Whether you are a marketing giant or whether you have a “lean and mean” marketing team, your marketing technology architecture is crucial to success.
Why? After all, marketing is all about getting people into the funnel: that journey that begins at knowledge of your service, and leads them all the way through to a purchase of some kind. What does a MarTech architecture have to do with that? A lot.
The first step to getting people into the funnel is to generate awareness. Digital can be targeted, agile, and less expensive than many traditional methods of advertising.
A blended marketing strategy that combines both organic social media and paid digital media can be an effective approach for attracting prospects. Depending on your needs, there are a number of great platforms available to help manage your social media accounts.
For paid digital media, consider a three-pronged approach consisting of paid search ads, paid social ads, and display advertising. Digital paid media is important for several reasons:
- It exposes your message to new audiences
- It amplifies awareness of your “owned media”
Once you build awareness, the next step is to invite prospects to enter the marketing funnel by getting them to visit your website.
For most enterprises, the majority of consumer interaction happens through their website. You can think of your website as the equivalent to your business’s storefront. Your website is the medium through which most prospects will form their first impression.
Now you’ve got a great website and you’ve invited your prospects to enter the marketing funnel. What’s next? You have to move your prospects down the marketing funnel and convert them to paying customers. An important tactic to keep in mind is to ensure that every interaction the customers have with you is outstanding.
What’s the final step? Measure, measure, measure! This means doing in-depth analysis of and reporting on key performance indicators that demonstrate how effectively an organization is achieving key business objectives. For example, at UCLA Extension we measured performance by evaluating web analytics at the department level and business analytics at the institutional level. For our web analytics, we used Google Analytics, which provides insight and data visualization for our website.
We also used a business intelligence software to provide insight into areas such as predictive modeling and to ensure key decision makers have the insight they need to make the right choices for UCLA Extension.
Great marketing begins with great strategy, but all the strategy in the world can fall short without the proper infrastructure. And that’s where it pays off to invest in Marketing Technology Architecture for success.
An Example of Marketing Technology Architecture
