The digital marketing landscape is evolving rapidly, creating new opportunities for businesses to connect with their audiences.
The MarTech landscape now includes over 14,100 solutions, reflecting a 27.8% growth year over year. This growth highlights the expanding need for flexible and adaptable marketing technology options.
Composable architecture is changing the game, offering a flexible and adaptable approach to building Marketing Technology (MarTech) stacks that help businesses thrive in this environment.
In this article, we explore:
What is Composability in MarTech?
Composable MarTech refers to a modular approach to building technology stacks that allow for high levels of flexibility and customisation. Instead of relying on a single platform to manage everything, composable systems involve assembling the best tools for each marketing function, enabling a more agile and tailored MarTech stack.
Key Components to Consider While Building a Composable MarTech Stack
Here are key components that you should consider:
- Customer Data Platform (CDP): centralises customer data from multiple sources, offering a unified view of customer interactions, ensuring data accuracy, supporting personalisation, and enhancing audience segmentation. E.g., Segment, BlueConic, Tealium.
- Analytics and Business Intelligence (BI) Tools: enable in-depth analysis of customer behaviour, campaign performance, and return on investment (ROI). Eg: Google Analytics, Tableau, Looker.
Headless CMS: allows the presentation layer (the part responsible for displaying the content to users) to be separate from the back-end content management. This means that the way the content is displayed can be controlled separately, allowing for greater flexibility in delivering content across different platforms or channels such as websites and blogs E.g., Storyblok, Kentico Xperience.
Take a look at how we helped Humanforce succeed with Storyblok CMS.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM): manages customer interactions, tracks leads, and nurtures relationships. E.g., Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Zoho CRM.
- Marketing Automation Platforms: help automate repetitive marketing tasks, such as email marketing, lead nurturing, and social media posting. Eg, Hubspot.
- Social Media Management and Listening Tools: help manage social presence, monitor brand mentions, and engage with audiences. Eg: Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer.
- Advertising and Demand Generation Platforms: drive traffic, increase brand awareness, and generate leads through paid campaigns. Eg: Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, LinkedIn Ads.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Tools: are crucial for improving website visibility on search engines and driving organic traffic. Eg: SEMrush, Ahrefs, Moz.
- Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) Tools: help improve website and campaign elements to increase the likelihood of conversions. Eg: Optimizely, Hotjar, VWO.
- Other Components include:
- Data Integration and ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) Solutions that help connect data across platforms like Zapier, MuleSoft, Talend.
- Data Privacy and Compliance Tools like OneTrust, TrustArc, BigID.
- Personalisation and Customer Experience Tools like Dynamic Yield, Evergage, Adobe Target.
- Project Management and Collaboration Tools like Asana, Trello, Monday.com.
- Attribution and Performance Measurement Tools like Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM), Multi-Channel Attribution (MCA).
Benefits and Shortcomings of Composable MarTech Stacks
While Composable MarTech stacks offer a powerful solution for businesses looking to tackle the challenges of modern marketing, they also come with certain challenges.
Pros
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- Flexibility and Customisation: Businesses can choose the tools that align best with their goals and challenges, creating a tailored solution.
- Adapt and Adopt: The modular structure lets businesses quickly scale up or down, and adapt to the latest technology changes.
- Reduced Vendor Lock-in: Businesses can maintain control over their technology stack, ensuring they're not overly dependent on any single provider.
Cons
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- Complex Implementation & Higher Costs: Implementing and integrating best-of-breed tools requires technical expertise and can be costly upfront.
- Ongoing Maintenance: Maintaining a modular tech stack demands continuous monitoring, technical support, and vendor management.
- Learning Curve: Teams may need additional training to adapt to the new modular approach.
- Security and Compliance Risks: More components can mean increased risk in ensuring privacy and compliance.
Practical Tips to Help You Build a Composable Stack
Building “The composable MarTech stack” can be overwhelming, time-consuming and sometimes costly. But with the right MarTech strategy, you can create an agile, integrated, and optimised stack to meet your evolving goals.
Here are six steps to get you started.
- Assess your needs, marketing goals and challenges.
- Choose the right technology and technical expertise that fits your business goals.
- Prioritise Integration to ensure that each component integrates well with others, allowing for seamless data flow and coordination.
- Develop a first-party focused data strategy to ensure privacy, compliance, and efficient data management across all systems.
- Start small and scale gradually. Build a core stack that meets immediate needs and expands as you grow. This helps avoid complexity and reduces your team's initial learning curve.
- Regularly audit and monitor the performance of your MarTech stack and be prepared to make adjustments as new tools become available or requirements change.
If you're considering a more adaptable and scalable approach to your MarTech stack, composable architecture might be the solution that can grow with your needs. Reach out to us for guidance on how to integrate these solutions effectively into your marketing strategy.
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State of MarTech in Australia Report
The new State of MarTech 2024 report aims to provide insights into the short-term future of digital marketing and to provide an updated perspective on our rapidly changing media landscape.
