How a well-integrated MarTech stack can transform content workflows

Marketing teams have more tools available to them than ever before — a lot more. 

You only need a glance at the Contentful Marketplace to get an idea of the vast possibilities for crafting digital content experiences. Each tool promises to address some specific digital marketing content problem or deliver some specific, innovative functionality — but combined as part of a marketing technology stack, together they can transform the digital experience and help your brand create outstanding marketing campaigns. 

However, the more complex your marketing tech stack, the greater the potential for content workflow friction. In this context, more doesn’t always mean better and, if your MarTech tools aren’t integrated, optimized, and working together seamlessly, you risk not only wasting resources, but degrading user experiences with duplicated content, downtime, formatting errors, and so on. 

In this post, we’re going to take a closer look at MarTech integration challenges, their solutions, and how Contentful could be the tool you need to take your MarTech stack to the next level.

What is a MarTech stack?

In a content management tech stack, you integrate tools to (obviously) manage content. The foundation of that stack is the content management system (CMS), which would comprise a backend administrative layer, a frontend presentation layer, and a database where your content is stored. 

A MarTech stack is essentially the same thing — but serves the broader purpose of marketing that content, and so is built to support things like lead generation, customer orchestration, personalization, and other marketing functionalities. To that end, a MarTech stack might include, in addition to the CMS, a customer data platform (CDP), a digital asset manager (DAM), a customer relationship management (CRM) tool, an email marketing platform, analytics tools, and so on. Basically anything that a brand could use to facilitate and optimize its marketing strategy. 

Although their composition varies across the marketing technology landscape, in an ecommerce use case, the key layers of a MarTech stack include:

Commerce layer 

The commerce layer of a MarTech stack supports the sale and purchase of the products marketed on the wider site. For ecommerce sites, it’s typically the core layer of the stack, and includes modules like product catalogs, pricing, inventory, payment processing, and delivery tracking. 

Example modules include Shopify, Salesforce, and BigCommerce. 

Content management layer

The content management layer serves the visual presentation, discoverability and, ultimately, experience of content within the digital ecosystem. It includes modules and tools such as the content management system (CMS), digital asset management (DAM), search engine optimization (SEO), and website builder. 

Example modules include Bynder, the Contentful headless CMS, and Contentful Studio. 

Data layer

Ecommerce brands need to know who they’re selling their products to in order to focus their marketing efforts on the right areas. To that end, the tech stack’s data layer should support the collection and analysis of customer data, including customer behaviors and preferences, past purchase history, segmentation, and so on. It should also support content personalization, with testing and experimentation tools, real-time content recommendations, and other features to tailor content to individual customer experiences. 

Examples of data layer integrations include the Segment plugin, Optimizely, and Contentful Personalization. 

Analytics layer

Marketers can continually optimize the performance of their content by analyzing data from every part of their digital ecosystem. To that end, the analytics data should be set up to feed data to marketers in real time, across a range of engagement metrics such as time on page, click through rate, bounce rate, and so on. 

Examples of analytics integrations include Google Analytics 4 and the Contentsquare plugin.

MarTech integration challenges 

In well-integrated MarTech stacks, layers and tools work together seamlessly to help brands shape customer experiences efficiently. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to achieve that outcome — let’s look at the key challenges of MarTech integration. 

• Fragmentation: Tools that reside on different layers can be difficult to integrate — which can fragment processes across the stack, including delayed updates, duplicated content, translation errors, and longer wait times. In those contexts, what should be quick, painless updates become drawn-out, multi-step processes — and that’s before the wait for approvals or launch delays kick in.  

• Data silos: Complex MarTech stacks can lead to data silos, in which valuable customer data, content performance metrics, and other insights are trapped, isolated, or even hidden. Silos prevent marketing teams from developing a unified view of their content ecosystem, making it difficult to deliver consistent content experiences. 

• Customer journey cohesion: Your customers don’t care how you manage the customer journey — they just want it to feel cohesive. But when your data is fragmented and teams are creating content in silos, things start to slip. Messaging drifts, and personalization doesn’t feel so personal anymore — instead, it feels like it was written for someone else.

• Limited visibility: Disconnected or fragmented MarTech stacks also lead to incomplete data. Your analytics team might be able to tell you how a promotional email performed with its recipient, but not how that same user subsequently moved through the website or what nudged them to convert. Essentially, important insight is stuck in tool-specific silos, making it hard to optimize or measure true impact. That data disconnection can mean that you end up showing a user content that’s not relevant to them. Worse still, scattered data can significantly limit your understanding of customer intent, which means you can’t effectively guide them toward the content they want, and so you end up missing out on conversions, and, ultimately, sales.  

• Wasted AI potential: AI tools can offer game-changing efficiency benefits, but they’re only as good as the data you’re able to leverage. That can be a problem when your data, content, and workflows are scattered across a complex, poorly integrated MarTech stack. AI-automations work best with structured content and clean handoffs between tools. In that environment,  AI tools can not only consume your data efficiently, but make better decisions about what to do with that information by factoring in metadata, context, and intended uses. In other words, the more organized and well integrated your MarTech stack, the easier it is to train an AI to make decisions that maximize your specific business objectives.

What does a well-integrated MarTech stack look like?

An effective, modern MarTech stack is composable, AI-powered, and ready to scale with your business. 

