The MarTech market has an overwhelming number of over 10,000 platforms and applications to choose from, and the complexity only continues to grow. To effectively build, operate, and derive value from MarTech investments, a clear commercial strategy and supportive MarTech architecture are essential. This will allow your business to deliver data-driven and personalized customer experiences.

The MarTech strategy outlines the direction of your marketing efforts and quantifies the return on investment of your current and future MarTech investments. The supporting MarTech architecture provides clear guidelines for the development of your MarTech stack, enabling you to identify, prioritize, and plan the implementation of your MarTech roadmap.

The modern MarTech stack covers a diverse array of technologies, including CDP and CRM data platforms, video/web/app/email personalization applications, and advanced data analytics services. Selecting a platform that aligns with business needs, organizational context, and IT architecture requires a systematic approach to break the pattern of implementing isolated solutions.

A strategic sourcing approach quantifies your business requirements, establishes guiding principles, and identifies critical business capabilities. It creates the foundation to shortlist relevant platforms/vendors and drives the procurement process from evaluation and selection of the preferred platform/vendor, review and negotiation of terms and conditions, finalization of procurement, to preparation for onboarding.

The onboarding of a MarTech platform is usually a complex project that involves platform vendors, implementation partners, and internal stakeholders. The implementation project has multiple technical, business, and organizational workstreams that require a concerted focus, alignment, and domain expertise to be executed with the right quality, effort, and governance standards to ensure success.

MarTech implementation management facilitates and supervises the MarTech onboarding to ensure that scope, methodology, planned activities, and assigned resources align with the project’s business goals. Ongoing supervision of deliveries, along with facilitation of project and steering committee meetings, ensures appropriate levels of governance and project progress. Alignment with platform users, IT operations, and management ensures platform adoption and operational efficiency.

The ROI from investments in MarTech comes from utilizing the technology, monetizing customer data, and adopting new ways-of-working and skills in the organization. A strong MarTech business practice has a clear focus on delivering value to the business. It should measure the performance and robust operational processes that drive optimization & personalized customer experiences at scale.

A focused approach to platform adoption, skills, and processes creates the foundation for a strong MarTech practice. Assessing existing practice maturity and performance levels is key in order to formulate clear short- and long-term objectives. Formalizing ways-of-working, job roles, and responsibilities is foundational to organizational practice adoption & operational efficiency. Finally, barriers for practice growth and improved business outcome must be identified and incorporated into the MarTech governance process.