Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads. (Annuitas Group) As 2019 approaches, it’s time to begin planning for digital marketing success in the new year. Next year, streamline your marketing processes with marketing tech stack tools to increase overall efficiency and spare yourself a headache.
Marketing technology is an ever growing aspect in the digital marketing world. Tools are a great investment for simplifying your workflows and keeping your team organized so you can focus on what matters. Take some time before 2019 arrives to plan and build your marketing tech stack by starting with these 11 essentials.
The Importance of a Marketing Tech Stack
While the term “marketing tech stack” may be new, the concept has been around a long time. They simplify processes and the already hectic lives of marketers. So what is a marketing tech stack? Essentially, it’s a collection of technology-based tools marketers use to streamline daily marketing activities and increase overall efficiency. These tools help marketers adjust and adapt to the ever changing needs of their customers.
Scott Brinker, Chief Marketing Technologist for Hubspot, is a big supporter of utilizing a marketing tech stack. In fact, his own stack has grown from 150 tools in 2011 to nearly 7,000 tools in 2018. With technology continuing to evolve, he expects that number to grow. We have come up with the top eleven tools to maximize efficiency in 2019.
11 Marketing Tech Stack Tools for 2019
1. Content Management Systems
A content management system is essentially the base your website sits on, and one of the most essential elements of your marketing tech stack in 2019. A CMS system lets anyone, even those who don’t understand web development, easily manage their website. While marketers typically wouldn’t change the design or functionality, as a developer would, you do have control over what content is posted to your site.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: WordPress
An estimated one-third of the visible internet runs on WordPress, with about 500 new sites added daily. So it’s easy to say that WordPress is the favored tool here. As stated on their site, “You don’t have to know a single line of code to publish content using WordPress.” It’s the easiest to use, most widely recognized, and best supported CMS platform, which is why many people are making the switch from other CMS.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Hubspot Website Platform
Hubspot allows you to manage all content: blog posts, landing pages, forms, site pages, and emails from their home base. It also provides analytics—so everything you possibly need to manage your site is all gathered in one easy-to-use hub.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Squarespace
Squarespace offers all the marketing tools you need to manage a website, with a heavy focus on the design and visuals your site will offer. It offers marketing tools such as email campaigns, SEO, social integrations, analytics, customer engagement tools, and blogging. Squarespace also offers free, unlimited hosting and 24/7 security and support.
2. Advertising
The use of online advertisements has become more of a requirement than an option to keep your business relevant in the digital marketplace. Having a tool where you can build, manage and track your advertisements a key addition to your marketing tech stack in 2019.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Google Ads
By far the most widely used advertising platform (and for good reason), Google Ads gives you the opportunity to reach a global audience, or target a much more defined, specialized audience. With a CPC pricing structure, Google Ads also provides retargeting ads, which is necessary for pushing your leads to the bottom of the sales funnel.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Facebook Ads
With Facebook ads, you can set your own budget and bid, target a very specific audience, design an eye catching advertisement and then track the effects. Facebook also offers the option to run your ads on platforms beyond Facebook with Instagram and Audience Network integrations.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn offers a user-friendly advertising platform where you set your own budget using one of three options: total budget, daily budget or by setting bids (cost-per-click pricing structure). It offers an easy way to nurture prospects using Custom Audiences to best attract and then re-engage your target audience.
3. Conversions
Tracking your leads is just as important as generating them. To turn visitors into leads, it is helpful to use tools that make the user experience more convenient and personalized. Adding one or more of these tools to your marketing tech stack in 2019 will save you time and boost conversions.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Hubspot Lead Generation Software
Hubspot provides a whole toolbox with the goal of helping you convert visitors into leads. The best part is the free version of the software gives you a powerful range of tools, and you can upgrade as needed to suit your business. Utilize forms to capture leads, find out more about who your leads are and collect analytics to strengthen your conversion strategy.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
On a smaller scale, your headlines are just as important when it comes to attracting the right visitors and increasing traffic. CoSchedule offers this free tool where you simply plug in your headline and it gives it a 0-100 score based on the word balance, length, keywords, sentiment and how it will appear in search engines.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: OptinMonster
OptinMonster essentially creates pop up email opt-in or landing page opt-in forms with a focus on driving as many conversions as possible. Their three step process (design/create, target/personalize, test and adjust) has been proven to instantly boost leads and grow revenue with pre-existing website traffic.
