Future-proofing your martech stack

It may be a bit cliche, but the pace of marketing technology evolution seems to, against all odds, continue to speed up. According to ChiefMartec's annual landscape report, the number of martech solutions has grown by 9% to over 15,000 tools in the market. For marketing operations teams, this means staying afloat on the latest technologies and trends, being ready to deploy new tools and integrate them into your tech stack.

When it comes to future-proofing your martech stack, the question becomes: how do we avoid turning today's perfect tech stack into tomorrow's technical debt?

It's a scenario all of us in marketing operations have been in before—looking to integrate a new technology and finding out that the tech stack we have is fragile, complex, or difficult to integrate with.

This raises the question: what does future-proof really mean when it comes to martech stacks? I think it has to do with four things. First, the ability to integrate new tools into the tech stack seamlessly. Next, the ability to onboard employees to use that technology, ensuring adoption across the organization. The technology also should fit within your current and future workflows—how you go about launching campaigns should, by and large, remain the same, even if the underlying technology is radically different. And lastly, the ability to have flexibility in your tech stack, deploying new technology and integrating it effectively.

In this blog, we're going to take a look at how to future-proof your marketing tech stack.

The Hidden Costs of Today's Martech Choices

Us marketing operations professionals love to map out technology stacks, workflows and integrations, understanding how the whole puzzle comes together, and then working on the individual pieces. This is the best way for a MarOps pro to reach a nirvana state.

There is a trap that we have to be aware of: customization. Customization is an essential part of deploying any technology. However, developing custom features and integrations can become fuel for tomorrow's migration nightmares.

The perfect fit can become a straitjacket if you're trying to integrate a new piece of software into your tech stack and it doesn't align with your data structures. Next thing you know, you're working through ETL layers, transforming data, and focusing your time on integration rather than execution. According to Martech.org, 65% of marketers identified data integration as the biggest challenge when managing their martech stack

When building out your tech stack, you need to consider future improvements and anticipate how technology will change. This is a tall order, and something we'll talk a little bit more about throughout this blog post.

A symptom of these challenges is the middleware maze. When you need tools to manage your tools, you know you're in a position where things are starting to get overly complex. This cascading complexity often manifests itself as a series of indirect integrations—tools that transform data in flight from one system to the other in order to enable workflows or automations.

This is certainly not abnormal in the marketing operations space, but a warning sign as well that you're building a house of cards that could come tumbling down.

Whenever deploying technology, you want to think deeply about how it fits in with your current stack and consider the implications of customizations. Simple things like using custom fields seem innocuous enough as it provides us with in-depth reporting that are tailor-made for our organization. However, when we start looking at integrating with other applications, sometimes these custom fields don't come across, aren't accepted, or require data transformation.

Today's choices can create a scenario where we suffer through a death by 1000 cuts. We want to make sure that whatever we build is built on a solid foundation.

Building on Solid Martech Foundations

A solid foundation is the key to future-proofing your martech stack. But what does that really mean? Modern trends are helping us to understand how marketing operations teams are rapidly deploying technology and being effective while doing so.

One of the main trends that has arisen in the last few years is the idea of a composable architecture or composable martech. Think of this as like an insurance policy. Having a number of point solutions that help you accomplish your marketing operations objectives ensures that you don't have any single point of failure and avoid monolithic systems.

Composable martech is effectively using a number of different individual tools or software instead of a single, all-encompassing tool. Even all-encompassing tools like your traditional marketing automation platforms like Marketo or HubSpot are now readily integrating with composable solutions. For instance, if you are propping up a marketing automation platform and you want to integrate with a platform like Clay, these tools are now integrating natively with these platforms.

Monolithic systems can create single points of failure, which can create challenges down the road. Instead, thinking of your martech architecture as a modular system—having different components within the module that allow you to accomplish your objectives—often means that not only are you removing those single points of failure, but you're also using tools that are specifically designed for a given task. For instance, using a form provider because it enables key functionality, whereas maybe your marketing automation platform doesn't have that.

