Marketing Analytics Tip: The Fastest Way to See Your Digital Marketing Tech Stack

One of the perennial problems we face in marketing analytics is knowing what tools and technologies we have available to us. This is especially prevalent at larger companies. It’s not surprising to find multiple instances of popular digital marketing tools like Adobe Marketo, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, even major CRM software packages like Salesforce Marketing Cloud – with all the confusion, duplication, and expense that comes with running multiple copies of software. I ran into this at a client once; I found they had 3 different copies of Salesforce.com, 3 different contracts. Consolidating them saved the company $1.5 million over the span of a year.

A second major problem in digital marketing technology is siloed tools. In larger companies, it’s not uncommon to find that one department has access to a tool like AHREFS or Talkwalker, and another department is clamoring for an SEO or social media monitoring tool. How do we make sure that we’re maximizing our use of the tools we’re paying for, that teams can leverage resources that already exist, rather than buying new ones?

While we frequently talk about great MarTech governance, great data governance, etc., if you’re starting from scratch, finding out what you have too much of or not enough of can be a labor-intensive process. There’s a secret shortcut that few marketers ever think of, because most of the time they try to avoid it.

Accounting.

Whether it’s called accounting, finance, procurement, or another title in your company, the folks who manage the bills, invoices, credit cards, etc. for your company have a full, true 360-degree view of every tool your company is paying for. They have all the contracts for every tool, the number of licenses or seats, and who in the company is responsible for it.

If you’re struggling to reconcile all your marketing technology, bring a box of doughnuts and coffee down to accounting, make friends with them, and ask them nicely for a summary of all the vendors you’re paying money to in marketing and IT. You’ll have a great starting point for building your MarTech governance plan and may even discover you have access to some best-in-class marketing analytics tools that you don’t need to pay additional money for.