With the introduction of more and more marketing tools, MarTech stacks got fat and wobbly.
Chiefmartech.com, Scott Brinkers, illustrates the current state of play. For those without bionic vision, you can download a larger version.
Marketers are now complaining that there are too many marketing tools available - seriously, we’re never happy – and integrating new tools into existing MarTech stacks is hard.
Being a member of this whinging crowd, in a team that not only has its own MarTech stack but also offers a MarTech tool, I tend to agree. It’s time to sit back and work out a game plan.
How to Pick the Right Marketing Tools for Your MarTech Stack
Stack sizes vary and can be one tool or one hundred. It depends on the number of customers you have, your budget… Ultimately, your aim should be to optimize your stack by adding tools that’ll help you achieve your goals.
Marketing tools for email, social media, ecommerce, search, events, video, content, chat, loyalty, design. Tools to track SEO, SEM, CRO, PPC, and, PR. You’ll need marketing automation, predictive analytics, data management, a CRM, DMPs, demand gen and lead gen tools and more, just so you can understand mobile, social media, display ads, TV, radio, etc., etc.
Liesa recently published a report - The Perfect Marketing Tech Stack - How Companies Can Find The Tools They Need - providing best practices for evaluating and deploying marketing tools for your MarTech stack. You'll learn the importance of leading with a solid strategy for planning MarTech investments, and come away with the right questions to ask when vetting technology vendors.
How to Build the perfect MarTech stack
To accompany her report, I've pulled out ten marketing tools from our own MarTech stack, along with comments from our partners and industry experts.
Talkwalker Alerts | Reputation Protection
Do you monitor your brand’s reputation? If someone writes something damaging about your brand online, you need to find it quickly and react immediately – it's all about damage limitation. Talkwalker Alerts is quick to set up, easy to use, and FREE!!!
Setting up your chosen alerts takes seconds, then you’ll receive email alerts of the latest relevant mentions on the web and all the breaking news stories related to your specific search terms. All alerts have a brief description alongside links to the news source.
“Is it better than Google Alerts? I’ll be brutally honest – YES!”
Meg (@megzcarpenter) | Digital Comms Officer @Talkwalker
SEMrush | Keyword Research
Your content is brilliant - it’s witty, insightful, with just the right amount of sarcasm. Did you optimize? Like it or not - and I know some content writers balk at the idea – you can’t afford to ignore SEO. Quite simply, there’s just too much competition out there to pooh-pooh SEO.
SEMrush is one of the best marketing tools on the market for keyword research. With this tool, you’ll be able to analyze rankings, ad copy, and backlink profiles. Bonus, you can spy on the competition.
SEMrush analyzes your entire SEO strategy and gives you insights on how to drive more traffic to your website.
“For me, the most interesting factor here is the ability to find the top keywords driving traffic to any domain. For a serious marketer or company, knowing a top competitor’s keywords (SEOpivot) is the holy grail.”
Harsh Agrawal (@denharsh) | Fountain Head of Internet Marketing Blog ShoutMeLoud
Hotjar | Visitor Behavior
This is one of my favorite marketing tools, I could play around with it for hours.
It shows you how web and mobile users behave when visiting your website so that you can understand what they’re looking at when they interact with your site. Analysts, web developers, digital marketers, UI developers can use Hotjar to optimize the conversion and usability rate of their site.
The visual heatmap tool reveals how users are interacting with your site. If they’re stumbling at any point on a given page, the sections they’re concentrating on, where they’re clicking, and their scrolling behavior. Hot areas present opportunities for growth and conversion rate optimization.
And – OMG – you can make mouse tracking movies. Yes, you read that right, MOUSE MOVIES – how cool is that!
Features include:
- Visitor Recordings – monitors users’ behavior on your website.
- Heatmaps – tracks where users most scroll past or click to identify which sections get the least or most attention.
- Conversion Funnels – understand which pages cause visitors to leave so you can improve bounce rate.
