While this new equilibrium is exciting for PR, it’s also a bit daunting to figure out which of the nearly 4,000 B2B marketing solutions your organization should be using.
Lou Pelosi, an advocate for marketing technologies and Entrepreneur in Residence for Storm Ventures, recently wrote an article about how to create a strategic wish list of MarTech/PRTech tools so you can streamline your stack.
Here are a few top tactics inspired by Pelosi’s piece.
1. Start by prioritizing the outcomes associated with various marketing roles.
Viewing an organizational chart in tandem with the business outcomes associated with each marketing role can help you prioritize where to focus. From communications to demand generation roles, isolate the most business-critical outcomes these roles are responsible for so you can find the MarTech/PRTech solutions that support them.
Where are you looking to affect your business, and what do you need to measure, automate, or launch to accomplish those goals?
For example, if influencer sentiment is a priority for your pet product subscription service given your growth goals for this year, then you’ll know to hone in on B2B tools that can help you monitor influencer relations.
2. Consider B2B solutions with notable customer traction, ratings, and reviews.
In other words, which PRTech or MarTech solutions are used by a respectable number of customers? Does that company display customer testimonials on their website or case studies depicting how those customers have succeeded with said tool on their blog?
You can also take into account if the company you’re eyeing up is profitable or has raised several rounds of funding successfully — indicators that they’ll have the resources needed to offer commendable customer support (as opposed to working with a service that’s beta testing and may not have kinks worked out yet).
3. Consider the maturity of your marketing team.
Pelosi suggests evaluating how evolved your organization is with respect to digital marketing so you can find B2B solutions best suited to the needs associated with that maturity level.
“Stages of maturity are often defined as beginning, single channel, multi-touch, progressive, mature, world-class, etc.,” writes Pelosi. Here’s an example of a micro-landscape created for a mid-sized B2B technology company that is considered progressive.
Pelosi notes that the complexity of these micro-landscapes will increase depending on the complexity level of your evaluation process. “Using just the filters mentioned here would generate dozens of landscapes,” write Pelosi. “The complexity further increases as more marketing functions and outcomes are added.”
In short, the MarTech solutions you end up choosing should be considered integral and used across the organization given that they affect sales, customer support, and, yes, PR.
Don’t forget that MarTech includes PRTech, and PRTech = gold for today’s PR pros. You are a powerful arm of the marketing function and should have a say in the stack used by your organization.