There was a time when marketers had very few choices in automation. It was a challenging time. In a way, it still is. But now the problem lies with having too many.
Just imagine this. The year was 2011. The marketing automation landscape was picking up, and marketers had a mere 150 marketing technology tools. Fast forward to ten years later, and that number is more than 50 times higher at 8000 and counting.
What is a Marketing Technology Stack?
Gartner defined Marketing Technology Stack or ‘Martech Stack’ as “a set of software solutions used by marketing leaders to support mission-critical business objectives and drive innovation within their organizations.” A Marketing tech stack is categorized into:
- Email Marketing Tools
- Social Media Tools
- Advertising Tools
- CRM Tools
- Analytics Tools
- Collaboration Tools
It is evident that there’s no dearth of marketing technologies in the market, as businesses are constantly in search of tools that streamline tasks and aid with workflow challenges. After all, there’s just too much a business can achieve with the right set of tools and fetch ROIs.
So this is the picture. Too many choices, and there’s no other option but to choose those that would be fundamental to your business goals. How do you pick the best?
There’s a way out, and that’s what I’m going to address. From our experiences and team insights, we’ve shortlisted a few tools that have now significantly transformed the way we work. For good.
Let’s have a look.
1. ActiveCampaign
A typical sales conversion funnel requires an average of eight touchpoints. Most businesses receive a lot of leads through inbound and ads but fail to recycle or reuse them. This task ultimately falls upon your sales rep to follow up with the leads manually. This process isn’t just time-consuming but also mundane. And since it’s humans executing these tasks, accountability remains a big concern.
Instead, why not automate all of it?
ActiveCampaign is a tool that helps automate your follow-up and outreach strategy while also letting you personalize each touchpoint that drives conversions. It enables you to categorize your sales funnel in different stages and track consumer preferences across all of those conversion steps.
Email marketing has proven, time and time again, to be a very efficient and cost-effective method of lead nurturing. The more targeted and focused your emails are, the more subscriber engagement you can expect.
With the ability to create drip campaigns and split testing, you can improve email sequencing, encouraging better open rates and engagement from your audience.
The most common ways companies use ActiveCampaign are,
- Onboarding new customers
- Nurturing existing leads
- Reviving lost leads
- Sending Newsletters
- Behavior-based emails
2. Heap Analytics
Data is at the core of everything in marketing. It dictates future plans and gives insights into what’s working and what’s not. An analytics tool is the most common and easy way to read your marketing data which makes it an essential inclusion in this list.
There are a lot of analytics tools in the market, dominated by Google Analytics, that let you track online traffic, understand user behavior, and improve your overall marketing activities. But to use them, you need to have some know-how on how to use the tool, get well-versed with its features, etc. It becomes a challenging task for those who do not have experience with it.
Heap Analytics solves that. The product is made in a way that makes it seem simple and easy, no matter if you are a pro or a beginner. Heap collects all the data beforehand, leaving you only to define the critical events you want to track.
Create reports for the metrics that are important to you and even add multiple reports on a dashboard.
You ought to take a trial to see how they truly make analytics easier.
3. Getsitecontrol
It takes mere 7 seconds for visitors to make up their mind about a website and move on to something else—just 7 seconds. So what your visitors need is the motivation to stay and explore your site to give them a push and get one step closer to closing the sale.
You need to grab their attention, and Conversation Rate Optimization (CRO) tools helps you do just that.
Getsitecontrol is a CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization) tool that lets you convert more visitors into leads from your website. It’s an easy-to-use tool that allows you to build pop-ups and sticky bars so that visitors stay longer on your site and convert eventually.
You can do all sorts of things with Getsitecontrol, like running surveys, announcing updates using sticky bars, capturing visitor information using pop-ups, displaying coupon codes, eventually helping you push them down the sales funnel.
A few reasons why Getsitecontrol should make it to your marketing tech stack are,
- Easy to use interface
- A plethora of triggering options
- A/B test between variations
- Analytics on each widget
- Customizable widgets
4. WotNot
Your marketing tech stack is incomplete without an automated demand generation and customer engagement tool, and we have a few reasons why we think you should pick WotNot.
First, you spend thousands of marketing dollars to bring visitors to your website, but they visit and go away. That’s leaving you with nothing but numbers on an analytics tool. What you need is to engage with every visitor coming to your website in a conversational manner to probe them to understand why they’re here, gather their contact information, and eventually convert them to sales-qualified leads.
Second, WotNot is a no-code bot-building platform, so you don’t have to worry about its setup and know-how. And even if you don’t want to, opt for our done-for-you service, where our experienced team understands your challenges and develops your bot accordingly.
Third, owing to the integrations that WotNot offers, whenever there is a new lead generated, you can simply push the data to your CRM, Email management system, etc.—making it seamless for you to take up the next steps in the sales funnel.
Lastly, you have data. Data represented in a business-centric helping you identify and analyze the conversion %, the business value generated, contacts generated, geo-location-based insights to improve your conversational flow for an even higher conversion rate.
5. FeedHive
With too many tasks on your hands, let’s face it, you don’t have the time to be active on your social media handles. You cannot overlook it, too, since it’s a critical medium for audience engagement, at least given in this digital age.
FeedHive is a social media marketing tool where you can create a content backlog and schedule them to post at a specified time, as well as leverage AI to create fresh content.
