Digital transformation has changed nearly every aspect of how we conduct business, including how we perform marketing. Digital marketing enables companies of all sizes to reach an enormous audience cost-effectively. But that’s not all. With advances in marketing technology, known as martech, marketing campaign success, and the different digital elements that comprise the campaign, are testable, trackable, measurable, and changeable. Martech also allows you to influence prospects, track the buyer journey in the marketing funnel, and measure ROI (return on investment).
As with all technology initiatives, choosing the right martech tools for your business takes careful planning. Our guide below covers what martech is, its benefits, why it’s essential for your business and highlights 20 top martech tools.
What is martech?
Martech is a combination of marketing techniques and technology used by digital marketers to create, communicate, deliver, test, measure, automate, integrate, and adjust marketing efforts. From advertising and promotion to content and the buyer journey, martech gives marketers insights and analysis capabilities to make data-driven decisions that improve marketing campaign performance, personalize customer and prospect interactions, and proactively communicate with them.
Email marketing is a simple example. Martech enables marketers to automatically send triggered emails to customers in response to their specific actions. If, for instance, a customer visits your website and provides an email address to download a white paper, you can use this action to send an email inviting the customer to attend a webinar on the topic or more customized, targeted information about your products or services. Martech also helps you learn more about customer preferences, interests, and needs since you can track the links they click on when they read email content.
Why is martech essential, and why should marketers care?
Martech tools automate and streamline the digital marketing process from asset creation and testing to deployment and monitoring. They enable you to look at the entire customer journey along the marketing funnel, identify lost opportunities and funnel problems that result in fewer sales, and make modifications to boost customer engagement and conversions. Ultimately, martech provides tools to execute and scale marketing efforts more quickly and smoothly, often using fewer marketing resources.
As the number of martech tools grows, so does the need for system management and integration, such as an integrated Martech stack where apps share data with a shared record system. We’ll cover this in more detail later in this guide.
Benefits of martech include:
- Increased marketing efficiency: Automating and streamlining digital marketing efforts makes it possible to easily manage multiple marketing channels and improve your marketing team’s productivity.
- Generate more and better-qualified leads: Lead generation is a crucial first step to an effective marketing campaign. Use Martech tools that support digital ads, email marketing, search engine marketing, and more to create lead generation.
- A multichannel view of prospect behavior: With the proliferation of digital channels and devices, marketing automation platforms that provide a multichannel view of how prospects behave as they move through the marketing funnel toward conversion are useful.
- Better alignment on goals (marketing and sales): Objective data derived from martech tools encourages sales and marketing to collaborate and determine how to best use what’s working and modify what isn’t.
- Improved conversion and better ROI: Martech includes tools that support A/B testing, incrementality testing, remarketing, upselling, and other marketing efforts designed to drive conversions and improve ROI.
What is a martech stack?
Nearly all companies use multiple technologies to engage with customers, automate and streamline the digital marketing process, and collect and analyze data. The collection of tools you use to accomplish is called the martech stack.
Building the optimal stack
Before you begin building a martech stack, develop your marketing strategy, and review current marketing practices to identify if changes are required. Your strategy and practices will determine which martech tools you will use. For example, if your marketing efforts don’t include remarketing, you won’t need martech supporting it.
Marketing technology is exciting, but stick to essential tools and only add new technology when you’re ready to use it. Companies with expertise and history using martech may eventually build a complete martech stack to address every marketing funnel stage, but if you’re a beginner, keep it simple. Creating the optimal martech stack for your business comes down to understanding your most pressing goals, the extent of your digital asset management requirements, and where you can potentially improve your ROI. Once you know these things, you can determine which martech tools will support your goals.
Martech tools include:
- CMS: Content management software technology such as WordPress, Ghost, Joomla, and Wix enables you to build, edit, manage your website, and quickly add, edit, and remove pages or sections.
- Advertising: Digital advertising martech includes but is not limited to Google Ads, Bing Ads now called Microsoft Advertising, and YouTube ads.
- Social media: Martech tools support streamlined social media management, including automated scheduling, statistics, and reporting, and enable marketing teams to collaborate on social media efforts.
- Conversion: Conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools that focus on visitor behavior on your website, first-time visitor conversions, and return visitor conversions which help you increase conversion goals.
- Email: The latest Martech aimed at email marketers provides more flexibility, and more features, such as automated trigger-based emails and premier email analytics.
- Customer Service: Customers and prospects are savvier and demand more today from the brands they choose. Martech supports more personalized engagement and customized buying experience.
- Analytics: Martech tools collect, measure, and analyze digital advertising data so you can understand the impact of marketing activities and maximize ROI.
- CRM: Customer relationship management technology brings marketing, sales, and customer support activities together on one platform.
- Automation software: Marketing automation supports repetitive marketing tasks that nurture sales leads and prospects, and personalize marketing messages and content.
20 best martech tools
There are approximately 8,000 or more marketing tools available to digital marketers today. With this staggering amount, how do you choose? Below we’ve highlighted 20 of the top martech stack tools for you to consider.
- Salesforce: This integrated customer relationship management (CRM) solution provides a single, shared view of every customer with multiple departments within a company, such as marketing, sales, commerce, and service.
