How to Choose the Right MarTech Platform for Your Business

MarTech platforms have played a key role in how businesses engage with customers and understand their needs. Adobe, salesforce, Hubspot are major players in this, but today, there are nearly 11,000 MarTech platforms available, all helping businesses improve their relationships with customers. From enhancing conversations and support to messaging capabilities, the impact of MarTech is vast.

Here’s the question: With so many capabilities, can a business or enterprise afford to use 100+ tools?

The ROI could be greatly impacted.

This is why it’s crucial to carefully select the right MarTech tools and understand how to choose them. Selecting the right MarTech tools and utilizing them effectively is directly related to ROI. More importantly, the wrong martech tools can harm your objectives if they don’t align with your goals.

Let’s learn more about various MarTech tools, how they can help you achieve your business goals, and how to select the right ones.

Here are some MarTech tools:

Below are some enterprise MarTech tools that help improve customer engagement, analytics, marketing and few more 

• Analytics: Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics – Analytics platforms help you track users’ journeys, channels, and behavior.
• Personalization: Adobe Experience Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, MoEngage – These tools help you customize messages based on segmentation and behavior, making interactions feel personal and meaningful.
• Customer Journey: Adobe RTCDP – This provides a 360° view of your customer, showing where they came from, what they are interested in, and how they interact. The best part? It can even connect with offline data.
• Customer Retention: Adobe Target, LoyaltyLion – These tools help you design loyalty programs to turn customers into lifelong advocates

Key Things to Know Before Buying a MarTech Tool

1. Align Your Goals with the Right Technology

Every business will have some objectives to achieve, whether in the short or long term. You may be asked to improve customer retention, increase inquiries, enhance customer experience, and more.

Most objectives in today’s world begin with selecting the right technology, training people to use it, and utilizing it to achieve the desired results.
To select the right platform, you need clear objectives. Here’s how to get started, ask yourself some simple questions:

• Are you looking to increase sales, improve customer engagement, or manage data better?
• Do you find it hard to track customer behavior, or are your campaigns not performing well?
• Do you need tools that are easy to use, or ones that can handle more complex tasks?

Once you have a clear objective, selecting the right tool to make the job easier will become much clearer. 

2. Assess Your Current Martech Stack

Before buying any new MarTech tool, start with a thorough audit of your existing stack. Include all stakeholders and departments in this assessment to get a complete picture.

• Tools purchased by other teams may already have the features you need or offer add-ons for customization.
• Identify tools used by multiple departments and consolidate them to reduce costs while adding necessary users.
• Look for tools that are not up to date, such as using an older version instead of upgrading and assess if an update would be more effective than a replacement.
• Identify tools that offer integration options, APIs, or Zapier connections that could meet your current needs without requiring a new purchase.

A proper martech audit will help you allocate your budget wisely, knowing where to invest and where to cut costs.

3. Map out the current process & identify gaps

If you have heard about any tools or if you noticed a trend, don’t make the major mistake that many are doing right now by buying them asap due to FOMO.
Because just buying it without understanding what the current gap is will definitely affect your MarTech ROI, here is what you should do,

1. List out the key activities that your marketing team handles (e.g., email campaigns, lead nurturing, social media posts, content creation, SEO, etc.).
2. Break down how each task is completed step-by-step.
3. Identify bottlenecks on where your team is facing the biggest challenges. For example:

• Manual data entry
• Lack of coordination between tools
• Time-consuming reporting
• Difficulties in tracking and managing leads across multiple channels

Once you’ve listed this out, now think: Which tasks are repetitive and time-consuming that could benefit from automation?

• Automatically sending follow-up emails based on user behavior.
• Automating the scheduling of posts and managing engagement.
• Using AI to automatically segment leads based on behavior.
• Automating performance reports to save time and increase accuracy.
  

Now create a flowchart mapping your ideal workflow visually. Draw a diagram showing your current marketing processes, identifying where automation can be applied, and where integration with other tools is necessary. Once you have this in your hand, you will have a complete picture of where the gap is and what is needed to make a decision.

