Building a good marketing technology stack will help your team work more productively and make the most of your marketing campaigns. The bad news is that there are thousands of tools to choose from when building your martech stack. You may not be an expert in evaluating different solutions, and that’s totally fine.
In this article, we will share some tips on how to build a marketing tech stack and will also suggest some tools for you to consider.
But let’s begin with defining what martech stack is.
What is a marketing tech (martech) stack?
A marketing tech stack is a collection of tools and technologies used to automate different marketing activities, collect data to turn it into valuable insights, and save time spent on marketing overall. Martech tools typically deal with various elements of marketing campaigns, such as website analytics, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), email campaigns, or search engine marketing.
Your main task is to come up with the stack that works for your company’s marketing needs. And here are some tips on how to do it.
How to build a martech stack
There is no universal way to build a marketing tech stack. Each business is unique, so your martech stack doesn’t have to be a copy someone else’s. That being said, here are a few pieces of advice for building the right stack according to your needs.
Determine your goals and budget
Before you start choosing tools, you need to clearly define why you need a martech stack in the first place. Let’s say, you want to improve the conversion rate on your website. For this goal, you will need to see what pages users visit most often and how they interact with them. So, when it comes to the martech stack, you should focus on analytics tools that will help you come up with strategies to improve the conversion rate.
On the other hand, you can also install a couple of tools, and find out what problems they help you solve along the way.
You can also set the budget for each tool or for the overall stack.
Research the tools
Once you understand your current goals and estimate the approximate budget, you have to research the market and evaluate the solutions you’ll add to your martech stack. Reading dedicated articles may come in handy in this case. For instance, when you’re looking for a new CMS, you may look at a list of the best CMS systems, and when you’re interested in tools for creating engaging content and SEO promotion, you may read about the best content marketing tools. Also, consider reading customer reviews on review platforms such as G2 or Trustradius.
Test new tools
After deciding on the tools, try implementing them into your team’s workflow. If the free trial option is available, test out how the chosen tools work and whether your team finds them useful.
Top 12 Martech apps online business needs
Now that you know how to build your martech stack, here are our recommendations for martech tools worth considering.
Segment
Segment is a customer data platform (CDP) acquired by Twilio. It helps businesses collect, segment, and analyze customer data to build marketing strategies upon it.
Here is what you can do using the Segment tool:
- Collect data from different customer touchpoints (social media, company website, or emails) and load it to other tools.
- Get a single shared data dictionary for marketers, contact center agents, and engineering teams.
- Segment customers into different meaningful audiences.
- Receive a unified customer history from different devices and marketing channels as a comprehensive profile.
All these features help make customer engagement with each channel more personalized and effective. Segment is in the marketing toolkit of many companies, from Gap and PayPal to Atlassian. You can have a free account, and the paid plans start at $120/month.
Amplitude
Amplitude is a real-time analytics software designed to personalize digital products and maximize their value to customers. It focuses on analyzing user behavior data. Its functionality includes:
- Real-time analytics for user behaviors, channels, and attributes.
- Analyzing customer paths across different devices and defining the interactions that made them convert or drop out of the sales channel.
- Predict user behavior patterns using machine learning (ML) and identify audiences for targeting.
A Starter plan is free, while the business plan is $995 per month.
Mixpanel
This tool is used for analyzing user interactions on both web and mobile devices. Its features include:
- Using behavioral analytics data to build more personalized communication with your users (customized chat messages and emails).
- Tracking special user events (clicking buttons, sharing content on social media, downloading content).
- Monitoring each stage of the customer journey to further change it if necessary.
- Running A/B tests and making user surveys.
Overall, Mixpanel provides powerful analytics to know your users better and helps find out which things on your website facilitate their long-term retention and which are not. You can use Mixpanel for free, while the extended plan pricing starts at $25/month.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is probably the most well-known tool for running business marketing campaigns. With its real-time analytics, marketers can see how users interact with the website right away.
This is what Google Analytics deals with:
- Offers auto-generated customizable reports on your audience, user behavior, and conversions to give a better picture of your current state of marketing.
- Sets specific Smart goals for your campaigns and monitor progress toward them.
