to share before and during the campaign to create awareness and drive appointment requests. 

If they had simply launched the campaign without supplemental assets, it would not have met their audience’s needs. Further, the context and tone of the campaign itself were critical to get right, so we A/B tested headlines, subject lines, calls to action, design, and types of content to understand what resonated the most. 

This leads us to our final best practice. 

A seamless customer journey is one of the most important aspects of your marketing strategy. No matter what tools you invest in to meet your business goals and needs, you should prioritize the digital experience strategy above all.

That’s because your marketing stack is likely going to directly touch the customer. Thus, each tactic that you deploy should accomplish a purpose at a particular point in the customer journey. Your technology should be mutually beneficial to both your business and your customers to inspire loyalty, improve the buyer journey, and drive ROI.

These tactics will vary depending on your business journey.

This is about having the fundamental strategies, practices, tracking, etc. in place to leverage your new marketing platforms and drive modern digital tactics. Don’t try to grow too fast and skip out on laying the groundwork. You will rely on these strategies and tactics every step of the way. 

For example, how are you going to create awareness around a new campaign? Further, how will you support the buyer journey at each touchpoint?

As described in our UF Health Cancer Center example above, detailed strategies and practices to supplement a campaign (e.g. to get ahead of common objections and answer questions) is just as important as the campaign itself.

Consider every stage of the marketing funnel (awareness, consideration, decision, retention, advocacy) and build practical strategies for each stage of the journey. 

As you grow, you should build a framework to create the processes to analyze data, gather insights, and use experimentation to drive iteration, learning, and growing. 

For example, once you launch a landing page, you should constantly check your site analytics to see what’s working as intended and what, if anything, is interfering with the user experience. 

Automate reporting if possible to get daily or weekly insights for number of visits, click-through rates (CTR), bounce rates, conversion rates, and so on. If anything is impeding the customer journey, optimize, A/B test, redeploy, and continue analysis.

Never stop learning, testing, optimizing, and growing. The moment you do is the moment you stop leveraging your marketing stack to its fullest potential.

Before you consider investing in new marketing technologies, audit your existing tools to identify gaps and opportunities. From there, figure out which tools align with your short and long-term needs and goals and build a procurement and usage strategy that will ensure maximum output.

Then, align your deployment strategy with your customer’s needs and keep the digital experience top of mind. If there is an avenue to automate, take it, and reinvest your people power in analyzing and optimizing your tools as needed.

Top Tip: A digital experience consultancy can be just what you need to unlock your marketing stack’s maximum potential. We partner with you to uncover your objectives, help you choose, implement, and manage the right tools for your business, and stick around to optimize your tactics for as long as you need. To get started, sign up for a free consultation today.