The best martech solutions depend on your business and its goals, but a few clear winners can keep you on top of your metrics.
Key takeaways:
- Your martech stack is your utility belt of tools that share data to create a bird’s eye view of your marketing performance
- Building a martech stack means defining what your business needs and what your sales funnel looks like, then choosing tools to match
- No single stack works for every business, but we’ve put together 15 of our favorite martech solutions to get you started
- Martech only helps your content marketing strategy if you have killer content, so don’t neglect that piece of the puzzle
Martech – or marketing technology – is a piece of the content marketing puzzle that you just can’t ignore.
Every successful company has a martech stack or a set of interconnected tools that help you see your company’s performance from a bird’s eye view.
Without it, you can’t really know how your company’s doing on all the complex metrics you have to watch. But with it, you’re empowered to see what’s working (and make better decisions around what’s not working).
The problem is, there are a lot of martech companies that all say they have the best solutions for you, so it’s not easy to find the right stack without a TON of legwork.
In 2020, there were over 7,000 marketing technology companies in a $121 billion industry, and they all want your attention. How the heck are you supposed to build a stack when your pool is 7,000 companies deep?!
Don’t sweat too hard just yet – first, take the time to learn about the marketing technology stack as a tool, and then we’ll help you narrow it down from there.
What is a martech stack?
Your martech stack is a customized toolkit that includes a set of tools that share data to create a top-down view of your marketing performance through the entire sales funnel or buyer’s journey.
Pretty much any business that utilizes marketing finds a martech stack useful. That includes B2B and B2C companies of all sizes!
The pros of building a martech stack include that you’re getting a constantly updated, accurate view of how things are going within your marketing strategy. That translates to better decision-making and better performance.
There aren’t any real cons – unless you count the difficulty involved in building a martech stack and choosing from the near-endless pool of available tools. (And that doesn’t really count because nothing that’s good for you comes without hard work!)
How to build a killer martech stack
Now’s the best time to start building your martech stack because that takes time. Chances are, you already have some marketing technology tools in place, but maybe you’re not utilizing them as effectively as you would be in a stack.
First, take inventory of your business requirements. Ask yourself questions about where your business could benefit from some extra help. Those questions might include:
- What’s your customer persona?
- What marketing channels do you use?
- What marketing channels do you want to use?
- What’s your most important metric?
- What are your biggest marketing goals?
- What’s your marketing budget?
You can use those answers to identify where you need help within the sales funnel or buyer’s journey.
It makes the most sense to develop your martech stack based on the funnel or journey that users take on their way to becoming customers. We like the Pirate Metrics model by Dave McClure:
- Acquisition
- Activation
- Retention
- Referral
- Revenue
(AARRR!)
There are hundreds of tools that fall within each of those five stages, but we took matters into our own hands for you and narrowed it down to just a few.
The 15 best martech tools by funnel stage
There’s a reason we narrowed it down to our three favorites per category instead of just one.
Let’s say it louder for those in the back: There’s NO perfect martech stack that works for every company. So we’re not going to give you the best martech stack. We’re just going to give you a list of favorites that you can use to build your own stack.
Here are 15 martech solutions that knock it out of the park, by their stage in the Pirate Metrics journey:
3 best acquisition tools for martech
Acquisition tools generally mean outreach, which can include email marketing automation, social media automation, and performance marketing tools. These are our favorites:
- Unbounce: a powerhouse platform for creating kick-ass landing pages that convert.
- Clearbit: data enrichment for your website visitors that will sync to any CRM.
- Qualified: the most comprehensive conversational marketing tool on the market that will alert SDRs when their lead in browsing the web.
3 best activation tools for martech
Activation tools for your stack include any fantastic user analytics tool that lets you see whether you’re wow-ing the customer at the right stage. We love:
- Mixpanel: a top-notch customer insights platform with self-serve product analytics.
- Amplitude: a powerful product analytics platform for understanding customer behavior.
- Crazy Egg: a traffic analysis and website optimization tool with heatmaps and A/B testing.
3 best retention tools for martech
Keeping your customers around and happy is critical, and you can see how you’re doing by adding tools to your stack that fall under the CRM umbrella. Our favorites include:
- Salesforce: a powerhouse CRM for interconnecting all your teams and workflows.
- Freshsales: a CRM platform for growing customer value, contact scoring, automation, and more.
- HubSpot: (could have easily been in acquisition too) the gold-standard CRM for marketers looking to convert leads, engage with customers, and boost revenue through automation.
3 best referral tools for martech
Want to go viral? There are tons of viral marketing tools that help you measure how successful your referral programs and sweepstakes are.
- UpViral: the ultimate referral platform for contests and viral marketing campaigns.
- Gleam: a growth platform that lets you capture emails, build social galleries, run contests, and automate instant rewards.
- ReferralCandy: a customer referral platform for word-of-mouth marketing.
3 best revenue tools for martech
Want to measure your revenue and know how to improve it? Pick a payment gateway tool that has out-of-this-world analytics capabilities. Some of our favorites include:
- Stripe: arguably the payment gateway with THE best analytics dashboard.
- PayPal: the best payment gateway for accessibility and payment protection.
- Square: the payment processor of choice for those with e-commerce and physical stores.
Reminder: Your martech stack only matters if you have good content
All the hard work that goes into your stack basically goes down the toilet if you’re not backing it up with extraordinary content. You’re here because content marketing is a critical part of your marketing strategy. Heck, it’s a critical part of every marketing strategy.
When you’re looking at your metrics, think: Where could better content support better metrics here? Where could my content do a better job supporting my goals and moving the user along the pipeline?
Get the freshest content when you choose ContentBacon
You know the drill – you’re busy, you need content, so you need ContentBacon.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a business owner or a CMO. We know you’re already wearing way too many hats and working way too many hours. That’s why we’re here to offer a content subscription solution that’s hands-off.
Our team of expert writers, editors, and strategists is standing by to create content that truly sounds like your brand and tells your story in an authentic way. That’s how you ensure the best success with your martech stack – by backing it up with great content.
Get your FREE inbound marketing assessment today and learn how ContentBacon can revolutionize the way you do content marketing!
