MarTech stacks are frequently used to plan marketing efforts, simplify onerous operations, measure the impact of marketing activities, and promote more efficient spending. It is a collection of integrated marketing technology products that help you grow your business. The goal is to optimize marketing operations, analyze growth experiments, and attract new customers utilizing cutting-edge techniques. Read on to find out how having a MarTech stack in place will help your company’s marketing activities

Any marketing that takes place in a digital environment, such as social media marketing, is an example of marketing technology. Any marketing that is tracked via digital technology is also considered marketing technology. It’s marketing tech if a company uses technology to send or track discounts.

What is marketing technology (MarTech)?

Marketing technology is a collection of software solutions marketing executives use to support mission-critical business goals and foster innovation inside their firms.

Content and customer experience, advertising, digital marketing campaigns, direct marketing, marketing management, and marketing data and analytics are all areas where MarTech solutions excel.

What are the benefits of the MarTech stack?

While the term MarTech may be unfamiliar to some, marketing technology is not. Marketing teams worldwide have long relied on these tools to offer relevant information to their audiences daily. That’s just one of the many reasons why marketers adore technology. The marketing technology stack also assists with: marketing campaigns and marketing operations.

Process Automation

Marketing automation is using software or technological procedures to automate repetitive marketing campaign operations. Typically, the operations entail automating email and messaging sequences previously delivered one at a time. Another important aspect of marketing automation is data migration between systems via integrations. When properly implemented in a MarTech stack, marketing automation allows firms to market to a more significant number of clients more personalized manner.

Innovation

One of the essential aspects of growth marketing professionals’ job is to be innovative and develop ‘growth hacks.’ MarTech tools frequently make this task simple! Staying ahead of the curve and utilizing new tools might assist you in attracting clients in creative and exciting ways.

Customer data & Insights

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool should be at the heart of every MarTech stack. This is your MarTech stack’s growth engine, and it should be pulling data from the other tools. Use this information to create a customer profile for every one of your customers.

• When do they interact with your company?
• How frequently do you communicate with them?
• What items do they purchase?
• Who is their company’s representative?

These questions are self-evident, but they are frequently unanswered. A well-managed CRM will enable you to thoroughly understand your customers and successfully engage with them. We recommend creating a customer journey map to complement your MarTech stack and discover consumer touchpoints. Personalization is crucial in every communication, and data is the only way to achieve that.

Marketing Efficiency

With less, you can accomplish more. This is what a competent MarTech stack allows a business to conduct. With little or no work, a well-oiled marketing machine can generate clients in a sustained manner. You must now ensure your MarTech stack is set up appropriately and that your campaigns are effective.

How to build a Marketing tech stack?

In the marketing technology landscape, it is far from simple when building your MarTech stack. However, it can mean the difference between meeting and exceeding your marketing initiatives and objectives.

To create a MarTech stack that supports your marketing goals, follow these steps;

Identify your needs

Identify the things needed. Examine new tools and ask your coworkers for input. Is it going to make things simpler for them? Is it easy to use? Is it a good match for their workflows?

If you do decide to stick with one solution, work with your I.T. team to integrate it with the other technologies already in use at your company. Regularly evaluate the performance of the tools in your stack and make modifications as needed.

Survey your team to find out its challenges

You’d want to give your marketing team the tech stack they need to automate their processes. More time spent on higher-value work implies less time spent on routine duties. To find out what issues your team is encountering, do a survey. What are the tasks that they devote the most time to? What steps of their workflow do they carry out manually?

Utilize the responses to discover the best MarTech solution.

Establish a budget

You can detect holes in your marketing stack by assessing your marketing requirements and canvassing your team. However, you must set aside sufficient finances to purchase the necessary equipment.

You can either set a marketing budget for specific tools (for example, $700 per month for a content management platform) or specify a recurring budget for the entire team.

What amount of money should you set aside?

This will be determined by factors such as the size of your firm and the tools you invest in. Companies spend 26.2 percent of their marketing expenditure on technology.

Choose tools that help you make data-driven decisions

Examine the new tool and solicit feedback from your colleagues. Is it going to make their job any easier? Is it a good fit for their processes?