- Form Analytics – watch where users are dropping off and why they’re not completing your forms.
- Feedback Polls – add a polling box to high-traffic pages for instant feedback.
“So overall, Hotjar really is a great tool with a lot of value to offer any online business (or website in general at that). There's not many businesses that work online I wouldn't recommend this tool to.”
Stephen Esketzis (@StephenEsk) | Founder StephenEsketzis.com | Sales Funnel Architect & Advance Online Marketer
Ahrefs | Backlinks & SEO
Originally just for backlink analysis, Ahrefs now covers SEO auditing, content marketing analysis, link prospecting, review keyword ranking positions, and keyword research.
WOW, how many marketing tools in one?!!
The Ahrefs dashboard lets you set up projects where you can monitor domains for changes in metrics. Metrics that include domain health - accessibility, crawlability, meta data violations, gained and lost referring domains, URL rating, backlinks, and how many keywords your domain’s ranking for.
You can set up email alerts for won/lost backlinks and rankings. A crawl report of your site identifies response codes, duplicate content, thin content, title tags, H1 and H2 tags, internal/external links, and meta descriptions.
“Ahrefs is an absolutely essential toolkit if you want to grow your traffic from Google. Just by analyzing sites of your competitors you can learn a lot about the keywords they’re targeting and how much search traffic it brings them. Other than that, you’ll be able to see where they get links to the pages of their websites, which helps them rank higher in Google.”
Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) | Head of Marketing at Ahrefs
Marketo | Personalized Engagement
We went nuts for the monkey, but the Yeti got huffy – likes to be the center of attention – so we moved to Marketo.
Marketo is one of the most important marketing tools in your MarTech stack because it’s:
- User-friendly – it’s UI may not be drop dead gorgeous, but it’s easy and intuitive to use.
- Easy to integrate with Salesforce – syncing can be slow but these marketing tools work hand in hand.
- Fast to set up – it’s easy to implement and you’ll be using Marketo quickly.
- Support & community led – advice on campaigns and technical issues are readily available.
"We use it to nurture prospects with personalized content based on the stage of their customer journey. It helps us convert prospects to customers and customers to brand ambassadors."
Liesa (@LiesaOpitz) | Digital Comms Officer @Talkwalker
Google Analytics | Track Website Traffic
Google Analytics tracks and reports data on your website – traffic, bounce rate, conversions, and more. It’s a free service from Google that provides insights into how users find and use your website. Your MarTech stack is not complete without this marketing tool.
And then we made it better…
Social mentions are unrecognized by Google Analytics. To attribute revenue to social media, social data integration is needed. Following an integration with Talkwalker, we can now collect multiple sets of data from social media and website analytics. We can track conversations to conversions.
"Do you have a blog? Do you have a static website? If the answer is yes, whether they are for personal or business use, then you need Google Analytics."
Kristi Hines (@kikolani) | Freelance Writer at kristihines.com
Hootsuite | Social Media Management
If you’re juggling multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, and you have several team members in your social media team – you need Hootsuite, it’s gonna keep all your balls in the air - clever trick. It also has additional integrations in its app directory, including Reddit, Tumblr, and Marketo.
Marketing tools that manage your social media accounts are worth their weight in gold, and Hootsuite is one heavy tool.
Integrated with Talkwalker, you can set up streams and monitor all mentions of your favorite topics across millions of news sites, blogs, and forums whilst sharing content in real-time. If you’re using Hootsuite already, you can install the Talkwalker app for free.
Yep, that’s what I said, it won’t cost you a penny.
"If you are looking for a tool that lets you manage all of your social media accounts and presence in a single place, and collaborate as a team on them, then Hootsuite should be at the top of your list to investigate." "The company keeps investing in enhancements to its platform. Hootsuite just keeps getting better. And that’s not always true with products."