While you do have a lot of social media tools in the market, what makes FeedHive special is that it aids you with not just scheduling but also creating posts by learning from your post history, suggesting reposts to recycle content.
It has a vast library of post templates that helps you save time in creating and publishing new tweets regularly.
It does all this at a very reasonable price. Given the benefit you get out of it, it’s a steal.
6. HotJar
Let’s say you’ve built a fantastic website. Thousands of visitors visit your website and perform various actions – like page views, button clicks, etc.
However, there are still questions that remain unanswered as a business. How are visitors from the US scrolling through page A? How many visitors clicked on the “Sign up” button? What exactly did prospect A do during their visit to the website? Where do visitors drop off from a feature page?
HotJar answers all these questions for you.
HotJar is a product experience insights tool that gives you insights and feedback to understand your customers better. It is an easy-to-use product with tools like heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, funnel tracking, and incoming feedback widgets.
The heatmaps and recordings allow you to understand where the visitors are losing track and what sections are performing the best. This will help you know what CTAs to use, which design element resonates with the users, and what website layout to use in the future. You can also verify if your A/B test campaigns are working effectively, and it allows you to capture feedback that explains your user behavior.
Surveys and incoming feedback widgets are added bonuses that help you get valuable insights from your visitors on their experience and how they actually perceive the product based on how they see it.
7. Calendly
When you already have so much on your plate, you want to be rid of the administrative tasks of scheduling appointments. You aim for inbox zero and fewer back and forth emails to find a time that works with both parties’ schedules.
Calendly is scheduling software that helps you book appointments, interviews, calls, demos, and more. You can simply define your availability and fields to be captured to book a slot (Name, Email, Phone) and embed it on your website or share its URL. Using it, your visitors/customers will easily see the available time slots to book a meeting.
Research says that booking a meeting with the prospect has a higher likelihood of the prospect coming on the call, as compared to filling a form and then your sales reps reaching out. Because the intent to purchase would be at the highest when on your website otherwise, your sales rep will keep following up to prospects to no avail.
Apart from your website, you can also use Calendly on conversational tools like chatbots where the bot automatically qualifies the leads and schedules a meeting on your calendar. Calendly also takes up the tasks of sending the invites, timely reminders for the event, and updates on schedule changes. All in all, it becomes effortless for you to juggle appointments daily and enhance your chances of generating quality leads.
8. Salesforce
Think about all your sales goals – increasing your pipeline, nurturing leads, qualifying them, customer management, etc. But before you do all of this, you need to have all your customer data under a single roof. You need a platform to access and manage all your contacts, leads, and accounts and know at what stage of the customer journey your prospects are on.
Salesforce is that platform and your go-to CRM software for numerous reasons. It is a cloud-based Customer Relationship Management software that acts as a collaborative hub where various departments can centralize data of its customers and prospects, from the in-product activity to contact information. And being cloud-based, accessibility is real-simple.
With its ability to customize the product to your needs, you can tailor-make workflows, objects, reports, and dashboards to your liking. Thereby helping your teams work together effectively and hand you the most critical aspect for running successful marketing campaigns – data!
Create skill-based routing rules so that the right leads to the right sales reps for an even better conversion rate.
9. Slack
If you want to reap benefits from your marketing efforts, you need a tool that strengthens organizational efficiency. Slack is a well-known team messaging and project collaboration tool that facilitates real-time communication between teammates and organizations through channels.
You can create private and public channels and share messages, posts, articles, etc., with anyone in the workspace.
However, Slack’s use-case goes beyond a communication tool for teams.
Slack offers integrations with a ton of marketing tools through which you can get real-time updates of all your marketing activities.
Got a new sign-up? Received feedback from HotJar? Push notifications from all your other Martech tools under a single interface, displayed for all the concerned teammates to view.
This paves the way for discussions and collaboration across teams and improves team productivity based on events.
10. Ahrefs
All your sales and marketing activities start after you get site visitors, but how do you first generate site traffic?
To truly stay ahead of the game online, you need brand visibility. Search Engine Optimization activities help you garner those views online, making potential prospects more likely to click and visit your website. SEO also instills trust amongst your prospects. The bigger your SEO score, the higher the chances of ranking at the top of search engines.
But if you’re intimidated by the word ‘SEO,’ you have Ahrefs to the rescue. Ahrefs can help with all your SEO activities, such as keyword research, ‘clicks’ data, tracking backlink activities, keyword click distribution, ranking history, monitoring outbound links, and a lot more metrics that help you eventually help you get more traffic.
The best part is it doesn’t just allow you to check your SEO activities but also helps with a competitive analysis where you can check how your competitors are ranking, which are their top pages, which keywords are they running ads on, so you can learn and improve your marketing strategies.
Some of the top metrics you have to check on Ahrefs are,
- Website Audit (Health Score)
- Keyword Research
- Backlink Growth or Decline over Time
- Analyze SERP History
- Content Explorer
- Rank Tracker
- Domain Comparison
While all of these tools provide individual benefits, they work best when integrated. So, if you’re building a marketing tech stack, you need to assemble them all to create a cohesive experience for your prospective customers. More than adding a bunch of tools, you’re instead building a product ecosystem that will dictate your workflows and impact your customer relationships in a manner to complement your growth strategies.
Originally published here.
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