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Marketing

New year, new martech strategy

Welcoming the era of nimble and affordable marketing execution

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Today’s financial services marketing professional has never had more messaging power at their fingertips, nor has there ever been more technical complexity in brand management. Traditionally, marketing dealt in fundamentals of Product, Placement, Position, and Pricing with clearly defined (albeit limited) media channels. The modern promotional discipline combines those basic principles with a nuanced web of interconnected systems, datasets, and logic-driven messaging rules.

The common temptation for credit union marketing departments with limited budgets and understaffed teams is to single-source the data management, segmentation, and messaging systems that combine for its “MarTech” (or, Marketing Technology) suite. This closed system approach can simplify short-term technical considerations, trading flexibility and scalability for a quick startup.

As we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, your credit union will continue to reach for greater levels of marketing-fueled balance sheet growth. Your initial suite of single-source marketing systems provided an “MVP” (Minimum Viable Product) for defining audiences and communicating with them. Now you regularly wrestle with limitations and compromises of vendor ‘lock-in’. Perhaps 2025 is your year for composable martech.

Composable martech is a strategy for you to build your marketing team’s technology stack by assembling and integrating solutions and platforms. A composable martech stack provides greater flexibility and customization options compared to traditional singular MarTech suites. Thinking of making a change? We offer some concepts, considerations, and the benefits and impact on your team’s productivity.

  1. Modularity: composable martech relies on standalone platforms, each catering to certain marketing needs. These individual solutions can include tools for email marketing, social media management, CRM, analytics, content management, and more.
  2. Scalability: A composable martech stack can easily scale alongside the credit union’s growth or evolving marketing needs. New tools can be added or replaced as necessary, reducing constraints associated with traditional ‘does-it-all’ marketing suites.
  3. Flexibility and customization: Modular solutions can be adapted as marketing requirements evolve, ensuring agility in the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing. This approach allows marketers to select the best tools for their unique needs, promoting customization and optimization of the stack through different cycles.
  4. Integration: Tools and components within the stack seamlessly share data through APIs, webhooks, or middleware platforms, facilitating a unified view of member data and telling an intuitive story of marketing performance.

Why have a composable martech?

  1. Improved data management: Integration of various tools streamlines data collection, storage, and analysis, providing a comprehensive view of member behavior and marketing performance.
  2. Best-of-breed solutions: Rather than dealing with sub-par supplemental tools hard-coded into a single effective one, credit unions can choose individual best-of-breed solutions for each specific marketing function, resulting in a more efficient and effective marketing technology stack.
  3. Experimentation and innovation: The flexibility of a composable martech stack encourages experimentation and innovation. Marketers can easily test new tools and strategies to optimize their campaigns.
  4. Reduced vendor lock-in: By avoiding vendor lock-in, credit unions mitigate the risks associated with over-dependence on a single vendor’s ecosystem, giving them more control over their technology investments.
  5. Cost control: Composable martech empowers credit unions to manage costs effectively by selecting and paying for only the tools and services they need, eliminating unnecessary expenses.

Composable martech offers marketers the tools and flexibility needed to adapt to the ever-changing digital landscape. As your board and leadership colleagues begin to seek out more speed and detail personalization from marketing outreach, a modular tech stack can help you to become both faster and more granular in your messaging. The composable approach also makes your marketing strategy nimble, with the ability to pivot when circumstances change, and your stack must change as well.

As your marketing team greets this new quarter of the 21st century, resolve not to miss another market opportunity from limitations in your technical solutions. Begin to adopt composable martech and move with the speed, agility, and innovation that unlock your potential as your credit union’s chief storyteller.

Hilary Reed

Hilary Reed

EmpowerFI