5 Tips for Selecting Marketing Technology

Marketing technologies are a necessity for achieving success and growth in the digital age.

However, simply subscribing to a new platform or purchasing new software will not make you an overnight success. Opting into the wrong digital marketing technology can increase costs, hinder productivity, and hurt your bottom line.

B2B marketing technology should primarily aid in making your team more efficient at what they do best. Here are five tips for selecting marketing technology that your brand can use today and for the years to come.

Tip 1 - Choose B2B Marketing Technology That Can Improve Your ROI

First, and perhaps, most importantly, B2B marketers need software that can provide actionable insights.

Brands and marketers alike are well aware of typical strategies for netting new leads.

Design an elegant website.

Run an ad campaign on social media.

Create the perfect landing page.

The problem is that even the best marketing team will face limitations without access to the right metrics. B2B marketers need to know where traffic comes from, who's converting, and what specifically appeals to unique customers.

For that reason, your B2B marketing team requires high-quality, data-driven marketing software for your tech stack above all else. Even if new software comes with a learning curve, any meaningful improvement in your marketing insights is worth considering.

The best B2B marketing technologies should feature built-in analytics tracking for your website, profile, and/or marketing campaigns.

Specifically, sites like LinkedIn allow you to build profiles for free. You can then bridge into creating groups or running targeted ad campaigns that fit accordingly with your budget. You'll have access to a continuous stream of insights around the clock, which ultimately help to improve your bottom line.

Businesses can also find success on other social media platforms, email marketing campaigns, or video marketing. There are numerous affordable options for each that will inform you of daily clicks, traffic sources, engagement, shares, and much more.

Tip 2 - Choose What's Easy and Intuitive to Use

The overall goal when purchasing and using digital marketing technology is to improve efficiency. That hot new tool might work well for some companies, but the benefits are lost if it takes the average team member twice as long to complete a task as it would otherwise.

Ascend2, a research-based marketing company surveyed marketers and found that more than half value ease of use above all other factors. This is unsurprising for several reasons.

First, we want our tools to help us become even more productive than we already are. We're looking to eliminate the tedious aspects of B2B digital marketing so that we can place greater emphasis on those tasks more deserving of our attention.

Second, our team members need to be able to utilize those same tools just as effectively. Ideally, we want to be able to share ideas, creatives, and insights without necessarily possessing the same level of expertise with particular software.

Finally, we want to plan and think about how easy it will be for new team members to adapt to our current marketing technology stack. The more intuitive the toolset is, the less time and resources you need to invest in training, which can impact your bottom line.

Tip 3 - Ease of Integration

This tip effectively goes hand-in-hand with tip 2 but is worth taking note of on its own.

The latest, sexy marketing technologies might boast better ROIs, better insights, and more ease of use, but how does it integrate with your current marketing tech stack?

Any time you look to adopt new technologies, you need to run a cost-benefit analysis of what it will take to integrate your existing data with a new platform.

Does the new software offer open third-party integrations? Is it easy to customize your account and establish those integrations on your own? Will you need to back up data and manually reincorporate it within the new marketing tools?

Some of the newest, most innovative digital marketing solutions are prioritizing ease of integration more than ever. For example, the DashClicks platform offers seamless transitions in the following ways:

• Incorporate all data from any pre-existing CRM
• Incorporate any sales data from any pre-existing sales CRM
• Third-party integrations with popular analytics software
• Third-party integrations with popular campaign software
• Ability to incorporate new apps with an open API call

When choosing new B2B marketing technology, you'll want to look for these types of benefits. This will allow you to take advantage of new apps and features, while still making use of your hard work to date without any additional interruptions to your workflow.

Tip 4 - Invest in Tech That Can Scale

As your B2B marketing company progresses, you'll inevitably look to invest in new marketing technologies.

Because growth is your ultimate goal, you'll want to create a foundation for success by investing in tools that remain relevant as you scale.

This could mean taking advantage of tools and platforms that offer ever-increasing resources and account limits with corresponding price changes. As your team and your customer base grow, you'll be able to make a simple upgrade to your team's account without any interruption to the service.

Continued growth also means experimenting with new marketing channels and resources. You may specialize your efforts in PPC campaigns now but may wish to offer services like web design, report building, or improved CRMs as demands grow.

Platforms like DashClicks, Salesforce, and HubSpot offer these types of expansive platforms so that you can leverage the tools you need when the time comes. Because your company data is already located within that data system, expanding and upgrading becomes simple and intuitive for any user.

Failure to future proof your marketing technology can cause your team to find itself in the same position it's in now. You'll be researching better tech, juggling countless account passwords, and looking for safe ways to transfer existing account data.

Help yourself today by choosing tech that will satisfy your needs both now and in the future. This will keep your team mobile, agile, and allow them to continuously improve their skills within a specific platform over a long period.

Tip 5 - Run a Cost-Benefit Analysis

Finally, choosing the right B2B marketing technology for your team can be as simple as running cost analysis.

There are hundreds of free and paid marketing tools available that can aid your team in every area of digital marketing. While many offer tremendous benefits, that doesn't mean investing in a new tool is the right call at this point.

When looking to cut down on costs and improve profit margins, one of the most commonly recommended suggestions is to eliminate unneeded subscriptions or services. For that reason, you will benefit yourself from closely examining how a particular tool will benefit your team daily before sinking valuable dollars into something unnecessary.

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Even if that new technology would be beneficial, you do not always need to leap today. Make a business goal of incorporating new technology into your marketing strategy by a specific date after you successfully reach certain milestones.

When your business continuously hits its marks and finds itself ready to scale healthily, you can look to invest in new marketing tech provided that it satisfies the other tips mentioned previously in this article.

Implement New B2B Marketing Technology the Right Way

Investing in the right digital marketing technology is simple when you follow these basic guidelines.

Marketing rapidly evolves every day with software creators providing new, specialized solutions to different companies. While those benefits and features may seem appealing, not every piece of new tech or software may be right for your team.

Your priority should always be on that which makes your team more efficient and allows them to attain superior results. If the new tech is not directly aiding with everyday tasks or dilemmas, it's not necessary for your marketing stack.

Follow up by researching the tech to ensure it's user-friendly, allows for simple integration with existing tools, and is capable of scaling with you as you grow. Finally, verify that you can safely enjoy all of these benefits without unnecessarily exhausting your budget.