Fortunately, Contentful can help you achieve that objective — let’s explore how. 

1. Composable architecture

Legacy content management solutions offer very limited scope to adjust or adapt MarTech capabilities because they coupled their services tightly across their back and front ends. In this environment, brands that want to develop their MarTech capabilities by experimenting with new tools or swapping out old ones, find that they’re locked into the products their vendor ships and can’t change anything — at least without significant IT support. 

Contentful rejects that approach by providing a completely composable environment in which to develop unique MarTech stacks effortlessly. The key advantages of composability include:

API-first integration

Contentful is an "application programming interface-first” (API-first) solution. You can think of APIs as a communication layer that securely connects the different tools and services within a tech stack, and facilitates the safe, efficient transfer of data between them — just like well-maintained roads facilitate high-speed travel between different places. 

And, as an API-first solution, Contentful also enables the seamless integration and limitless extensibility of your MarTech stack. That means that you can leverage APIs to build out the stack with the best-fit tools for your organization, choosing from an assortment of platforms with prepackaged business capabilities that integrate with other systems — all without worrying about compatibility issues or fragmentation. APIs also unlock omnichannel marketing opportunities because your content can be stored in a single location and published across any channel, in any part of your digital ecosystem, with no risk of formatting errors. 

Composability is at the core of everything we do at Contentful, and we strive to ensure that our API-first platform offers unparalleled flexibility for integration across your entire MarTech stack. 

Built to scale

Composability isn’t just about adding new components to the stack. It’s also about evolving to address changing market conditions, and scaling content to meet growth goals without compromising the quality or consistency of your services or brand voice.

Contentful is built to scale. Our platform handles more than 120 billion API calls each month — a testament to its reliability at enterprise scale. 

Whether you're venturing into new markets, or adding new pages, websites, or channels, you won’t need to worry about performance or reliability when using our platform.

Effortless extensibility

Modern stacks involve a lot of moving pieces and while composable environments always strive to be as plug-and-play as possible, they can't always account for specific business needs and requirements. That’s why we make it easy to extend our platform without procuring additional infrastructure or third-party orchestration tools via Contentful Functions.

Remember our API-road analogy earlier? Well, Contentful Functions are like delivery trucks that we provide to send data along your API highways more efficiently. With Functions, you’ll find it easy to trigger logic, sync data, or enrich content with minimal lift — so that your MarTech stack works as a cohesive system, and not a random assortment of tools.

2. Real-time personalization

Building personalization into your MarTech stack shouldn’t require you to jump between multiple different tools — that’s going to add tedious complexity to the personalization process, and create subpar outcomes.

With Contentful Personalization, your personalization strategy is embedded in your tech stack. You can create, test, and launch personalized content directly from the Contentful UI — everything you need to personalize your content is at your fingertips. And Contentful Personalization comes with an array of automated AI tools to take personalization to the next level, including customer segmentation, data analytics and insight, testing and experimentation, and content suggestions.  

Even better, data from tools like Klaviyo, Shopify, and SAP Emarsys flows straight into Contentful behind the scenes, so you can activate audiences based on things like purchase history, campaign engagement, or customer profiles. All that happens without you needing to loop in a developer.

3. Native AI

MarTech integration is effortless in Contentful’s extensible, fully composable architecture — but our native AI features are what will take your stack to the next level. 

In Contentful, AI isn’t a standalone tool but an integral part of your content management workflow, and you can use it to shape the way your team already builds, edits, and optimizes content.

Our AI Actions feature is designed to transform your everyday, time-consuming content work with automated translations, alt text generation, SEO tweaks, and even tone adjustments — all of which happen right inside the content platform. There’s no need to plug in extra tools (unless you want to) and no need to tediously copy-paste between systems.

Native AI automation isn’t just about speed and efficiency, it’s about amplifying your brand voice with clarity and consistency, and supporting your content strategy as it scales. To that end, you aren’t limited to the templated AI Actions: You can teach the feature to automate other parts of your content management workflow, using customizable prompts and a built-in knowledge base to create new rules. 

4. Localization

Contentful can help you make your MarTech stack global with localization tools that extend the potential of Contentful’s AI toolset with the option to apply global locales to content as you work on it in the CMS. Our Locale-Based Publishing feature enables content teams to quickly adjust content for different territories and languages, apply region-based permissions, and give content owners multi-region control over batches of content.

In fact, our AI Actions feature includes a location-based translation tool, which can save brand teams with multi-language marketing needs plenty of time — and eliminate the error-prone copying and pasting of content between third-party tools. You can check out our AI translation demo, or explore some reliable localization and translation providers in Contentful’s Marketplace, including Smartling, Lionbridge, and XTM Connect. 

Build smarter and scale faster with an optimized MarTech stack

Effective MarTech integration is predicated on flexibility. As the market evolves, you need to be able to continually nudge your stack to fit changing customer needs and expectations. 

That’s what makes Contentful’s composable tech stack such a valuable asset for ambitious marketing teams. Not only does it offer your content and development teams game-changing control and precision to shape digital experiences down to the smallest detail across multiple channels, but ensures that you’re able to future-proof those experiences for the ongoing challenges and opportunities of your environment.   

If you're ready to take the next step, you can explore thousands of MarTech integration options in the Contentful Marketplace, or you can get in touch with our sales team to dive a little deeper into what’s possible.

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