Currently, digital tools evolve at a frantic pace. We can aspire to stay reasonably updated, but it’s really complicated to always be up to date with all the advances. Necessarily, we live facing the difficulty of having to make decisions amid an environment of constant change and in full expansion of the digital boundaries.
Building a martech stack is not an exercise about incorporating many solutions, but about choosing a set of tools that, properly combined, can respond to the specific circumstances and needs of an organization. We must be careful because it’s a path where mistakes can be very expensive, whether in time or money.
What do we understand by “martech stack”?
When we talk about martech stack, we refer to the set of technological solutions that a company uses simultaneously to execute, measure, and optimize its communication, marketing, and sales actions.
The term comes from marketing technology stack and although there is a temptation to associate the concept with large corporations with hefty budgets, the truth is that any SME needs to have its own. What about companies that have a website they never update and only use Excel to track business opportunities? Well, that’s their martech stack.
We can refer first to the website and all the elements that define it (CMS, Page Builder, the ocean of available plugins…) and continue with the CRM, the email marketing platform, analytics tools, LLMs, social media content managers, integration points with office tools, and many other pieces that for time economy reasons are not worth listing here. Let’s understand that it’s a really large universe of solutions.
The key is not having them all, but choosing well and ensuring that the chosen pieces are well connected so they fulfill their function in the best possible way. The more different tools, the more chances they won’t understand each other.
Factors that determine it
This is not a lottery and there is no single winning combination. The ideal stack has a lot to do with the designer having a clear vision of what they want to achieve and at what stage of development the organization that must operate it is. Additionally, we must keep in mind that learning curves exist and that usability is a key factor that we should always consider when making decisions.
We must know that a small team or one just starting with digitalization cannot afford to operate complex tools that require a lot of configuration or maintenance. It’s not the same to implement a CRM for the first time as it is to replace a previous system. In a B2B sales environment with complex sales, personalized follow-up is more important than mass acquisition and therefore, the instruments to use will not be the same. Keep in mind that tools without connectivity generate information silos and that not everything is interoperable in this life (or at least not at a reasonable cost). And last but not least: the budget always has its limits and we must adapt to them.
Flee from Frankenstein
It has happened to a greater or lesser extent to all of us who are curious and like to try all the tools we hear about (such as Sprinklr). We must flee from the risk of assembling our own Frankenstein piece by piece. First, because it’s not a functional creature and second because it’s easy to become attached to it.
The “Frankenstein stack” is a monster that duplicates or triplicates functionalities, loses data or creates it contradictorily, generates unnecessary manual processes, is plagued with technical incompatibilities and ultimately, generates confusion and inefficiency around it.
Its problem doesn’t lie so much in the number of tools, but in the disconnection between them. It multiplies effort instead of reducing it and well, that’s exactly the opposite of what technology should do. Entropy already complicates things enough, don’t play its game.
The importance of having a unified vision
Efficiency arrives when tools work as a unified system and not as islands. And even better, it arrives when tools work for you and not the other way around. This is where integrated platforms make the difference.
At this point, it must be said that, for the vast majority of companies, Hubspot is a tremendously solid and affordable solution where you can operate an excellent CRM, work high-level email marketing, automate flows based on behavior, measure almost everything you can think of in a segmented way, and operate with many other functionalities that few need to reach. Its modular proposal allows you to grow step by step and you can start getting to know the tool without paying a license to go deep with it when you feel ready. It’s also necessary to say that it has great training resources and operates in price ranges that are more than reasonable in relation to what it can bring you.
Furthermore, it’s an “industry standard” solution and owned by a company that won’t stop investing in development and updates, which results in its interoperability with many other complementary tools that appear day after day. And no less important, it’s also interoperable between communication agencies and industry professionals.
As we believe it’s important to have criteria and a vision, we’ll express it: in our opinion and for the vast majority of companies, Hubspot is a great option when we want to establish the hard core of the martech stack to work with for a long time.
Some practical criteria for tool selection
First of all, any technology we adopt must be easy to use and have a reasonable adoption curve. If it connects natively with what you’re already using, much better. That it has good technical support and training resources. That you can start with the basics and add features as you need them. And finally, that it be transparent regarding costs.
Technology, as much as we like it, is not an objective in itself, it’s a vehicle with which to transit towards these. Therefore, before making any decision, we must think about the real problems we need to solve, who will use the tool and how often (whoever doesn’t have some underutilized or directly abandoned license, let them cast the first stone), how it will integrate with what we already have, and how you will measure its impact. It’s important to grow step by step and consistently. There’s no single valid sequence of actions, but it’s obvious that nowadays the first thing is to have a good website that positions correctly and is integrated via forms with a CRM, however basic it may be. From this point, everything can be discussed.
Building a martech stack appropriate to the circumstances is a balancing exercise where it’s about understanding the business well, the team’s capabilities, and the objectives to pursue. Prioritizing integration, avoiding accumulation, and remembering that mature, accessible, and scalable solutions already exist.
Emprendedor y profesional con experiencia en sectores como las agencias digitales, la comunicación corporativa, la industria musical y las administraciones públicas. Especialista en organizaciones y desarrollo de negocio. Enfocado en la comprensión y el uso de las tecnologías digitales.
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