This was originally published by Scott Brinker on ChiefMartec.com as the second of “3 New Year’s resolutions for your martech stack in 2018.” The text in full can be found here.

The digital world continues to advance at an incredible rate — this is Martec’s Law in action. If you don’t take advantage of innovations in the market, your competitors may.

So your resolution for 2018 should be to (continue to) experiment with new marketing technologies. Don’t let your martech stack — or the marketing tactics you apply with it — stagnate.

Here are 5 keys to making smart additions to your marketing stack:

  1. Allocate a reasonable portion of your resources (time and budget) to trying new marketing technologies. A recent Gartner study found that on average CMOs allocate 10% of their budget to “innovation.” That sounds like the right ballpark. Don’t overspend here, but don’t underspend either.
  2. Initially adopt new martech software in a trial or pilot program. Most martech vendors should make it easy for you to do this. (If they don’t, ask why.) This should be a fast-tracked process on your end, as you want these trials to be relatively low-overhead experiments. Have a fixed time frame for evaluating the results of the pilot, say 3-6 months.
  3. Establish metrics for success with any given martech tool — decide how you will measure its impact on your business. It might be customer-oriented metrics, from conversion rates to NPS scores, or it might be efficiency
  4. Enforce a more stringent evaluation process for adopting marketing technologies into the core of your marketing stack. A successful pilot is just the first step. Make sure you address: integration with the rest of your stack, training and support to ensure adoption, availability and performance SLAs, privacy and security compliance, and options for migrating away from the tool in the future, just in case you ever need to.
  5. Appoint someone as the head of your marketing stack (if you haven’t already) — half architect, half evangelist. This person takes responsibility for governing your overall marketing stack, to make sure that all the pieces fit together coherently. They take the lead in educating the rest of the marketing team with what’s possible with your stack, so you get the most value out of it.

Interested in trying a new service for the new year? Contact us to get set up with LeadConduit, TrustedForm, or SuppressionList and see if they are right for your martech stack.