Does the term Marketing Stack sound familiar to you? Although this concept is not so common to hear, what it implies is much more common than you might imagine. If you are a marketer, you will quickly find that you put it into practice all the time.
What is Marketing Stack?
Marketing Stack is nothing more than the smart use of technology in the marketing world. It is the integration of different tools that are used for analysis, monitoring, and research, among many other activities. Yes, exactly! Those platforms that you use every day to facilitate and accelerate your work.
Marketing Stack: Why Bet on a Technology Vision?
The answer is more than obvious: technology simplifies our lives. And, if we talk about marketing, then there is nothing cooler than having, for example, large volumes of data analyzed on a platform to link it with a sales tool.
Results Optimization
At a general level, the implementation of Marketing Stack allows optimizing results at all levels, since technological platforms provide a range of very efficient work organizations. Among them, we can highlight CRM and CSM.
Through these tools, it is possible to generate acceleration in processes, eliminate obsolete circuits and discard those manual jobs that slow down the time of the equipment in each sector. This improvement will imminently provide results superior to those obtained with work methodologies that were used in the past.
Integration between Different Tools
Marketing managers will be in charge of choosing the tools that solve business problems; that is to say, those that best adapt to the area, the process, the budget, and the number of employees.
The selected platforms must be compatible with each other: there must be a link between them that allows automation. For example, an analytics tool has to be compatible with the CRM and, at the same time, with the Social Listening platform.
Innovation and Disruption
Being one step ahead, not being afraid of change and always being open to new ideas is the fundamental thing in this regard.
Many times, the key is to find unconventional solutions to common problems; therefore, disruption has to be an ally in your business.
The Marketing Stack is full of innovative platforms – more than 7,000 – that provide practical and efficient solutions. The important thing is that you think outside the box and analyze how you can replace traditional and outdated methodologies with new technologies.
Marketing Stack: How to Incorporate It into Your Strategies?
A strategy is a set of very thoughtful actions, directed towards a certain end. Therefore, the first thing you have to do is evaluate under what circumstances technological tools can be useful to strategically solve a problem.
You must know the flow of the business, each step that is taken in it. It is necessary to know where there are points that should be improved and where bottlenecks are created to take action and implement changes. Be open to thinking about solutions for those processes that cause failures or unnecessary expenses.
Process Simplification
The other fundamental step to implement your Marketing Stack strategy is that you investigate the different options that technology offers you to fulfill the tasks that you have chosen to improve.
First, you have to analyze which tools could speed up production in your company or which of them would solve one or more activity flow problems, for example.
Benchmarking
Comparing is the best buyer rule. Look for the best options, the best plans. Evaluate which tool has technical support and which of them has a plan according to the number of people you have in your office.
It is important that you do research on the advantages and disadvantages of each platform: many of them offer options that represent a high complexity and what we are looking for is simplicity, but with efficiency.
Incorporates Agile Methodologies
It is essential to adapt the work dynamics to the conditions of each particular project. By implementing an agile methodology, you will be able to identify all the steps to follow in a development process, what tools to use in each step and how many people will be needed to carry it out. This will make it easier to determine the cost and appreciate the overall benefit.
Carefully planning all the stages and paying attention to details will help you reduce costs and increase productivity to meet all objectives in a timely manner.
Study the Costs and Benefits
Once you have identified the set of innovations that meet the conditions of your company, you must evaluate the costs that their acquisition represents.
Is it better to buy a monthly plan, rent a platform, buy it, develop your own? How much will it cost me? Does it generate profitability in the short, medium, or long term?
It is also important that you analyze the life of the software and the level of utility that you are going to give it. In many cases, it happens that a tool of great value is acquired that in the end is not implemented, either because there is no project that deserves it or because it is very complex.
This evaluation is essential: it will allow you to take into account all the costs involved in making this change and avoid economic losses for both the company and the client.