If a new marketing tool fails to meet your expectations, don’t hesitate to cancel your subscription and try something else. The last thing you want is to have tools in your stack that aren’t being used. Measure the performance of the tools in your marketing stack regularly and make changes as appropriate.

Analyze the tools’ success and switch solutions if necessary

You don’t have to start from scratch when building a marketing stack. More tools are now available that provide “all-in-one” solutions that combine multiple applications into a single platform. Take a look at the tools that your firm already possesses.

Are there any features of these tools that you aren’t using? Are there any enhancements you can add to your strategy to help you address any marketing “gaps”?

Simplify your MarTech stack with all-in-one technology solutions.

With so many MarTech products on the market, finding the perfect blend of capability, onboarding needs, and value-added can be difficult. If you get it wrong, you could end up with a stack full of unused tools, fragmentation, and tool fatigue among your team. As a result, you should approach the construction of your MarTech stack from a consolidation standpoint.

The advantages of tool consolidation are numerous; however, they can be loosely divided into four categories:

• Increasing the visibility of all your campaigns from beginning to end
• Getting rid of operational silos
• Goal-setting and predicting with precision
• lowering the amount of money spent on technology

Using products that easily integrate with your existing Marketing stack, or choosing ones that offer a wide range of functionality on a single platform, is often a better option than using several disjointed solutions. A smaller stack also alleviates the effort of ensuring that your staff is adequately trained on how to get the most out of each tool, which is often forgotten.

Aim for ease of use, but don’t sacrifice the necessities.

Many possibilities are available, so don’t settle for anything less than what you require. You need a simple system for your team to learn and use while providing the power and flexibility you require to get things done.

The problem with lead generation marketing automation platforms is that they only offer enterprise-grade power or consumer-grade ease of use. As a result, many companies still go for the safe bet: costly, unnecessarily complicated, and underutilized solutions, resulting in more time spent on systems than on customers.

MarTech Stack essentials

Marketing automation software is a word that encompasses a wide range of MarTech tools and products that companies have created to aid in the improvement of their marketing, customer experience, and sales pipeline/processes. These applications frequently automate a wide range of repetitive marketing strategies/duties while offering insight and reporting into their specific marketing sectors. A good MarTech stack comprises several lead generation marketing automation software that perform in tandem.

Customer Relationship Management

Your CRM is where you keep track of acquired customers and manage your customer experience, relationships, journey, insights, and interactions. It’s essential for lead nurturing and customer retention, and it should be able to grow and expand with your company.

Depending on the CRM you use, it may include or integrate with various MarTech tools, including email marketing and sales software.

Marketing Automation

Any marketing strategy should include marketing automation. Automation tools will aid in streamlining your procedures, marketing channels, video marketing, modern marketing, marketing cloud, and the personalization of the client experience.

Social Media

For both ad campaigns operating on social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as content posted to those platforms, social media tools help to streamline and quantify your company’s social media activities. Social media is one of the MarTech tools that cannot be overlooked.

Content Management System (C.M.S.)

Marketers can use the tools in the content management system to manage a company’s online presence, which includes principal websites, blogs, landing pages, and more.

Website Analytics Tools

It’s challenging to manage a website these days without some type of analytics software running in the background unless your business is primarily an offline one. Web analytics tool/software, whether a free tool like Google Analytics or an enterprise-level suite, provides data to help you better understand your online users, differentiate website visitors from regular customers, and deliver what they want.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO tools can help firms review their most popular site pages and ways to boost traffic to underperforming sites. SEO tools may help companies assess their most popular site pages, search engine results pages, and strategies to increase traffic to underperforming pages.

Web Accessibility

Website visitors with visual, hearing, cognitive, neurological, physical, and speech disabilities should be able to see, understand, navigate, and interact with web material to be considered accessible. It should also be accessible to users who do not have disabilities but face other obstacles, such as using mobile phones instead of laptops or desktop computers, elderly users, persons with “temporary” or “situational” disabilities, or users with sluggish Internet connections.

