Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) face many challenges as they grow. And in our all-digital, work-from-anywhere world, finding the right customer at the right time continues to be an obstacle. But different marketing solutions can help support SMBs as they move forward. 

Here are three reasons why SMBs need to invest and optimize in martech stacks — also known as marketing technology stacks.

Build Your Marketing Roadmap

Many small and medium-sized businesses are unsure of where to start investing in the right technology. Currently over 8,000 marketing technologies exist, and many are competing with each other, while also releasing new features every couple of months. As an SMB, it may be hard to keep up and pinpoint which marketing solutions will be the best fit for your current need, remain affordable, and be useful as they scale. 

As an SMB team, it’s time to ask yourself: What are my marketing strategies? What are my goals? What marketing solutions will help me align with my business’s needs? These questions will help you build your marketing roadmap.

Unite Different Tools for the Better 

Many marketing technologies only offer a specific solution, so it’s common to see SMBs with very complex and disjointed martech stacks as a result. But when you find a marketing technology that allows you to solve for many processes, you can achieve a more cohesive customer experience through unified systems and tools. When considering any new tool, it’s essential to understand its implications and ask yourself two questions:

• Will this technology impact the processes that we need to complete?
• How will this new tool fit in with our marketing workflows?

An integrated tool is only possible when all your teams – IT, sales, support, and marketing – work together to make collaborative decisions. For example, integrating your customer relationship management (CRM) solution with your marketing automation can help both sales and marketing work from the same customer data and sell smarter. High-performing marketing teams have a martech stack that not only integrates but builds cross collaboration across several teams, providing for a unified, 360-degree view of your customer and improving customer experience.

Enable Your Teams to Make the Most of Technology 

Oftentimes, we see marketing technologies under-utilized. In fact, a Gartner study revealed that “marketers report using only 58% of their martech stack’s full capabilities, and that marketing teams that utilize less of their stack’s capabilities report a lower level of martech effectiveness.” This happens quite often in SMBs, mostly due to the fact that martech stacks are replaced or changed too often, or the staff isn’t fully trained on the marketing solutions capabilities. 

For an SMB, it can be a lot of technology to keep up with, handle, and maintain. As an easy fix, we’ve seen SMBs use online learning to help support their teams when a new marketing technology is introduced. For example, Salesforce offers Trailhead, our free online learning platform that can help anyone get started with marketing automation and customer relationship management in an instant.

Marketing Strategies & Technology Solutions that Make an Impact

Looking for cutting-edge marketing strategies and technology solutions that can significantly help your SMB?  Check out our ultimate list:

Account Based Marketing (ABM)

Account Based Marketing (ABM) helps B2B marketers meet buyer expectations with highly personalized campaigns to engage accounts or specific customers with an individualized approach. Right now, 92% of B2B marketers have an ABM program in place.

ABM works so well because of its “long game” approach — it gives so much value to the customer that when they’re ready to buy, you are at the top of their mind because you’ve delivered such a highly customized experience. This is how you build long-term customers and relationships.

Artificial Intelligence in Marketing

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t new, but it’s being incorporated in marketing technologies across the board. More SMB marketing teams are leveraging it to understand their data better. Businesses are leaning on analytics for business insights and efficiencies more than they did before COVID-19. In fact, 49% of companies are using data analytics “more or much more” than before. 

SMBs in particular are finding new ways to use data in response to the crisis. The combination of marketing automation and AI is empowering marketers to discover innovative ways to connect with new customers in the all-digital world.

Unified Platform

Today’s customers expect to interact with companies on a wide variety of channels, both online and offline, and their expectations for these interactions are higher than ever. So how can an organization engage with customers across an ever-growing number of channels without losing control of costs or consistency? How can it keep a sharp eye on customer experiences without adding extra checkpoints and friction that slows the deployment of marketing campaigns? 

The key is to implement a centralized solution that keeps your brand in lockstep with your business. 

At Salesforce, we focus on just that. We build all of our solutions, including our marketing automation solution, on a single platform with tools that our customers need to succeed. As SMBs expand, they can easily scale their marketing automation technology with seamless integration with other products, like Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, giving their company a single view of the customer. 

Our model has helped many SMBs bypass integration complexities. And with three releases per year synchronized across all the products on our platform, it makes it easier for businesses of all sizes to stay up to date.

This post is a part of our SMB Success Series. Stay tuned for monthly blog posts to drive your small business growth!