5 Factors That Help You Select the Right MarTech Tool

Once you have a clear objective & the tools available to achieve the same, there are a few major things you need to consider before deciding to add them to the martech stack.

1. Feasibility of integration

Having separate tools for different objectives is fine, but they must be interconnected to ensure a seamless flow of data and insights.

For example:

• An email marketing tool should share email delivery and open rate data with a customer journey tool.
• The customer journey tool should, in turn, provide feedback to the email tool on how recipients interacted post-click (e.g., immediate bounces or further engagement).
• Both tools should also feed data into a personalization platform, ensuring campaign performance insights are used to tailor future interactions.

For this to work effectively, every technology in the stack must integrate seamlessly. Without proper integration, tools will operate in silos, leading to fragmented customer communication and suboptimal results.

When evaluating any technology, it’s crucial to assess its integration capabilities, not just whether it integrates, but how well it facilitates real-time, actionable data exchange.

2. Save Time with Smart Automation

With the rise of AI, most MarTech platforms have integrated AI to provide real-time insights and automate routine tasks. Your MarTech stack should include these capabilities—ensure the tool can automate regular tasks effectively.

Platforms like Salesforce offer a range of automation tools that simplify daily operations. For example:

• Workflows in Salesforce can automate tasks like sending notifications to internal teams.
• Process Builder enables automation without requiring coding.

Such automation capabilities are essential to consider, especially given the pricing of these tools.

3. Ability to handle increased demand

When your business evolves over a period the tools you are adding to the stack should have the capability to handle huge amounts of data, usage, and more users to match the demand.

Say for instance,

• If you have a CRM, it should be able to manage and store more customer records without performance issues. It should also handle more complex customer journeys and enable personalized communication at scale.
• As the volume of data you collect increases, your analytics tools need to be able to process and analyze large datasets efficiently. They should also support deeper insights into customer behavior and trends as your business scales.

In short, you need to ensure that the MarTech tools you choose can grow with your business, support increased volume, and adapt to your evolving marketing needs. This prevents you from needing to switch tools frequently as your business matures, which can be costly and disruptive.

4. Cost vs ROI

Let’s be realistic, most of the MarTech platforms are very costly. Hence, it becomes important to do the ROI calculation as a basic benchmark for making that investment. Here’s how you can do that:

• Consider what you have paid for purchasing and setting up the tool, installation, configuration, and customization costs.
• MarTech tools often require ongoing maintenance to stay up-to-date, secure, and functional. This may involve regular updates, bug fixes, and system enhancements.
• Training your team also required since it involves courses, certification & time required

To assess ROI, based on investment, follow these:

Assess whether the tool is assisting you in achieving your marketing goals. These may include improving campaign performance, increasing customer engagement, more leads, or better customer insights.

Tools should assist in optimizing and automating processes to save either time or cost. For example, automating email marketing or customer segmentation saves manual effort on campaigns and hence can make those campaigns more effective.

Cost and ROI are about the money spent on a MarTech tool giving measurable, long-term value.

5.  Customization & Flexibility

On all the above I would say this is the most important feature for any tool. Though the objective of many businesses seems common, many will have their unique needs & challenges. Whatever the platform you are buying, it should have the option to customize based on your needs.

• Some businesses focus more on lifetime value than cost/conversion. The platform should have the reporting & features to focus more on this than default settings.
• Your sales journey also will change a lot. You might need to create more touchpoints & more email sequences, each with specific messages. The tool should have customization options to change according to your needs.

A tool that allows you to make adjustments as you grow is crucial for long-term success. If the MarTech tool is too rigid, you might outgrow it or face limitations in meeting your changing business needs.

Your marketing strategy or customer journey may change over time. You’ll need a tool that can be easily updated to accommodate new tactics, customer segments, or communication channels.

In short, customization and flexibility ensure that your MarTech stack grows with your business and that your tools are working in harmony with your specific needs and objectives.

When choosing MarTech, consider all factors. Buying a tool without a clear plan won’t be beneficial. After all, the tool should help you grow, not hold you back.