What you’ll read: When it comes to your tech stack, are you an innovator or an exnovator? Do you prefer automated or hand-crafted content? These choices reveal a lot more about your business than you think.
We often think of marketing tech stacks in terms of their function — what each component does, who uses it, and how the different platforms connect. But at a certain point, it’s also a reflection of your marketing priorities. What sorts of things can we learn about companies, including our own, just by studying the tech stack?
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Innovation or exnovation?
Marketers are always seeking new ways to reach customers, and most of these opportunities lie in technological advances. As such, the industry is constantly discovering new platforms to add to the stack, whether transitioning from ad waterfalls to programmatic bidding, or diversifying to incorporate CTV channels. Unfortunately, marketing budgets aren’t unlimited. So when a new advancement emerges, we need to ask ourselves: do we pursue a new trend or double-down on our current tech stack?
Some marketers aggressively pursue the new by living on the cutting edge. We call these marketing innovators. They frequently update their tech stack with the latest, shiniest, and most cutting-edge ad solutions. Innovators can gain immense rewards by being the first to embrace a new trend, but the act is not without risk — some innovations may have slow adoption or fail to catch on entirely.
Innovators often think of themselves as the ones keeping an industry vibrant, but the opposite of innovation is not stagnation — it is exnovation. Marketing exnovators are the ones who double-down on exhaustively tested products and processes to be confident they work as expected. An exnovator will update their stack periodically, but they tend to be far more selective about every upgrade. If they cannot be sure of the benefit, they will wait and see how it performs elsewhere.
Automated or hand-crafted content?
For many marketers, the entire point of having a tech stack is to automate their workflow. It makes it far easier to target and deploy ads, manage email deliverables, and resolve many other tasks at scale. Some ad tools can go even further, assembling entire advertisements with dynamically-generated creative. If your goal is to find the most effective way to serve as many customers as possible, an automated tech stack can meet that need.
And yet, despite all of these options, some marketers still prefer to manage their workflow in person. Not necessarily every step — most of us still work in a digital world, after all. But they might eschew dynamic creative to manually produce each campaign or write each email with hand-crafted touches. This approach can be quite effective if your business is scaled for one-on-one customer interactions or a niche audience.
Interestingly, the common factor between each group is personalization. We all know the vast majority of customers are receptive to personalized marketing content, but there is more than one way to achieve that goal. How you manage your tech stack reflects your ability to dynamically assemble personalized ingredients or blend them from a human perspective.
It’s all about priorities
At the core of each tech stack is a message about priorities. For example, a heavily automated stack saves time for individual marketers so they can focus on other tasks. Meanwhile, workflows that target specific customer traits are more interested in finding a niche audience than a broad mass market.
Take a close look at your tech stack. Does it reflect your marketing priorities? If it does not, perhaps it is time to make a change that aligns them once again.