We all face different challenges as marketers. Our priorities evolve as customer needs shift. Marketing technology exists to make our lives easier. Every marketer leverages a MarTech stack to help simplify and automate standard processes.
But deciding which tools to purchase is just the beginning. You must ensure the right employees have access to the right tools and get the most value from their capabilities. That’s where designing your MarTech stack becomes more complex.
Why MarTech stacks are so diverse
Every organization has its own specific goals and challenges. Similarly, each marketing team will require different tools and services to achieve the KPIs in front of them. A well-implemented MarTech stack can help groups successfully plan, execute, and measure campaigns.
For example, this can benefit your organization by offering more measurable content attribution to marketing qualified leads (MQLs). Plus, showcasing the marketing team’s success can work wonders for employee retention and your talent pipeline.
On an individual level, the tech stack you use can make your job much easier. In the long term, this can mean getting ahead in your career by allowing you to showcase success metrics, publish error-free content, and be more efficient.
Designing your MarTech stack
When building a MarTech stack, where should you start?
1. Determine your budget.
Before you start researching your options, first determine your budget. Costs can vary widely. Also, different plans may be available for each device, for instance, depending on factors like the number of employees who would use it.
2. Consider your organizational size and structure.
The size of your team—think enterprise organizations vs. mid-sized companies—will play a vital role in designing your stack. Suppose your marketing team is more extensive and perhaps divided into multiple smaller groups (such as brand, demand generation, operations, and so on). In that case, you might have more employees using each tech tool than a one-person marketing manager who does it all at a small startup.
3. Research tools that align with marketing needs.
Keep in mind that while some MarTech tools focus on specific functions (like SEO, social media, paid media, and editing), others allow you to address multiple needs within a single platform. So, how can you decide which MarTech tools suit your team? Naturally, your business goals and marketing tactics will be at the forefront of your decision. For instance, a marketer prioritizing SEO and social media may turn to Moz for keyword research and Hootsuite for social scheduling.
4. Research tools that address specific challenges.
Ensure your stack resolves the team’s specific challenges, such as process inefficiencies or knowledge gaps. Do they align with your team’s goals? How will it impact individual KPIs vs. collective success? Make sure your challenges are clearly outlined, so you know how these tools will help you solve them as a team.
5. Purchase the tools for your stack.
You’ve determined your budget, assessed the appropriate tools for the size of your team, mapped challenges and solutions to organizational KPIs, and researched how these tools would help your team achieve your departmental goals. Once you’ve done the work, it’s time to make purchases and roll out your stack.
Popular tools for your MarTech stack
Automation and CRM
Marketing automation and CRM tools allow you to simplify and streamline repetitive and routine tasks, create buyer journeys, and manage relationships with customers. You can track audience behaviors and get critical insights into what drives your consumer at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Software such as Hubspot, Marketo Engage, or Salesforce helps marketers deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time.
Search Engine Optimization
If you want your content to rank on search engines like Google, tools such as Moz and Semrush can help you boost your organic and paid search efforts. These tools enable you to research keywords, track rankings against competitors, monitor backlinks, and improve on-page SEO.
Social Media Scheduling
Without the right tools in your MarTech stack, you would need to manually prepare and schedule individual social media posts on each respective social platform (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.). Social scheduling tools like Hootsuite, Buffer, and Later enable marketers to plan and schedule posts across multiple platforms at once and view content in a calendar view. In many cases, you can easily track engagement and other ROI metrics.
Marketing AI
Marketers rely on artificial intelligence to automate a wide range of processes. For example, Jasper is an AI robot that creates topic outlines, blog posts, social media ads, product descriptions, and more. The tool integrates with Surfer SEO to optimize content for better SERP performance.
Another example is Influence, an AI-powered influencer relationship platform that automates processes associated with influencer marketing, uses data to choose influencers for your campaigns, and provides measurable results.
Finally, there’s Albert.ai, a cloud-based AI platform that helps you adjust your digital advertising spend and content within the parameters you set throughout a campaign to ensure it’s optimized at all levels. The list goes on.
Project Management
Every marketing campaign involves many tasks that typically depend on various stakeholders. Project management tools like Asana and Wrike work similarly to help you build project timelines and calendars, collaborate by assigning tasks to team members (internal and external), share and edit files, and more.
Editing
Editing is an essential part of content creation. After all, how can you get a potential customer to trust your brand if your content is riddled with grammatical and spelling errors, your voice and tone are inconsistent, and your word choice is off?
Tools such as Grammarly (for more technical editing) and Hemingway (more for readability, which affects SEO) use artificial intelligence to provide feedback on your content before you hit “Publish.” While not a replacement for human editors, they can give creators solace as an extra layer of review before publishing.
Product Marketing
Crayon and Klue allow marketers to perform competitive intelligence analyses and assess competitor advantages and gaps. This helps teams evaluate how to better compete with their rivals and ensure their product exceeds customer expectations.
Manage your content marketing with Contently
Suppose you’re a content marketer looking to streamline and simplify processes. In that case, Contently serves as a leading end-to-end solution for strategy, creation, collaboration, award-winning freelance, content optimization, distribution, and measurement.
With Contently, users can collaborate with internal or external stakeholders in a single platform. For more accessible publishing across channels, you can integrate Contently with social media such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook, as well as WordPress for blog posts. Plus, you can measure the success of your efforts by exploring content analytics.
Whatever MarTech tools you choose for your stack, remember that every organization’s needs, challenges, and structures are different. Your pile will likely grow as your business needs evolve in today’s unpredictable world. And that’s OK!
See Contently in action! Demo the platform on-demand to learn how to enhance your content marketing campaigns.
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