- With visualization of different metrics and reports, this tool helps analyze and share data more easily.
For example, a behavior flow report shows how your visitors explore your website and at what point they leave.
Google Analytics is a perfect tool for analyzing your marketing data. And it’s completely free of charge.
Intercom
With Intercom, you can connect with your customers and prospects more effectively. Intercom has many integrations with customer support, marketing, and sales tools.
- A live chat widget you can place on your website and customize to communicate with prospects on your website.
- Emails and notifications to enable interactions with your customers 24/7.
- Extensive reports on leads and sales, level of customer engagement, and ROI.
The Starter plan starts at $74 per month when billed annually.
Ortto
Ortto is a platform that tracks important user activities, segments the audience, and builds personalized customer experiences based on the received data. Here is what Ortto can help you with.
- Unifying customer data with CDP
- Offering personalized multichannel messages for customers
- Creating reports on user behavior, and attribution, and track key metrics on your website.
You can use Ortto by paying from $29 per month.
Drip
This is a marketing automation platform designed for eCommerce businesses. It has plenty of features that ensure a high level of automation for marketers. With the help of Drip you can:
- Create personalized emails.
- Track emails and funnels.
- Segment your target audience.
- Provide personalized content based on users’ activity.
- Divide your audience into specific categories.
Drip pricing plans start at $39.
Google Search Console
Search Console is a free tool from Google that lets you see how well your website performs on Google search results.
- Track your website positioning on Google search results
- See the keywords and search queries your website pages rank for
- Identify and fix usability and SEO issues on the website
- Provide valuable analytics to enhance your SEO strategy
If you plan an SEO promotion campaign, Search Console is a nice tool to have in your arsenal. Google is constantly updating its functionality to help you achieve better results.
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is a tracking tool that allows you to add marketing tags to the website to gather and analyze data on user activities.
- Tags to track different marketing activities (downloads, clicks, scrolls, watching videos, filling out forms).
- Seamless integration with Google Analytics and third-party tools.
Google Optimize
This tool lets you run A/B tests on your website and see how the pages perform. Optimize integrates with Google Analytics to see where users abandon your website and enhance your website according to this data.
- Identify problem areas on the website.
- Test different variants of your website.
- Customize the website for different customer segments.
As all the Google tools mentioned above, Google Optimize is free to use.
Salesforce
You’ve probably heard about the Salesforce CRM platform before. Being the most customizable CRM, it has the biggest market share in the CRM market. Hence, whether you are a small business or an enterprise, Salesforce has already dealt with problems like yours and can offer a tried and tested solution for them.
Here are the Salesforce features that help empower your team:
- Access to critical customer data and their previous interactions to get a better understanding of their behavior.
- Opportunity Management feature that lets view the stages of a certain deal and the customer activity timeline.
- Running multiple campaigns across different channels within a single dashboard.
- Identifying new market segments and audiences that might potentially be interested in your offers.
The cost to use Salesforce CRM starts at $25 per month.
Hubspot CRM
HubSpot is another popular CRM platform that covers sales, marketing, and customer service.
Hubspot CRM functionality includes:
- Storing information about your customers and prospects in a single database.
- Customized dashboard to view your sales pipeline.
- Task management features (notifications, task scheduling, and tracking).
- Analytics on your marketing campaigns and ROI and audience segmentations.
- Lead capturing tools (chatbots, lead generation forms, ad management tools).
- Integration with social media and SEO suggestions.
The free trial of the Hubspot CRM system doesn’t have an expiration date and no matter how many people are on your team, you can use Hubspot CRM free of charge. Still, if you want an extended plan, you will need to pay at least $45 per month. The price will also depend on the functionality to be used and the number of users.
We also note that all the Martech tools prices we mentioned in this article are actual for November 2022.
Martech market overview
So there you have it. We believe that the key to building a good marketing tech stack is to pay attention to the ease of use and whether the selected tools fit your budget and business goals. However, with more than 9000 martech apps, evaluating different tools and choosing the suitable ones can become a complicated journey for you and your team.
Creating an ideal martech stack is not a cakewalk so you may need some professional help with its configuration, installation, or support. Feel free to reach out to us and we’ll definitely help.
