A marketing technology stack is a combination of technological tools used for marketing. This stack is generally used over various channels and it helps digital marketers cover many phases and areas. Instead of all their focus is on one or two things, they stack the marketing tools and strategies on one another for maximum effect.
What areas should a marketing tech stack focus on?
#Creation and Collaboration
Trello
Trello is a project planning platform that allows team members to collaborate with other members. It is made up of boards and lists that you can organize into a workable plan. Team members can access and edit portions of the boards, so everyone knows what needs to be worked on at this time.
Asana
Asana is like Trello but has different ways for goals to be organized. Contributors can set up projects and tasks, then set due dates. After team members have been added, projects and tasks can be assigned to the necessary team members.
Airtable
Airtable is another creation and collaboration software that goes a bit farther. Asana and Trello are great for project planning and task management. However, if your team needs to share massive amounts of data and multiple items, Airtable may be a better fit.
Jive
Jive is another collaboration tool. It rates close to Trello concerning project management. It seems to be a better platform for file sharing and communication.
Evernote
Evernote is a great app that is known best for its note-taking abilities. It does not seem to be good for collaboration but is great for individuals. You can use it for research, jot down thoughts and ideas, and more.
#Email Marketing Tools
MailChimp and AWeber
MailChimp and AWeber are two of the top email marketing tools. With both, you can build a client email list, send out newsletters and messages through autoresponders, and analyze the success of your campaigns. They are both very similar in features and price.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is a simple email marketing. They have ready-made templates you can customize, drag and drop feature, and effective A/B testing. Campaign Monitor has become a very popular tool.
SendGrid
SendGrid is another email marketing tool that has a reputation for being the best for transactional emails. It is intuitive, easy to use and is highly customizable. The analytical data given by SendGrid seems to be top-notch as well and is made for developers.
#Social Media Marketing Tools
Hootsuite and Buffer
Both Hootsuite and Buffer are excellent social media content platforms. Digital marketers know that managing campaigns across multiple platforms can be challenging and time-consuming. With tools like Buffer and Hootsuite, strategies can be made and set in place over all of your social media accounts at once. The content that you place on these tools will automatically be sent out at the scheduled time.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a nifty marketing calendar that can be used to plan out tasks and schedule content to go out automatically on the date and time set. One of the best features of CoSchedule is being able to organize your content and see what is going out when on a calendar. This gives you an at-a-glance view.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media analytics tool. It looks across all your linked social media accounts and offers insight and information on competitors and data from your accounts. You can then use this data to adapt or continue your current social media marketing strategy.
BuzzSumo
This is another social media analytics tool that is extremely helpful for researching popular content related to niches and keywords. It shows data such as how often the content is shared over different social media channels. Using BuzzSumo can help you decide what you should write about and what keywords are good to use.
#CRM
SugarCRM is one of the top CRM tools available but can get a bit costly. HubSpot CRM is free to use and has some amazing capabilities. HubSpot has been rated higher as a sales tool than Sugar CRM so it is worth a try before paying for Sugar CRM. FreshSales CRM rates slightly under HubSpot and has both free and paid memberships.
#Landing Pages
Unbounce, Leadpages, and Instapage are customizable landing page generators. If you have multiple ads for your business or product, having only one landing page for each ad may be a bad idea. These landing page builders allow you to design unique landing pages for each ad. Though they are similar, Unbounce seems to be a better deal for smaller businesses while Instapage is geared more toward much larger ones. Leadpages is a good mix of the two.
#SEO
SEMrush and Moz are two of the hottest SEO tools out there. They are very close in the price- within a dollar of one another. Moz is a powerful toolset but SEMrush includes more, such as competitor analysis. SEO experts created both so they rank mostly side-by-side. Yoast is rated directly behind SEMrush. While this SEO tool also has a paid package, the free version has great results as well.
#Analytics
Though Google Analytics is the most popular analytics tool, there are many others to choose from. Some of these include Clicky, Mixpanel, Mopinion, and Kiss Metrics. All of these give you data that you need but some have different focuses. Clicky focuses on web activities like downloads and pageviews on your site. Kiss Metrics looks at first-time visitors’ behavior to help improve your conversion rate. Mopinion and Mixpanel analyze both web and mobile behavior. Google Analytics is a bit more comprehensive than others.
#Automation
Marketo and HubSpot
Both Marketo and HubSpot can assist in automating your marketing campaigns, advertising, CTAs and much more. Marketo is an awesome tool that is more useful for larger businesses. HubSpot, on the other hand, offers automation to smaller businesses for no- to low-cost.
An effective marketing technology strategy will include multiple tools to cover all bases. You will find your customer base on different social media platforms. Attracting them through these platforms will do no good if you have no landing page for them to click through to, or an email sign up ready for them to fill out. Go through the tools above and create a marketing strategy that involves multiple areas so that you can maximize results.
