How to Build a Winning Marketing Tech Stack?

Without the right marketing tools, your team is straddled with more admin and chores than they can handle.

Doesn't that sound familiar? It's a common struggle to juggle piles of data and overflowing inboxes.

It is difficult to keep track of all aspects of the business and this is where the problem creeps in. If you are not able to facilitate automation, then it is likely that human errors will creep into your work—and this is a threat to your growth.

That's where the marketing tech stack comes in.

Martech stack cuts off the time wasted on menial tasks and helps you manage your team's work. It streamlines processes, standardizes workflows, and automates marketing activities.

But how can you build a successful marketing tech stack to help you achieve your goals? And how do you know which tools to choose?

In this post, we'll answer these questions.

Let's dive in.

What is a Marketing Tech Stack?

A marketing tech stack combines software and technology that a marketer uses to power their marketing operations. It consists of the tools a marketer needs to collect, store and analyze customer data. As these tools take off much work from a marketer’s plate by streamlining and automating multiple tasks, so that they can concentrate more on things that matter.

Different Technologies used in Marketing

MarTech is an umbrella term that encompasses any service that helps you to measure the customer's experience and buying behavior. These services are grouped into some main types;

1. Interactive Product Demo

As the market is growing more competitive than ever, it’s crucial to beef up your sales and marketing efforts. It is essential to include a tool that helps you showcase your product in a way that cuts through the noise.

As buyers are particular about their investments, it’s essential to demonstrate your product's value by addressing its key features and benefits. Interactive product demos help your prospects explore every facet of your product, without giving them access to the live version. This empowers them to make more confident and informed decisions.  

2. Analytics

Analytic tools play a crucial role in optimizing your business. It helps you to make data-driven decisions and helps in increasing the return on investment.

Several types of analytics technology can help you improve the effectiveness and efficiency of your ad targeting, website customization, and customer response. The right tools can help you make better decisions faster, improving performance and competitive advantage.

3. Customer relationship management (CRM)

In the simplest terms, customer relationship management (CRM) software helps companies manage their customer relationships. It can help businesses keep track of their clients, leads, prospects, and contacts in one place.

It bridges the gap between customer and company, intending to create strong connections between them.

4. Search engine optimization

SEO software helps companies craft their search strategy with perfect keywords and phrases. But it doesn’t stop there. It also ensures that the content on your website is optimized for search engines to ensure that you get maximum exposure in SERPs (search engine results pages).

The SEO software is designed to help you generate more organic traffic and improve your website’s ranking in search results. It allows you to track the performance of your site’s keywords, analyze keyword rankings, and monitor competitor activity.

5. Social media marketing

Social media tools play a crucial role in the B2B marketing tech stack, as it helps you to understand your target audience, track the performance of your content and measure the ROI. You can also build brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.

6. Content management system

Content management tools help you by letting you manage the content on your site without having to be an expert in HTML, CSS, or any other coding language. This saves you time and makes it easier to change things around when needed.

Moreover, mastering content management is just as crucial as crafting compelling content. You can even explore innovative solutions like headless CMS.

The main benefits of headless CMS includes smooth content delivery across multiple channels and easy connectivity with third-party softwares which makes it a worthy choice.

7. Email marketing

Email marketing is evergreen and cost-effective marketing that helps you grow your business by building a relationship with your customers. Email marketing allows you to communicate with your customers, learn about them and deliver them value in exchange for their loyalty.

Other pieces of your tech stack may already have email marketing capabilities built-in, for example, your marketing automation platform or inbound marketing software.

How to Build a Winning Marketing Tech Stack?

No one can tell you precisely what your Martech stack should look like. So every company must find its own way to succeed online—and then stick with it.

Before your team starts working together, you should choose tech tools to help them be more productive (e.g., a collaboration tool for communicating with each other).

Once done, you have to set them up so that everyone can use the technology without much training or help from others. To ensure a smooth transition to your team, take the following steps;

1. Start with defining your ideal marketing strategies and goals

Before you invest any time or money into a new marketing tech stack, it’s essential to know what you want to achieve and how the campaign will be measured.

Do you want to increase the number of website visitors? Or do you want to increase your sales conversion rate?

Your answer determines the type of marketing technology you should use.

