An overview of the power and importance of the Marketing Tech Stack
The power of the marketing tech stack is a hot topic right now for very good reasons. The sheer number of vendors vying to gain access to your wallet as ‘must have’ marketing software is mind-blowing and knowing what you actually need is an important place to start. You can truly comprehend the scale of the market when you look at the visualization from Scott Brinker – a competitive Marketing Technology Landscape infographic. The infographic started in 2011 with just under 150 companies, and today you’ll see over 8,000 companies competing. Wow.
What’s confusing for many marketing departments is knowing what’s right for their company, what they truly need and when, how to integrate all of the different systems, and how best to navigate this massive landscape of SaaS software and tools at different stages in their company’s development. This article is intended to help you understand the landscape and what’s critical versus just nice to have.
Let’s start at the beginning and share some basics about the Marketing Technology Stack.
What is the Marketing Tech Stack?
A marketing technology stack (tech stack) is a collection of technologies marketers use to run and expand their marketing ventures. The main use of a tech stack is to ease complex business operations, automate whenever possible, gain deeper insights into prospects and funnels, encourage smart spending, and calculate the effect of marketing campaigns.
Why the Marketing Tech Stack is essential
Your goal is to grow your business. Marketing technology gives you a significant competitive advantage.
Some of the key things that the Marketing Tech Stack helps you with:
- Identifying prospects
- Providing key insights into which prospects are more likely to be interested in your product
- Helping you to reach and communicate more efficiently and effectively with your prospects
- Personalizing at scale
- Building and maintaining relationships
- Automating repeatable functions and processes
- Informing you what marketing is working and what is not
- Creating and packaging content into engaging offerings
- Saving time
- Saving money because with good software you need fewer people to implement
- So many other functions critical to modern marketing
It’s vital to understand that while parts of the Marketing Tech Stack are fundamental to your business, you don’t have to have all of the bells and whistles all at once. Nor do most companies need the Ferrari setup when a nice Honda will give you the power and insights you need. Ferraris are expensive to buy, require a lot of maintenance, and require highly skilled teams.
Key components of an effective Marketing Technology Stack
The kind of business you run affects the type of technology you should use. There are many Marketing Tech Stack components and based on our experience helping many different types of companies, these are the most common foundational software needed.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
The CRM is often chosen by the sales team and Salesforce is the big whale in the category. The system holds, manages, and tracks all client communications and relationships. That said, the basic packages for Salesforce don’t give you some of the capabilities a simple Marketing Tech Stack should have – you’ll need to move into a higher plan. Salesforce does not come with marketing automation unless you purchase their partner Pardot or integrate with other 3rd party software like Hubspot, Marketo, Active Campaigns, or other SaaS software
Key Takeaway: If you only have one part of the marketing tech stack, the CRM is where we’d suggest you start – this is a must-have for sales and marketing teams.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
CMS is the technology that enables marketers to package up content, manage, and engage with their customers through blogs, websites, landing pages, and other digital content. There are a lot of different CMS’s out there, some easy to build on while others require developer support. For the Marketing Tech Stack, whichever system you choose needs to be flexible, easy to update, play nice with marketing automation, and provide helpful analytics. The whale in this space is WordPress.
Key Takeaway: Most likely you have a content management system already built into your website. Marketers need access to their website – this is your window to the world and it’s critical to optimize that window. Partner with your tech team so you can optimize the messaging, marketing, and sales opportunities on your website.
Marketing Automation Platforms
Officially, marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies which more effectively create, manage, track, evaluate, and report on multiple marketing channels online and automate many repeatable marketing functions. There are several big whales in this category and depending upon your company’s needs, they can all be very effective. Our favorites are:
- Active Campaign for smaller and simpler businesses with smaller budgets
- Hubspot for fast growing startups and scaleups with a respectable amount of complexity and functionality – requires more budget and people. Hubspot has great tutorials and training
- Marketo and Pardot are excellent choices for more power and complexity. You’ll need highly-skilled teams to manage them – and be prepared to pay top-dollar for these platforms
Key Takeaway: In order to do demand generation using lead scoring, funnel lifecycle stage management, and content marketing well, it’s important to have a fully developed marketing automation software platform. But don’t over-spend. Get something that fits your needs if your needs are simpler and your budget is tight.
Email Marketing Software
All of the marketing automation systems are strong in email marketing. You can also purchase standalone email marketing with simpler and more affordable software and powerful email marketing systems. These software platforms provide more reporting and light lead scoring. The best system for you depends a lot upon the complexity of your business marketing needs, the size of your list, the make-up of your list (lots of cold emails vs. all warm leads), the size and skill level of your team, and your budget. Most of the time the larger your list, the more you’ll pay for email marketing software. Simpler systems like MailChimp make it easy to get started and more sophisticated email marketing software like Return Path offers more functionality for complex email marketing needs.
Key Takeaway: If you aren’t ready to invest time and talent into marketing automation software, email marketing software is a must-have and you can get started very affordably.
Content Marketing Software
To drive email marketing and marketing automation, you need a lot of content in a variety of formats, such as blogs, landing pages, videos, webinars, podcasts, slideshows, and fun social media campaigns. There are tools and software to make it easier to be a great content creator. The software you need will depend upon what type of content is best for your prospects.