Google Ads management tools

Google Ads was created to be a one-stop shop for all Google Ads inventory. It gives advertisers access to YouTube inventory for paid search, display (via the Google Display Network), shopping ads, and video ads. Google-owned assets and partner publisher sites are used as inventory sources (Adsense, Google Search Partners, Google Ad Manager).

Data integration tool

Marketers, on a general level, require access to their data to track digital marketing efforts. Most marketers will use in-house or third-party technologies to track their website and business metrics. A data warehouse can take data from various systems to make it more accessible or leverage content intelligence to provide insights on content performance in more advanced scenarios.

B.I./Marketing intelligence

A quantitative technique for formulating or answering marketing questions is known as marketing intelligence. You may use marketing intelligence to determine what your competitors are up to, what your customers want from your firm, and how much a product or service should cost.

Identity resolution tool

Identity resolution, or the science of connecting an ever-increasing number of consumer identifiers to a single person as they interact across channels and devices, is crucial to marketing success. Targeting, measurement, and personalization procedures for known and anonymous audiences are supported by identity resolution platforms across digital and offline media.

Advertising Technology

Although AdTech and MarTech stacks technologies are unique, a marketing plan without advertising is still just a strategy, as it was in the past.

All MarTech stacks should consider AdTech solutions. Your MarTech stack won’t produce much in the way of outcomes if it doesn’t include advertising functions capable of leveraging the insights from marketing technologies.

Customer database

Through out-of-the-box connectors that rarely require I.T. or developer involvement, customer data platforms allow marketers authority over customer data gathering, segmentation, and orchestration.

A Customer Data Platform, or C.D.P., is a marketer-managed system that acquires customers’ data from multiple sources, normalizes it, and creates unique, unified profiles for each customer.

Customer analytics tool

Customer analytics tools assist businesses in keeping track of their customer base by serving as a central resource for sales and customer relationship team members who must communicate with consumers and prospects. Email marketing might be a built-in feature or a special service, but smooth connectivity between a CRM and an email marketing solution is critical.

Digital Asset Management (D.A.M.)

The MarTech Stack’s heart is widely regarded as a D.A.M. solution. It’s where you’ll find and manage all of your material. Because content is at the heart of marketing, having a single, centralized resource for managing an enormous volume of digital assets is critical to maximizing marketing efficiency.

Email Service Provider (E.S.P.)

Email marketing is the oldest form of digital marketing and is still at the heart of how your company keeps in touch with leads and consumers. You could wish to use MailChimp or Infusionsoft, both email marketing platforms and automation tools. Alternatively, something more email-specific and accessible to small businesses, such as Constant Contact or GetResponse, will link with your CRM and automation tools.

Tag Management System

A tag management system (T.M.S.) is software for managing tracking tags in digital marketing campaigns and social media campaigns. A tag is a little code applied to a URL to collect information for analytics and digital marketing tools. A marketing team or analyst may deploy and manage tags on their site without relying solely on I.T. with a tag management solution. It’s a marketing strategy.

Tags are specific headers on websites that enable web analytics and tracking pixels used in adverts and content. Marketers use T.M.S.s to manage digital marketing tags from various ad services.

Users of the MarTech Stack Within the Enterprise.

Customer acquisition teams

Customer acquisition teams and individuals use various components of the marketing technology stack to organize and execute digital marketing, affiliate and partner marketing, events, app, website optimization, search for prospective customers, and other activities.

Brand marketing & communication teams

To manage the brand’s presence and marketing strategy on social media, public relations venues, and traditional mass media such as broadcast T.V. and radio, as well as print, brand marketers and communications professionals employ tools from the marketing technology stack. 

Marketing operations

Also known as Marketing Ops, marketing operations teams use the tech stack to manage and monitor marketing campaign performance, gain insights from customer data and other marketing data, and assist the extended marketing team in making the best strategic and execution decisions when it comes to deploying and improving marketing efforts.

Sales

Sales reps and teams use the data collected by the marketing stack to better understand the wants and needs of prospects and customers. This is true in both B2C (think of an insurance agent) and B2B (think of a software sales engineer) marketing, where a sales rep can use information about the customer’s behavior. Customers’ interests, behaviors, the offers they respond to, the communication channels they prefer, and previous purchase history are used to recommend the next best products and services as part of an offer that is most likely to win the sale.