For example, if your goal is to increase site traffic, your strategy will be SEO, and the best tool will fall under SEO tools.

2. Asses the existing tools in practice

Asses the existing tools you have with your team, and then decide if they are helping you to achieve your goals. If not, then it’s time to analyze what kind of tools you need and whether there are any gaps in your strategy.

In this way, you can identify the gaps and fill them in. Once you have done that, you can use the right tools for your goal. If you don’t have any tools for your efforts, you must identify the need using the following step.

3. Conduct an audit with your team

One of the best ways to identify gaps in your strategy is by surveying your team. This will help you understand what kind of challenges they are facing and how they can be addressed using new tools.

As the conversation begins, try to connect their challenges with your marketing goals—for instance: "I'm trying to provide a better product demo to ease the process of signing up new clients. Do you think it will help if we could streamline the process of creating demos?"

This will help you understand what you need to do to improve your team's performance. The point is to understand what your team needs so that you can come up with relevant and valuable solutions.

4. Define your budget

It's essential to know how much money you can afford to spend on the various technologies you'll need for your marketing tech stack. This will help you narrow your choices and focus on the tools within your budget.

You can approach this task in two ways.

• You might set aside a certain amount of money for each tool, or
• Opt instead to budget overall for the entire team on an annual, quarterly, or monthly basis.

The first approach is easier to manage but can cause problems if you find a tool that requires more money than you have available. The second approach allows for flexibility and creativity in your solutions, and it will be easy for you to drop a tool if that doesn't work best.

The next factor you have to consider is the number of people who will use the software. Thus, determine the number of seats that you need for your team. For example, if you have a small business and only need software for yourself, you should get just one seat.

5. Shortlist the tools to fill your marketing tech stack

Now that you know what type of software and how many seats are needed, it's time to narrow down your options. Create a spreadsheet and start mentioning the best available tools with the features, budget, and user reviews. You can also check out the tool comparison sites to better understand what is available in the market.

To research software, consider its:

• Cost: Will it fit into your marketing budget?
• Features: Can it help you achieve your goals and alleviate challenges you’re facing now or anticipate having in the future?
• Reviews: Other people’s experience with this tool.

Once you have shortlisted some tools, it's time to compare their features and pricing plans to pick one that meets your requirements.

6. Implement and adapt

When it's time to adopt the marketing tech stack, you don't want to throw them out without a workflow. Your team members would be unable to use their subscriptions if they didn't know how or were scared to make mistakes.

The best way to implement a marketing tech stack is by creating a workflow and putting it in place. You can also use this time to train your team on the new tool to know how and when to use it.

Once you’ve picked a tool and started using it, keep an eye on how well it serves your needs. If you find that certain features aren’t working for you or the tool isn't meeting your goals, consider whether to stick with it or switch to another.

Best 13 Tools to invest in Marketing Tech Stack for 2024

While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to developing a marketing tech stack, there are some tools that almost every company should have in their marketing toolkit.

Let’s look at the essential tools used in most marketing stacks. These are essential for running a high-performing marketing team: attracting site visitors, converting them into leads, and engaging them throughout their journey to becoming customers.

Interactive Product Demo platform

Storylane

One of the crucial aspects of sales and marketing is product demos. It’s the phase when your prospect feels the value of your product and the result it brings to the table. We all know that lots of work go in the background to schedule a sales demo with your prospect.

When your demo is scheduled, the way you lead and the questions you ask during a sales call will make or break the sales process! That’s why it’s essential to include demo software in your marketing tech stack. Storylane helps you to create and roll out an interactive product demo that hooks your prospect’s attention. Here is what an interactive demo from Storylane looks like,

‍

It also has multiple features like

• No-code editor,
• Analytics,
• Rich editing features,
• Auto personalization,
• Integration with martech stacks like Marketo, Hubspot or Pardot
• Integrations to beef up your sales demo efforts.

You can evaluate Storylane with a free demo here!

Analytics

Google Analytics: Website visitor analytics

A website visit analytics platform can tell you many things about your visitors, such as when they are visiting, where they’re coming from, and whether or not a particular visitor bounced off.

Google Analytics also provides information about your website's organic traffic, including the most popular landing pages and why customers leave. Once you know what your website visitors are doing, you can make changes to increase conversions and reduce bounce rates.  

