With Q4 well underway and 2022 rapidly approaching, your company is likely mapping out its budgets for the new year. This process can be complicated, especially when looking at the last two years and their decidedly irregular data. Although analytics and careful metrics tracking are essential parts of understanding where your budget is best spent, 2020 destroyed benchmarks for most organizations. This year has been fraught with miscalculations that make it difficult to reconcile “normal” with the new reality of metrics. 2022 can be better, but it requires readjusting and allowing this year’s data to set new standards.
Designing your tech stack budget comes down to a few key factors that can help you understand exactly what you’re hoping to achieve next year and what you’ll need for resources in order to accomplish it. Asking yourself the following guiding questions will make it easier to outline your organization’s journey for the next four quarters. It will also put you in a position to get the most out of your existing technology and identify what functions are missing from your current tech stack.
Determine Your Goals For Your Marketing Tech Stack
When it comes to finding the right tools (and budget) to make your 2022 goals achievable, it’s helpful to first look at your current key performance indicators and their status. What’s doing well, and what needs work? By identifying how you’re already performing in these areas, you can determine which parts of your process you can continue using and which parts need more support.
Wherever you’re performing well, assess what you and your team are doing that’s leading to success, and think about how you can translate that into other areas. For example, a particular technology might be creating a simpler process to execute initiatives, or maybe your platforms are enabling your team to automate more and free up employee time for more impactful tasks. Whatever the case may be, isolating the details that make the most significant difference in success means applying those standards to weaker areas and improving your KPIs.
In the areas that aren’t performing as strongly, talk with your team about chronic blockers that might be responsible. Your tech stack is only as strong as its weakest link, and if there’s a tool that you aren’t using to its full potential or that you’re experiencing repeated issues with, that can have a major impact on whether your team reaches its goals. Understand what metrics and specific issues you want to improve on in 2022 so that you can build a tech stack budget that equips you to do so.
Ask yourself:
- Which of my KPIs look good?
- Which of my KPIs need work?
- What strategies are leading to good results?
- Is there a certain tool (tools) that is bolstering our efforts?
- What blockers are my team members facing that impact performance?
What’s Holding Your Marketing Tech Stack Back?
After you decide with your team what your goals are, it’s time to have a conversation about current setbacks that need to be addressed. Knowing what you want to achieve is important, but if you don’t eliminate the flaws in the process or technology that are holding you back, it becomes very difficult to accomplish goals in spite of them.
Reflect on the problems that you and your team find yourselves facing repeatedly, and create action plans that remediate them. If it comes down to issues within your tech stack and how your technologies interact with each other, consider the purpose of each tool and determine how you’ve built your system. Oftentimes platforms are added because of the potential value they can bring to the team, but implementing something new into your stack requires prolonged maintenance.
Ask yourself:
- What issues is my tech stack presenting?
- Are these issues process-based, or is the technology not performing sufficiently?
- Does my organization have effective action and remediation plans that prevent repeat errors?
- Is my tech stack facing breakdowns in its integrations between tools?
Know Your Data
Data is a marketer’s guide, so it’s vital to get an idea of what your organization’s 2021 data looked like so you can create goals for 2022. For example, start by noting how many visitors your website had this year and how many form fills you received as baseline metrics to improve upon next year.
Evaluate any errors that may have cost you leads and revenue—finding out which of your software is the culprit allows you to narrow down what fixes need to be made. Any issues affecting these aspects of your process are top priority because of how costly they can be. Go in with a good understanding of how your website and efforts performed in 2021 because these metrics are crucial to making solid plans for next year.
Ask yourself:
- What are the most important metrics we want to focus on?
- How did these metrics perform in 2021? Which were good, and which weren’t?
- Are any of our software products creating lost leads?
- What fixes need to be made to reach our goals next year?
Critique Your Tech Stack
All of these questions have given you a good foundation to assess your tech stack and take action. Start by determining which tech is meeting expectations: it isn’t repeatedly breaking down, contributing to lost leads, or making integrations messy. It’s likely that these tools are worth taking into 2022 and are an asset to your stack.
For all tech that doesn’t fall into this category, reflect on why it isn’t fulfilling your organization’s needs. If there are issues that make it challenging to work with, but it’s a necessary part of your tech stack, then identify solutions that will improve its performance. It’s possible that the solution is to dedicate time consistently to learn and maintain it, along with the other tools in your stack, so everything stays clean.
If you find a tool that isn’t working well and isn’t deemed critical for your organization, it may be time to part ways. Often platforms are added to a tech stack because of promising capabilities, but sometimes the payoff isn’t worth the continued work needed to keep it running smoothly. In that case, removing it entirely makes your tech stack more manageable and frees up your marketing tech stack budget to go towards more effective measures to boost team success.
Ask yourself:
- What tech is currently working? What isn’t?
- Of the tech that isn’t currently working, which ones are necessary for our team?
- What solutions need to be executed to make these tools workable and less damaging?
- Are there tools the team isn’t using or that aren’t critical to the tech stack?
Is Stack Moxie Right For My Organization?
No matter how well-kept and functional your marketing tech stack is, issues are inevitable. Errors don’t always make themselves known immediately, and it’s possible that even your best tech is failing in some way behind the scenes due to unknown breakages or failed data syncing between platforms.
Stack Moxie helps you identify these issues quickly so you can fix them and move on. That means no need for manual testing or fears that leads are being lost—automated monitoring allows your team to focus on other things and get called in when something goes wrong.
If your assessment of your tech stack has uncovered chronic issues, error-prone integrations, or outages that are impeding revenue, Stack Moxie can provide your team with the information they need to solve and remediate these problems.
Ask yourself:
- How much time is spent between departments determining the reason behind tech problems?
- How much time does my teams spend putting out fires?
- How much time is spent monitoring for outages or broken forms?
If the answers for these questions alarm you, it might be time to add quality as a line item to your tech stack.
Most companies don’t budget for quality when planning for the upcoming year. Instead of dreading future system errors and outages, head into 2022 knowing your marketing tech stack is solid!
When you make quality a priority, you’re gaining back time and money.
Free Tech Stack Budget Resources
If you’d like to know more about optimizing your tech stack, download our three free templates here. Our resources will help you test and monitor your tech stack, evaluate your current tech stack, and help pitch new tech to decision makers at your company with a fillable 2o22 purchase presentation.