Customer service

Modern marketers are increasingly tasked with improving customer loyalty and using churn-reduction strategies. Customer service encounters are when loyal clients are gained or lost, and early churn indications can be detected. Furthermore, service interactions can be used to promote new products and services to clients, particularly when those products and services are tailored based on previous behaviors and interactions. As a result, more services and support operations are integrated with marketing stacks, allowing crucial customer data and insights to be shared and acted on.

Product Marketing

Product marketers play a critical role when it comes to complex or considered items, such as financial services or advanced technology. Product marketers use the MarTech stack to manage and implement content marketing tactics that educate prospective buyers on the usefulness and value of their products. They also employ technology to track and manage coverage and sentiment linked to their product offerings among the press, analysts, and other influencers.

Best Marketing Tech Stack

The optimal marketing tech stack for your company is unique to your requirements. Still, there are a few technologies we recommend, especially if you’re just getting started with your marketing team. Let’s look at a MarTech stack for getting visitors, converting visitors, and engaging leads in general. These MarTech tools are necessary for a high-performing marketing team to operate.

Collaboration: Google Drive

Your team may collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and folders in the cloud with Google Drive. Anyone who has the internet can use it, and there is no need to download any software. The most excellent part is that Google Drive makes losing work practically impossible.

Pricing: Free

Alternatives: OneDrive (Free), Dropbox (Free)

Web Page Analytics: Google Search Console

While Google Information is an excellent tool for tracking general website performance, Google Search Console offers page-by-page analytics. You may use it to compare periods and two or more URLs on your site and examine your top inquiries for the entire site or a specific page.

Pricing: Free

Alternatives: Ahrefs (Paid), Moz (Paid)

Communication: Slack

Slack is a business-focused instant messaging network (and not leisure chatting). This application allows your marketing team to quickly exchange updates, transmit files, and communicate in real-time if necessary. There’s no need to send emails for things that can be handled in a brief conversation with Slack.

Pricing: Free; $6.67/user/month (Pro); $12.50/user/month (Business +); Custom (Enterprise Grid)

Alternatives: Microsoft Teams (Free), Google Chat (Free)

Email Marketing: MailChimp

You can build sophisticated HTML emails with Mailchimp’s email marketing tool without writing a single line of code. You can tailor the emails using smart rules and A/B test campaigns to enhance click-through rates. Because the tool is connected with all of MailChimp’s services, a lead from any form on your website becomes a subscriber automatically.

Pricing: $274/month (Premium), $15/month (Standard)

Alternatives: Constant Contact (Paid), Marketing Hub’s Email Marketing Tool (Free), Klaviyo (Paid)

Project Management: Asana

The heart and soul of marketing is project management. You don’t want anything to slip between the gaps, whether your team is planning campaigns, managing complex procedures, or working on a project-by-project basis. Asana makes it simple for your team to check off tasks and discuss project updates by providing a shared workspace.

Pricing: Free; $10.99/user/month (Premium); $24.99/user/month (Business)

Alternatives: Trello(Paid), Freedcamp(Paid for as low as $1.49 billed annually, $2.49 billed yearly), Project.co (Paid)

Marketing Automation: Marketo

Marketing automation enables you to nurture leads through drip campaigns that are triggered in response to a specific action taken by the lead. Marketo’s segmentation technology helps you to automate campaigns and personalize workflows. In addition, you may score leads, dispatch them to sales, and set up internal notifications.

Professional and Enterprise subscription tiers include the workflows feature.

Pricing: $800/month (Professional); $3,200/month (Enterprise)

Alternatives: Marketing Hub (Paid)

Asset Creation: Canva

Canva has many templates to assist your marketing team in creating materials for any occasion. Canva allows you to make social media posts, Facebook banners, posters, infographics, presentations, flyers, and brochures. The best aspect is that you can get started right away for no cost, and there is almost no learning curve. Marketing leaders can immediately sign up and begin utilizing it.

