With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic pushing the boundaries of digital marketing and selling initiatives, being armed with the right digital marketing platform to help deliver a more customer-centric online buying journey creates that added relevance.
With many marketing and sales leaders reevaluating their tech stack before hitting the new quarter, it is important for teams to invest time in choosing a digital marketing platform that serves long term business goals by catering to various other factors.
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In order to vet only the best digital marketing vendors and make a more informed buying decision on the platform, this quick guide may help:
Current Challenges and 2021 Goals
Before replacing technologies from your current tech stack, it is important to understand the team’s challenges with the current platform they use and identify what their current marketing platforms fail to do.
Aligning this to the team’s 2021 goals, divided quarter-wise, can then help marketing and sales leaders decide whether a new platform is needed to help create a smoother journey, or whether an upgrade is sufficient to help enable the year’s goals.
Shortlisting Digital Marketing Vendors based on Actual User Reviews, your own Customer Reviews and your Peer Reviews
No marketing and sales team has a dearth of information on the various sales technologies and martech available in the tech world today. With all this information also comes the choice of a plethora of sales technologies and martech! In 2020 itself, the Marketing Technology Landscape totaled an approx of 8,000 martech solutions, an increase of 13.6% since 2019.
So how does a team that is trying to boost key performance metrics and digital presence with a better platform choose wisely?
Leveraging unpaid, unbiased reviews based on actual user experience from sites like G2 Crowd, TrustRadius are a recommended solution. Besides using online peer review platforms, tapping into your own peer network can give you a better direction that will help shortlist a solution that is a good-fit for the team.
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Free Trials / Product Demos
To really understand and navigate a tool or product it is important to use it for a period of time and explore all of its capabilities over time. When thinking about adopting a new digital marketing platform, shortlist the top 5 based on the above to then book demos or free trials. Use the demo to understand more about way the platform works, how it collects customer data, how it integrates with existing systems. Gauge the helpfulness of the customer service support while doing this because their helpfulness will determine the kind of customer relationship they have with users like you.
While evaluating a platform during a demo, ask key questions based on revenue attribution models, helpfulness with integrating disparate systems and case studies on proven increase in ROI.
Aligning Team and Other Key Decision Makers
For a digital marketing plan and platform to give a business the desired ROI, teams need to be aligned on what they want to use the platform for and how they plan to extract value out of it: digital marketing initiatives have to work in tandem with overall marketing, sales and other customer facing plans – when picking a platform based on current need, evaluating platforms together will help ensure that there is reduced chance of duplicated technologies between teams.
This internal due diligence that evaluates the scope of this tech investment and potential impact is a key step before diving into a final decision.
Taking a Pick and Focusing on Implementation
Taking a final pick based on budgets, contractual norms, feasibility is one part of the story, a new digital marketing platform has to then fit into the rest of the business’s systems while stakeholders finalize on data layouts, data migration, implementation, etc.
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Making a Change
Choosing a marketing technology for any purpose can be confusing and its often found that teams continue using their current technologies because it’s easier to do so. But in a digital marketing and digital selling world, the right marketing platform boosts the output of strategies and helps save resources; updating your technologies based on new market capabilities, new digital marketing trends are the key to staying ahead of the game.