Key takeaways:
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.
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!)
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:
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:
(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.
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:
Acquisition tools generally mean outreach, which can include email marketing automation, social media automation, and performance marketing tools. These are our favorites:
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:
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:
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.
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:
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?
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!