Pricing: Free; $199.99/year (Pro); $30/user/month (Enterprise)

Alternatives: Visme (Basic: Free/ $12.25 Personal/ $24.75 Business), Snappa (Basic: Free/ $15 per month), Crello (Free), Vistacreate (Free), Figma (Free), Adobe Creative Cloud (Paid. Recommended for advanced users)

SEO: Ahrefs

Keyword research, backlink development, competitive research, and rank tracking are all aspects of SEO. However, you don’t want to pay for many tools to accomplish these tasks. You can audit the incoming links heading to your competitors using Ahrefs’ keyword research explorer, rack tracker, and site explorer.

Pricing: $99/month (Lite); $179/month (Standard); $399/month (Advanced); $999/month (Agency)

Alternatives: Moz (Paid), AccuRanker (Paid), SEMRush (Paid)

Stock Images: Unsplash

Stock pictures can be utilized in blog posts, banners, flyers, and brochures, among other marketing materials. It’s against the law to use photographs from the internet unless a Creative Commons license covers them. Some of these photographs are likewise of poor quality. Unsplash is a fantastic resource for finding and downloading free high-resolution stock photographs.

Pricing: Free

Alternatives: Pexels (Free), Shutterstock (Paid), Getty Images (Paid), iStock Photos (Paid)

Social Media Marketing: HootSuite

Growing your follower base and generating leads through social media management and marketing processes is crucial. Choosing a solution that allows you to post, comment, and manage your brand across various networks is critical.

All of this and more can be accomplished with HootSuite. You may plan posts up to three years ahead of time, assess your social media performance, keep track of brand mentions, and join in on the topics that matter most to you. The Professional and Enterprise subscription tiers both contain it.

Pricing: $800/month (Professional); $3,200/month (Enterprise)

Alternatives: Marketing Hub’s Social Inbox, SproutSocial (Paid)

Webinars: GoToWebinar

Webinars are a valuable resource for B2B marketers and a great approach to creating leads. ON24 is a top option for generating engaging webinars, assessing your event’s performance, and discovering new leads if your team runs or plans to host webinars.

Pricing: Lite $49, standard $99, pro $199, enterprise $399

Alternatives: ON24 (Paid), Zoho Meeting (Paid)

Grammar Check: Grammarly

It’s critical to publish error-free material if you want to showcase your company effectively online. You may automate the process of copy-editing your work with Grammarly. Although it’s still a good idea to review your work one last time before publishing it, Grammarly will catch the majority of errors.

Pricing: Free; $12/month (Premium); $12.50/user/month (Business)

Alternatives: ProWritingAid (Paid), Hemingway App (Online version free)

Conversion Rate Optimization: Optimizely

Your team can use a conversion rate optimization tool to verify that your C.T.A.s are optimized for conversions. You can play with the colors, positioning, and style of your C.T.A.s using the Optimizely Digital Experience Platform. You may also test your website’s customization features and provide highly personalized recommendations to your visitors.

Pricing: Available on request

Alternatives: Google Optimize (Free), Crazy Egg (Free)

Content Management and Blogging: WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular choices in the industry. You can design landing pages, forms, pop-up C.T.A.s, and blog articles in a straightforward platform and track your performance metrics. It’s integrated with Marketing Hub, so you can easily link your other content marketing efforts to your website. There’s no need to pay for plugins or add-ons that slow down your site because it’s an all-in-one solution.

Pricing: $8/month (Premium); $25/month (Business)

Alternatives: C.M.S. Hub (Free), Joomla (Free), Drupal (Free)

Website Visitor Analytics: Google Analytics

Understanding and enhancing your entire website performance requires knowing who is visiting your site, when they are visiting, where they are visiting from, and whether they bounce. Google Analytics also allows you to track organic traffic, see the most popular landing pages, and see the most popular exit pages. It is a must-have in your marketing team’s MarTech stack.

Pricing: Free

Alternatives: StatCounter (Paid), Simple Analytics (Paid)

Conclusion.

You should now have a better idea of what a MarTech stack is. Now it’s up to you to put one together for your company to help with content and customer experience, advertising, digital marketing campaigns, direct marketing, marketing management, marketing data and analytics, or assess your current MarTech stack. As previously said, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all marketing tech stack. Your business and consumers will benefit from a unique combination of marketing technology and automation tools.