- Hootsuite: As an “all-in-one” social media platform, Hootsuite is compatible with multiple social networks. It enables you to schedule and queue posts and provides more than 200 metrics that measure performance.
- Sprout Social: Another fully-featured social media management tool, Sprout Social provides a single hub for social media publishing, analytics, and engagement across multiple social profiles.
- Google Ads: Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords and Google AdWords Express) offers PPC (pay per click) advertisements that appear in search results based on your selected keywords on google.com.
- Optimizely: One of the oldest and best-known A/B testing platforms, Optimizely’s features include A/B/n, split, and multivariate testing, page editing, multi-armed bandit, and tactics library.
- Crazy Egg: This heat mapping tool tracks how visitors interact with your website and provides a view of the “hotspots.” Using mouse-tracking technology offers insight into which parts of your website get the most clicks, which get ignored, which elements get the most visitor interaction and more.
- Marketo: Adobe’s Software-as-a-Service (Saas)-based marketing automation software helps B2B and B2C marketers automate and measure marketing engagement, tasks, and workflows.
- AdRoll: This AI (artificial intelligence)-driven software specializes in remarketing. Tracking every visitor’s behavior on your site enables you to display targeted advertising to previous website visitors. The platform has evolved to support ads, email marketing, and cross-channel measurement to improve ROI.
- Mailchimp: Touted as an all-in-one marketing platform for small businesses, Mailchimp supports email marketing and expanded to a full marketing platform, including automation and customer relationship management (CRM) functionality.
- Zapier: This automation tool moves information between web applications automatically. Link web apps with a few clicks to share data and automate workflows. For example, by linking Slack and DropBox, you can receive a notification via Slack when you have a new Dropbox file.
- Google Analytics: This free web analytics tool offered by Google helps you analyze your website traffic in-depth and measure your advertising ROI. It works by the inclusion of a block of JavaScript code on pages on your website.
- WordPress: A free, open-source, easy-to-use website creation and maintenance platform and content management system (CMS) you can use to build. The application underneath is programmed in PHP (hypertext preprocessor) or Javascript and paired with a MySQL database server to store content and site settings.
- Slack: A channel-based messaging platform, Slack is a workplace communication and collaboration tool that gives you access to real-time conversations with any teammate or team.
- Facebook: The social networking site supports ads that enable you to promote your page, posts on your page, actions users took, or your website itself. Facebook ads allow you to target users based on location, demographic, and profile information.
- LinkedIn: This social network focuses on professional networking and career development. LinkedIn ads support self-service ad campaigns using sponsored content, dynamic ads, message ads, and text ads.
- Twitter: Considered a public “microblogging” social media network, Twitter allows you to send and receive short posts called tweets to a broad audience. Twitter ad campaigns will enable you to promote tweets containing a video, accounts, moments, and trends.
- YouTube: A free video-sharing website owned by Google, YouTube allows paid advertising using video ads and display ads within the Google display network.
- HubSpot: This all-in-one marketing software stack includes CRM, Marketing Hub, which contains marketing tools and data in one platform, Sales Hub which combines sales tools and data on one platform, CMS Hub for with integrated content management tools, and Service Hub, which brings customer service data and channels together in one place and supports scaled support through automation and self-service.
- SEMrush: SEMrush is an all-in-one tool suite providing solutions for SEO (search engine optimization), PPC (pay per click), content, social media, and competitive research.
- Moz: This all-in-one SEO toolset crawls your website on demand to reveal technical SEO issues and recommend fixes, track the performance ranking of your traffic-driving keywords, provide backlink analysis, and support keyword research.
Looking ahead: The future of martech
The Martech landscape will continue to evolve due to technological advances, increased data privacy regulations, and changes in customer buying behavior and expectations. Below we’ve highlighted three areas to watch.
- Contextual targeting versus behavioral targeting: Behavioral targeting is where data from visitor browsing habits (search terms, sites visited, purchases, etc.) is used to display relevant ads and offers and improve campaign effectiveness. Contextual targeting allows you to display relevant ads based on website content rather than visitor data. As visitor data gathering comes under more scrutiny and privacy laws are enacted, such as the European Union’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), the shift from behavioral to contextual targeting will continue.
- Customer data platforms (CDP): CDPs claim to bring together all customer data to create unified customer profiles accessible to other systems. Although it’s challenging to find one that indeed does it all today, companies such as Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, and others are growing and evolving their CDP platforms, adding AI and machine learning to expand their capabilities.
- Immersive and experiential marketing: Expect these marketing tactics to evolve and expand, although in-person events have been brought to a halt in 2020 due to the pandemic. Experiential marketing brings consumers into the story and centers on fostering a personal interaction with consumers via a memorable, face-to-face experience. Look for innovation to include more immersive, virtual experiences using 3D augmented reality and virtual reality technology, and new ways to leverage 5G mobile networks designed to connect virtually everything and everyone.
Next steps
The advantages of using martech are substantial, but selecting tools and managing a martech stack takes time and know-how. If you don’t have the available staff or a team with the appropriate experience and knowledge to determine which martech tools to use, then implement and leverage them to boost conversion, streamline digital marketing, and improve the buyer experience, consider staff augmentation. Staff augmentation increases your team’s talent capacity, filling the gaps with high-quality, independent professionals who have the right skills. Upwork enables you to hire top talent with the confidence of using the world’s work marketplace.