The composable martech architecture is flexible at its heart. Flexibility beats the larger features in the long run, allowing you to deploy new software and new functionality as it arises, as opposed to having all of your features and functionality in a single software. Composable martech also helps to avoid vendor lock and empowers organizations to select and combine tools from various vendors.

However, the composable martech architecture doesn't work without an API-first approach. What I mean by this is that the classic challenge in marketing operations is getting all of your tools to work together. It's great to have one tool that can do it all, but having a suite of tools that all work together and use data as a common point of reference is essential.

An API-first approach means that when you're evaluating vendors, you're looking to make sure that their APIs support the type of integrations that you need. For instance, being able to grab information from one tool and make sure that it appears in another. Think of a scenario where somebody uses a booking software on your site, something like Chili Piper, and they sign up for a demo. Well, that information needs to flow directly into your CRM and marketing automation platform quickly so that the sales reps are aware of the booking and can do their research and prep ahead of time.

This is particularly important during vendor evaluation, making sure that not only does a vendor connect in with your existing integrations, but they have a roadmap and a flexible API architecture that allows you to integrate with any tool set. This is consistently one of the top priorities for martech leaders with 52% of marketers recognizing that their martech stack is an integrated, multi-system architecture.

Because not so long ago, marketing operations professionals could become experts in a single solution and have that buoy their marketing operations career—for instance, becoming a Marketo champion and architect could open up many valuable careers. However, now we're starting to see platform agnosticism take off and become more important.

The ideal here is that the skills used are not platform-specific, but actually general principles that you can apply to any tool and any process. This starts by building marketing workflows that transcend tools, that makes human and automated touchpoints to allow you to complete objectives quickly. As we'll talk about later, the idea of a modular system allows you to be more platform and vendor agnostic, and instead shifting a single part of your process to a specific tool.

Another component of this is the creation layer. The campaign creation layer has often been overlooked by marketing operations professionals, but it's becoming increasingly important. Assets are not only created by designers and developers within the actual tools themselves, but are built in third parties and shipped anywhere. This approach allows individuals to create content like landing pages and emails, and ship them not just to your marketing automation platform, but any platform they need. It creates libraries of assets that can be used and reused across the organization, independent of the actual platform that's sending that information. This is also important because creative professionals and digital marketers may not be users in all the tools that you have.

Design Principles for Martech Longevity

Here at Knak, we're big fans of modular design. The reason is that when you're thinking through a modular system, you're creating reusable components that are not just assets, but actually systems. These systems allow us to rapidly create content and to scale our marketing efforts.

If we apply this modular design philosophy not just to marketing assets, but to the components of our martech system, we can sense a mindset shift. Modular thinking helps to accelerate innovation by helping us create reusable systems, not just reusable assets. So, for instance, having a workflow that has modular components to it—things like "this is how we always handle design reviews," regardless of the type of campaign that you're running. The design review process always looks the same. Maybe it uses the same set of tools, like your project management system, various alerting, and so on. These types of systems help us to scale marketing operations rapidly and agnostic of any tool set that we're using.

At the heart of modular design thinking is also an integration strategy, prioritizing depth over breadth. Having ten deep integrations beats 1,000 shallow ones. To do this, we need to identify our core connection points across different platforms and ensure that the APIs and integrations are working seamlessly—for instance, making sure that the data flow between your marketing automation platform and your CRM is seamless.

The number of integrations that you have is equal to the number of potential failure points that you have. So having a careful and deliberate integration strategy helps you to ensure high quality in your martech stack.

The last point around modular design is having portability, particularly for your data strategy. Having a portable data strategy ensures that you're never actually trapped with any single vendor. Having true data ownership—making sure that you understand the fields that are used, the naming conventions, how data is collected and how data is transported—is critical.