Anita Campbell (@smallbiztrends) | Founder and Publisher of Small Business Trends
Talkwalker Command Center | The War Room
Break down your data silos, release your budget, and set your talent free with a command center. Our command center transforms real-time social data and delivers it as a fantastic visualization.
Real-time social insights of your brand will be centralized so you can react immediately to a crisis, receive live reactions to your marketing campaigns, and listen to real-time conversations about your brand.
All this essential information can be broadcast across your business to encourage collaboration and focus throughout your team.
If you're interested in our command center, it comes as an add-on – please get in touch for more details.
“We run our command center in the office, which is a magnet for people all over the company. It’s made a huge difference in the way data is shared with different teams. Almost everyone stops by regularly to look at it and take some information to their own teams.”
Elena Melnikova (@ElenaMMelnikova) | CMO at Talkwalker & my boss
Slack | Comms Tool
Slack does not mean lax, sloppy, sluggish, lazy, or loose – we’re not talking knicker elastic. Slack is not half a pair of slacks (trousers, to you Brits out there). Slack stands for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.
Who’d have thunk!
What’s Slack? According to its website, it’s where work happens. We use it every day in the marketing team for collaborating on projects, sharing interesting news, and scheduling coffee breaks.
Hey, we all need the occasional caffeine hit.
It’s a messaging app with powerful features that allow you to integrate other marketing tools such as Trello, Gmail, Giphy, and many more. You can create groups to include your entire team, segments, or have one-to-one chats.
"It's very, very, very quick for anyone who interacts with Slack to consider Slack, the entity, their friend. That's super weird."
Harper Reed (@harper) | Former CTO Obama for America, now defining the future of commerce at PayPal
Adobe CS | Create, Deliver, Optimize
Laura, our awesome designer, worships at the altar that is Adobe.
It’s a member of our team and touches every part of operations – image creation, videos, designing hard-copy brochures, logos, screen casts, business cards, and event displays.
Zap those zits with Photoshop, create professional reports and brochures with InDesign, and design logos, icons, typography, and sketches with Illustrator.
“Adobe has done a good job of making their tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign quite similar in the way they operate across these two platforms.“
Christopher Smith | president of American Graphics Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, creator and editor of the Digital Classroom book series
Lessons Learned
- You won’t know if marketing tools are going to work until you and your team try them out - it's time well spent.
- Don’t believe the sales guy’s pitch. They have a job, you have a job - their goal is not your goal.
- Allow enough time for implementation of new tech - training is essential.
- Understand how data integrates across the tools - it has to join the family.
Our MarTech Stack
Pretty sexy, no?
And finally, the last but quite possibly the most important tool in your MarTech stack.
A bloody good coffee machine
“For me, the most interesting factor here is the ability to find the top keywords driving traffic to any domain. For a serious marketer or company, knowing a top competitor’s keywords (SEOpivot) is the holy grail.”
Harsh Agrawal (@denharsh) | Fountain head of Internet marketing blog ShoutMeLoud
Hotjar
This is one of my favorite marketing tools, I could play around with it for hours.
It shows you how web and mobile users behave when visiting your website so you can understand what they’re looking at when they interact with your site. Analysts, web developers, digital marketers, UI developers can use Hotjar to optimize the conversion and usability rate of their site.
The visual heatmap tool reveals how users are interacting with your site. If they’re stumbling at any point on a given page, the sections they’re concentrating on, where they’re clicking, and they’re scrolling behaviour. Hot areas present opportunities for growth and conversion rate optimization.
And – OMG – you can make mouse tracking movies. Yes, you read that right, MOUSE MOVIES – how cool is that!
Features include:
· Visitor Recordings – monitors users’ behaviour on your website.
· Heatmaps – tracks where users most scroll past or click to identify which sections get the least or most attention.
· Conversation Funnels – understand which pages cause visitors to leave so you can improve bounce rate.
· Form Analytics – watch where users are dropping off and why they’re not completing your forms.
· Create Polls – add a polling box to high-traffic pages for instant feedback.