- Content packaging for video includes YouTube and Vimeo
- For podcasts, there are many platforms such as PodBean
- Landing pages can be developed using Unbounce or marketing automation software
- Slideshows are easy to build in Animoto and other similar software platforms
- Newcomers like Giide offer up engaging audio experiences
Key Takeaway: Content is what drives all of the marketing automation systems – figuring out how to create high-value content quickly and repackage it across multiple platforms is critical.
Advertising and Campaign Management Technology
Digital advertising such as Google Adwords, Retargeting, and Social Media advertising are important components of the marketing ecosystem. For many businesses, it’s a primary way of acquiring customers. There are tools and software for ad creation, keyword management, ad-buying, tracking, retargeting, ad optimization, and so much more.
Key Takeaway: Not every company utilizes digital advertising. It’s a good idea to test it for ROI, even in smaller amounts, to see if it makes sense. Once you are committed to it, having tools is going to make your life much easier. Google AdWords provides a lot of free tools, so it’s a great place to start. We highly recommend social media software that supports your ad campaigns such as SproutSocial and Buffer.
Marketing Testing Software
Testing software is often specific to the function. There’s A/B split testing for email subject lines, copy, images, CTAs – anything you’re doing in email marketing can be tested to optimize performance. Testing is critical for your ad campaigns, website content, user engagement tracking, and behavioral testing, website page and section copy testing, and more. Whatever you’re doing in marketing, there are specific ways to test effectiveness and optimization.
We’re firm believers in testing as much as possible, learning fast, and then iterating for continuous improvement. Many email and marketing automation systems have light to moderate testing capabilities included and more robust testing can be brought in with specialty software. Google Analytics is free, must-have software, for digital advertising testing and gathering aggregate data on your website traffic and behaviors – it’s not useful for tracking individual users.
Key Takeaway: All marketers need to get good at testing, measuring, evaluating, and making quick changes to improve. You probably won’t need specialty testing tools early on. Google Analytics, social media platform analytics, and email/marketing automation analytics are going to get you far without additional investment early on. Once your marketing gets more sophisticated and complex, using software like Optimizely will be key to efficiency and effectiveness.
Virtual Event Marketing, AKA Experiential Marketing Software
The growing popularity of webinars, online conferences, and other virtual events emphasizes the steep increase in experiential marketing. Today, we see a lot of virtual events being used as important marketing activities and there are some very helpful software companies that make organizing online webinars and virtual events so much easier. At the basic level, having good video software such as Zoom is the first step. If you’d like to do more sophisticated webinars such as time-delayed on-demand videos and complex landing pages, you’ll want to look at other software. We’ve tested a handful of them like Demio, Livestorm, EverWebinar, and WebinarJam, and they all have pros and cons. Depending upon what you’d like to do, test them out. I’ll write a blog about the pros/cons of webinar software one of these days because I was unpleasantly surprised at how different they each are.
Key Takeaway: Online events are very powerful marketing activities and having good software to support your efforts is the only way you’ll deliver successfully. There are lots of options and no clear winner so it’s hard to make a recommendation. Test the ones that have a free trial instead of diving in and buying for a year.
Social Media Management Software
We all know that social networks (like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat, and others) play a significant role in building relationships, understanding your customers, finding new audiences, acquiring customers, managing customer support, understanding the competition, and driving revenue. Very few companies can get away with not having a really solid social media strategy. Stay focused, start simple. Test and evaluate to learn what’s working for your business.
Key Takeaway: If social media is important to drive your leads and customer acquisition, having social media management software is imperative. You’ll need support in managing posting, scheduling, monitoring engagement, setting up and managing social media campaigns, listening, and analysis. Software such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and SproutSocial will help you organize, manage, and analyze your social media efforts.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Software
A lot of companies over-optimize on social media and advertising, and under-optimize on SEO for strong search results because it’s more likely you can see immediate results and it’s much more of a marketing ‘wow’. That said, it’s not uncommon for companies to get in trouble when one of the social media platforms goes down, changes their software, your brand gets hijacked by bad reviews, or your brand gets banned from a platform for some reason.
SEO is a long play. With strong SEO, you can drive significant traffic to your website and landing pages, and you will build long-term value. Good SEO plays a massive role in helping your website climb up search engine rankings. A high ranking leads to more organic traffic to your site content and landing pages.
Key Takeaway: Use keyword research tools to get the highest value and search optimizing keywords. Understand how SEO works, manage your site performance with some good social media tools such as SEM Rush and Moz.
These are the Marketing Tech Stack categories that we use every day and find critically important to our success in building out highly effective marketing funnels, driving qualified leads, and ultimately generating more revenue. What marketing technology and marketing tools do you use every day that you can’t live without?
If you haven’t built out or optimized your Marketing Tech Stack yet, our experienced team at Globig can help you through consulting, services, and our GROWlocity team can train your team for success. Our professional team will help you to identify the best fundamental marketing technologies and guide you to use them to your advantage. Set up your consultation today to get started.