Google search console: Web page analytics

Most marketers use Google Analytics to measure the traffic and analytics of their websites. While it’s reliable, the Google search console helps you to dig deeper into single-page insights. You can measure how much traffic your web pages are getting, bounce rate, session duration, and much more.

This goes beyond just knowing if someone visited your site or not, but also how much time they spent browsing around and what pages they were most interested in.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

Hubspot: All-in-one free CRM

HubSpot is a tool that combines customer relationship management with analytics to help companies understand their customers better, communicate more effectively within the company, and measure results.

It combines Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and CMS (content management system) to help companies manage marketing, sales, and service processes.

Salesforce CRM: Best and most popular CRM

Salesforce is a customer relationship management tool that allows you to store contact information, quickly identify sales opportunities, track service issues, and manage marketing campaigns.

By storing all customer interactions in a centralized database, your company can make that information available to anyone who needs it.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)  

Ahrefs

SEO has multiple elements weaved together, and investing in every tool to streamline everything is not feasible. This is where Ahrefs comes in.

Ahrefs' keyword explorer, backlink analyzer, and site explorer allow you to compare your keywords with the ones used by other websites. With this information, you can create a more targeted SEO strategy to help your site rank higher on search engines.

Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is a web crawling tool essential for finding 404 errors and identifying broken links and duplicate content.

Screaming Frog lets you crawl small and large websites for data. The SEO Spider exports essential on-page elements (URL, page title, meta description) to a spreadsheet so they can easily be used as a foundation for recommendations. It also generates backlinks analysis reports.

Social media marketing

Sprout Social: Social media analytics

Sprout allows you to dive deep into your performance on a single network or quickly compare results across multiple networks at once.

The one tool for marketers that does it all:

• Calculate Facebook page impressions
• Tally up Twitter link clicks
• Measure Instagram follower growth

Sprout Social helps you with everything!

Buffer

Buffer helps you manage all the social media platforms under one roof. With Buffer, you can shorten links, upload custom images and videos to share with your audience—and get precise analytics on their performance.

You can set up a schedule so your content gets posted regularly throughout the day. Moreover, you can reply to posts directly through Buffer and add teammates.

Content management system

WordPress: Popular and best

WordPress (CMS) is a great option for small businesses. It’s easy-to-use, free, and versatile enough to handle just about any website project you can throw at it.

This CMS is also highly extensible, so you can add new features and customize your site with plugins.  

Hubspot CMS Hub: Best for blogging and content management

HubSpot CMS Hub is a content management system designed to help marketers and business owners create, publish, and manage their websites.

CMS Hub is built on top of the HubSpot CRM platform, which includes tools for marketing automation, sales, service, and operations. This means it can be used by both growing businesses looking for a complete solution to manage their website—and large enterprises trying to organize all aspects of digital communication in one place.

Email marketing

Convertkit: Best for email automation

ConvertKit is a powerful email marketing tool that's growing rapidly. It offers automation and other features to help you grow your subscriber list, plus customizable sign-up forms and landing pages for more traffic.

Its email automation feature helps you manage your subscribers, send campaigns, and measure your results. The platform is easy to use and integrates with several other tools.

Mailchimp: Best Overall

Mailchimp is the best email marketing software because it provides all the tools necessary for businesses without overwhelming them with unnecessary features.

Thanks to smart scheduling features and analytics, businesses can maximize their email marketing results by running campaigns targeting subscribers optimally.

Streamline your efforts with a powerful marketing technology stack

At this point, you know the impact of having a robust marketing tech stack on your marketing efforts. Now, it’s time to fill your Martech tool stack with selective tools to help you reach your goal.

You may put all your efforts into generating leads for your product and end up booking too many demo calls, but if you fail to showcase your product in the best light possible, all your efforts will be in vain.

To avoid this issue, you need an easy to use demo software that gives your customers a real sense of what your product does. You should also consider the level of customization available for the demo, as this will allow you to personalize it for each customer.

This is where Storylane comes in. Storylane is a demo experience software that allows you to create interactive, highly customizable, and engaging demos of your product. On top of that, it offers multiple features that let you use your demo for multiple use cases and drive more sales.

Want to know how your product shines with the help of Storylane's features? Just schedule a free demo, and we will show you how.