If you're looking at migrating your marketing automation platform, having a map of all of your data connections and ensuring your data is highly portable is important. We've seen things like the rise of data lakes and data warehouses become important in the marketing technology space for precisely this reason. It allows us to liberate our data from single vendors and puts us as the true owners of our data.

It also is important for building up backup and migration solutions. So if something goes wrong, we have the data in a safe, single source of truth destination. When it comes to migrating your software—migrating to new pieces of software—making sure that your data syncs over to that new platform is critical and can be a huge time saver, as well as ensuring that your execution layer remains untouched.

From Martech Theory to Practice

I don't think it would be unfair to characterize marketing operations as the firefighters of the marketing world. We're often called to fight blazes and challenges that occur throughout the day. So it can sometimes be hard to be strategic and grab the time that you need to map out your martech architecture. However, that said, it's absolutely essential that we make the time as marketing operations pros to do these activities.

The Audit

Running a martech audit on a regular basis, whether it's every quarter or every six months, is critical. The purpose of this audit is to map out dependencies and single points of failure, making sure that you understand how the systems are set up, the impact of those systems, and how they integrate with other systems.

Doing a risk assessment to understand where, for instance, data in transit could be lost or understanding any privacy and data protection regulations is important. Even just taking the time to understand all the technology pieces that you have in place—marking off whether they are in use or whether they have fallen into disuse, understanding which users are using it and the purpose of that technology.

First of all, this can help you reduce costs by identifying software that's no longer in use. But it can also allow you to improve your utilization and adoption of these tools. Lastly, you want to make sure that you have a strong understanding of the data going between different systems, where critical data is being populated from, ensuring that you have a clear understanding of the data architecture of these martech solutions.

Vendor Evaluation

It's a good strategic activity to go through understanding your martech stack and the must-have criteria for future vendors. This can be built off of past experience and issues that you've run into. It can also be in accordance with the data governance strategy that you have in place today. If your customer data strategy hinges upon a few key data sources, you need to make sure that any future vendor integrates cleanly with those solutions.

Vendor evaluation can also allow you to understand what the right questions are to ask on sales calls, making sure that you know which integrations or APIs are available to you and the requirements for deploying new technology. It's easy to chase shiny objects, but it's important to remember that any tool that we add into our martech stack needs to be involved in the execution and growth of our marketing.

Implementation Roadmap

When implementing new technology, having a strategic roadmap that you manage is critical. Some pieces of software can be deployed in a matter of hours or days, while other pieces of software, like migrating your marketing automation platform, can happen over several quarters or even a year.

Having a clear idea of how this maps out is critical and ensures that you can manage expectations internally in terms of how this technology is going to improve your marketing and when people can expect it, as well as helping to identify quick wins versus strategic investments. The key when deploying any new technology is building up a head of steam without disrupting your current operations.

One of the other key components of future-proofing your martech is having the ability to have a game plan for when you're deploying new technology. How do you maintain your current execution? Again, with a marketing platform migration, we're often seeing that the execution layer must continue in the old platform until the new platform is ready to go, which can take time.

Martech Progress Over Perfection

Future-proofing your martech is a practice, not a project. It's a part of the modern responsibilities of marketing operations professionals, covered under due diligence, strategic auditing, and vendor management.

The benefits of making sure that your martech system is future-proofed and scalable is hard to overstate. If you've ever had to integrate a piece of software into your martech stack and have that experience go sideways, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. Martech integrations shouldn't be exercises in frustration and data migration. They should be about enabling execution and efficiency.

Future-proofing your martech isn't just about integrating new technology. It's about building resilience as a feature of your marketing operations practice. This resilience will come into play anytime you need new software, but also anytime that you want to make more use of the existing software you have.

A composable, modular design thinking is a best practice for future-proofing your marketing technology. Tools like Knak empower users to use point solutions that are best in class and that integrate with whatever platform that you need to use. They enable the end users of the martech to accomplish their objectives quicker and seamlessly, while also fitting nicely into the marketing technology architecture that you've so meticulously built.