4. Email
Email marketing helps push leads along their buyers journey while fostering meaningful relationships with them. These email marketing tools are great for organizing workflows and providing your audience with the right info, at the right time.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: MailChimp
Using a tool like MailChimp, you can target your audience based on behavior, preferences and previous sales. You can even integrate Google Ads with your MailChimp account for further impact. MailChimp gives you the option to set up landing pages as well with forms to increase your conversions and trigger email workflows to nurture leads into buying customers.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Hubspot Email Automation Tool
With this tool, you can set up manageable email workflows. Set up customized, personalized email drip campaigns to further automate your marketing processes and save time. With Hubspot, you can also automate other email-related processes, such as data and lead management tasks.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Constant Contact
Looking for a more all-encompassing email marketing tool? Constant Contact provides hundreds of beautiful email templates to use that are specifically designed to encourage engagement. It has integrations with Facebook, WordPress, Shopify, Quickbooks, Salesforce, Outlook and Hootsuite. They also offer welcome emails, subject line testing and contact segmentation.
5. Social Media
Social media is as essential part of any modern day marketing strategy. With the majority of users active and online regularly, the opportunities for exposure are endless. Automating your social strategy will not only save you time, but help you target your audience no matter where they are.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to schedule posts ahead of time to save time and deliver messages to your audience at optimal times. It’s an easy platform to monitor your social activity, or “social streams” as well. Hootsuite provides an easy-to-use analytics dashboard where you can assess your social media marketing efforts and tweak for improvements. They offer a free plan as well as several premium options.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Buffer
Buffer keeps all of your social media accounts organized neatly in one dashboard. You can schedule posts and keep up with analytics to see how they’re doing. Buffer is especially great for marketing teams with up to 25 team members per account, with the ability to grant different levels of access for each team member.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Planoly
This tool is specifically meant for brands who are working hard to establish a cohesive brand aesthetic on Instagram. Using a drag and drop feature, you can plan how your Instagram feed is going to look to ensure your feed has the look and feel your brand intends to communicate. You can schedule out your posts and track the analytics all within this app. There is also the option to plan out your Instagram stories.
6. CRM
Customer relationship management, or CRM, makes your customers the primary focus of all that you do. This helps increase efficiency and boosts marketing ROI for businesses.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Salesforce
Salesforce, the world’s #1 CRM tool, offers such a wide variety of options, so it’s a perfect fit for nearly every business. It’s well known for its user friendliness, with helpful guides to make it easy for beginners and experienced digital marketers alike to implements the tools the need.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Nutshell
Nutshell offers sales automation, reporting and performance tracking, team collaboration, pipeline management, contact management and free customer support for sales teams. It suitable for inbound sales, outbound sales, team sales, relationship-based sales and account-based sales models. They have integrations with G Suite, Microsoft Office 365, Unbounce, WuFoo, MailChimp and RingCentral, to name a few.
7. SEO
Search engine optimization is something many brands struggle to keep up with. Ever-changing algorithms, new websites and keeping backlinks clean are just some tasks associated with SEO. It’s ideal to have a tool that can easily detect what needs to be done, and even better if the tool can do it for you.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is an “SEO spider” that crawls your website quickly to evaluate your SEO. It returns information regarding broken links, auto redirects, duplicate content, page titles and metadata, XML sitemaps, data from the HTML of your site and robots. Screaming Frog can integrate with your Google Analytics account to take a look at things such as bounce rate and conversions. This is a great tool to clean up and focus your website in a content audit.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Google PageSpeed Insights
You want your website to load quickly on all platforms, and this tool can check to see if that’s happening or not. You just input your website’s URL, and Google will return info regarding your page speed on mobile and desktop. They provide plenty of actionable, helpful solutions to improve your page speed, along with tutorials.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Moz Local Search
Simply plug your URL into this tool and Moz will show you where you rank on Google, Bing and other local search engines. You’ll be able to analyze your listing, review their suggested solutions and select a packaged solution to improve your search listing.