Types of Marketing Stack Tools
The Marketing Stack includes all the technology that is merged synergistically to work as a unit; That is why the choice of platforms will depend on the type of business you have.
For an agency that works with customer acquisition processes, for example, you would need to cover these activities: Inbound, Intelligence, Analytics, and Collaboration. HubSpot could be very helpful.
Here is a list of the most used tools in Marketing Technology Stack:
In the next few paragraphs, we will delve into those softwares whose combination is essential to achieve digital marketing objectives. Let’s keep going!
Content Creation
One of the first steps you have to take to work on a digital project is to think about acquiring content creation software: CMS «Content Management System».
We are talking about having technology that allows you to manage dynamic content in a simple and organized way. Using this type of tool works as a landing place for the realization of objectives.
Among the main activities that can be carried out with CMS, we can find:
- Creation of web pages.
- Text editing.
- Management of website codes.
- Comment moderation.
- Styles editing.
- Inventory control.
- Sales system management.
- Installation of plugins and extensions.
- Storage of resources such as images and videos.
Customer Management
Efficient customer management is now possible thanks to the inclusion of a “Customer Relationship Management” CRM. As we mentioned before, it is a tool designed to help you understand more about the relationship with your consumers and detect sales opportunities.
The CRM stores customer information such as name, email, or telephone in an organized way, obtained through interactions at direct points of contact or through visits to websites, emails, or telephone calls.
The power of CRM is in being able to condense all the information in one place so that it can be worked on simultaneously by the marketing and sales teams. It is a really efficient step and has achieved a great acceleration in the results.
Advantages of a CRM:
- Collect and manage customer information.
- It connects all the computers in its interface.
- Automate manual and repetitive tasks.
- Visibility flow of leads.
- Instant insights.
- Optimize processes and reduce costs.
Social media
The technology also came to simplify the management of social networks. A few years ago, taking care of them had become a cumbersome and ineffective process.
Currently, the industry has several platforms that allow from the administration of all social networks in one place – avoiding the accumulation of passwords and logins – to the analysis of data and the obtaining of reports in a simple way. Thus, it is possible to achieve an efficiency that translates into profitability for agencies and companies.
The tasks of the community and content managers became much more bearable, which led to the entry of better ideas and much more valuable content thanks to the optimization of the execution time of mechanical activities.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
The optimization of sites to position themselves in the search engines has also undergone a spectacular improvement for some time now.
Currently, tools such as SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, or Screaming Frog have allowed marketers to detect errors on pages with such a great level of detail that it greatly facilitates optimization. Therefore, SEO has become a strong lead generation platform.
SEO optimization has 4 fundamental parts: analysis, keyword research, SEO On-Page, and SEO Off-Page. Let’s see what each one implies and what tool we can recommend simplifying the tasks.
Advertising
Digital advertising campaigns currently represent one of the most profitable strategies for companies. Investment in search engine and social media ads exceeds investment in traditional advertising thanks to the ease it offers to measure results, versatility, and the possibility of immediate reaction.
Tools like Facebook Campaign Manager, Google Ads, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and TikTok Business work hand in hand with Google Analytics, Data Studio, and Tag Manager to present an explosive combo, full of efficiency.
E-mail Marketing
Having specialized software for a good email marketing strategy is essential if you want to carry out a complete and effective campaign. One of the innovations that have revolutionized this process is precisely automation, which allows the generation of predetermined triggers automatically according to the stage of the sales funnel in which the customers are.
Tools such as Oracle, MailRelay, Doppler, or Mailchimp have provided great options that range from automatic email scheduling to effective and simplified data analysis, allowing email marketing to be one of the most efficient tools to achieve conversions.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the world of marketing professionals has benefited from technology that streamlines processes and, above all, leaves room to focus on what makes us powerful as humans in this area: business management and decision making.
We invite you to have this information so that you can evaluate what improvements you need in your company and choose which platform is the one that will be part of your Marketing Stack.