8. Interactive Content
Interactive content is all the rage when it comes to digital marketing trends and that’s expected to keep growing in 2019. Finding a tool that helps you in the creation, organization and publishing of interactive content will save you time and headaches.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: SnapApp
You can create so many different kinds of interactive content using this application, such as assessments, quizzes, calculators and more. It gives you wide customization control so you can make your content look exactly how you imagined. SnapApp integrates easily with platforms like Marketo, Hubspot and Salesforce.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Ion Interactive
With this app you can create visually appealing and engaging interactive content such as quizzes, assessments, calculators, eBooks, infographics, white papers, landing pages, lookbooks and solution finders. Integrated with nearly every other marketing platform, this is an easy tool to use to refresh your content and re-engage your audience.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: SurveyMonkey
A narrower take on interactive content, SurveyMonkey is a great tool for not only providing interactive content for customers but collecting great feedback and learning more about your audience. It’s easy to make a visually appealing survey with this tool and collect all your data and analytics in one safe place.
9. Analytics
Having a full understanding of your audience and those who are interested in your products is essential for marketing success. Having a tool that helps sort, organize and present this data to you in a comprehensible format is important to save time and energy.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Google Analytics
Google Analytics is by far the easiest and most user-friendly platform when it comes to tracking analytics for your marketing strategy. It will show you how people use your site and outline actions to take to improve your business. It offers analytics intelligence, reporting, data analysis and visualization, data collection and management, data activation and integrations.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: SEMRush
This tool is great for collecting specific analytics regarding organic research, advertising research, display advertising, backlinks, keyword research and product listing ads. It also provides plenty of tools to help you improve or further automate marketing tasks in any of those categories.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Cyfe
If you’re looking for a broader scope in an analytics tool, this one may be for you. Cyfe not only offers analytics for marketing and social media, but also client analytics, web analytics, finance, sales, project management and IT analytics. It truly is an “all-in-one business dashboard.”
10. Collaboration
Digital marketing has several moving parts to it, which requires an organized team of experts to constantly be collaborating. The easiest way to keep track of a marketing team is to use a collaboration tool of some kind that keeps everything in one place and streamlines your processes.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Teamwork
With Teamwork, you can assign tasks, communicate and track progress all within one application. There’s the projects side of the application, which is a project management software. Then there’s the chat software, which is an alternative to Slack, and finally the help desk to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: SamePage
SamePage stores multiple collaboration tools in one place to help marketing teams automate their workflows. Whether you need a tool for managing the team, pages, chats, files, tasks or calendars, SamePage has it. There are free features and premium features, so you can find the best blend for your marketing teams needs.
Marketing Tech Stack Tool: Evernote Business
Evernote’s Business collaboration tool has four main goals for your team: reduce information overload, easy access to projects, space to work and increased efficiency. It’s all cloud-based, keeping everything in one secure, safe place. It has integrations with Microsoft, Slack and Salesforce and comes at an extremely affordable price.
11. Automation
If you want an all-in-one automation tool, we recommend using Hubspot Marketing Automation. It has tools for:
- Blogging
- Landing Pages
- Marketing Automation
- Lead Management
- Analytics
- CMS
- Social Media
- SEO
- Call to Actions
- Ads
- Salesforce Integration
When 2019 arrives, be prepared to effortlessly execute a successful digital marketing strategy using your marketing technology stack. Automating processes not only relieves pressure from your entire team but also keeps everything organized and convenient for your customers – ensuring everything runs smoothly in 2019. Download the free Marketing Budget Template to further organize your marketing activities in the coming year.
