The Modern Marketing Stack Simplified

Are you spending huge amounts of money to market and promote your business? Do you want to make sure you are getting the best returns on your investment? To ensure this, it is not only important to have a good marketing strategy and choose the right marketing applications but it is equally important to understand and analyze your marketing data and make decisions accordingly. This can be achieved easily by using a Modern Marketing Stack.

Table Of Contents

• What is Modern Marketing Stack?
• What are the Components of a Modern Marketing Stack?
• How to Build a Marketing Tech Stack?
  • Identifying Primary Marketing Goals and Strategies
  • Identify Challenges Faced by your Team
  • Create an Estimated Budget
  • Researching the Right Tools For your Marketing Stack
  • Adding Non-marketing Tools to your Marketing Stack
  • Compiling All the Data to Transfer Into Tools
  • Assign One Team Member to Create a Workflow Per Tool
  • Analyze the Tool’s Success and Switch to Another If Needed
• What are the best tools for creating your own Marketing Stack?
• Modern Marketing Stack vs Traditional Marketing Stack
• What are the Benefits of the Modern Marketing Stack?
• Conclusion

What is Modern Marketing Stack?

The Modern Marketing Stack is a collection of technologies that marketers use to augment and improve their marketing operations throughout the customer lifecycle. Marketing technologies are used to make difficult processes easier, analyze how marketing campaigns are performing, and drive efficient, personalized customer interaction. 

We use the term stack because the various applications and systems contained in it follow a particular order and come one after the other. You will understand this better after we look at its various components.

What are the Components of a Modern Marketing Stack?

• Content Management System (CMS): A content management system is a software tool or application that can be used to create and manage digital content. They are used to power websites, blogs, or other relevant digital content through which marketers want to engage or interact with their customers.
• Advertising Technology: Advertising Technology is an umbrella term used for software and tools that businesses and organizations use to plan, set up, and maintain their digital advertising activities. There are multiple options available in this space but advertising is a key customer acquisition technique for most marketers. It is beneficial to use a strategic combination of SEM (search engine marketing), display ads, re-targeting, and ad tracking or attribution software.
• Email: People check their emails multiple times a day, so emails are a fantastic way of getting in touch with existing as well as potential customers. It is thus a key customer communications channel that all marketers must have in their arsenal. Various software products available in the market enable you to automate this process and also collect valuable information about the recipients and their behavior.
• Experience Optimization: Experience Optimization is the continuous process of understanding your customers, and their needs and providing them with the best possible experience. It allows businesses to improve customer experience through controlled experimentation and dynamic experience delivery. This can include A/B testing and personalization software or even programs that allow you to take action based on your marketing analytics. 
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology that manages all your company’s relationships and interactions with existing and potential customers. Its simple goal is to improve business relationships. CRM software helps you stay connected to your customers, streamline processes and also improve profitability. The CRM will track all customer relationships and also delivers insights on how marketing campaigns influence sales pipeline and customer growth.
• Marketing Data Warehouse: Most marketers will use various applications spanning these different categories. In order to make good and strategic business decisions, it is essential to perform a holistic analysis by looking at data from all of these different sources. To perform analysis on consolidated data, it is important to have a central repository to store data from different marketing products. A marketing data warehouse acts as a storage for this data and can be considered a single source of truth.
• Insights and Analysis: Marketers must have access to their data to measure digital marketing activity. Most marketers will use website analytics and their own business analytics tracked in either in-house or third-party tools. A wide array of Business Intelligence (BI) tools are now available too. A BI tool makes analysis and reporting easy, efficient, and fast. These tools provide dashboards and visualizations for easy and fast decision-making.
• Social Media: Social media is one of the most important channels to promote your business because social media is where your customer is. There are so many different platforms you can target here – Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Due to the large number of options available, it is important to have technology that can monitor social activity and make social engagement easier. Many of these platforms have paid advertising services available which you can opt for.

How to Build a Marketing Tech Stack?

Every Company’s Marketing Stack is unique, and it doesn’t have some fixed constraints to make one. It follows some steps that you can follow o create your Marketing Stack for your team and company. 

Choosing the right tools used for Marketing are used by future teams also, and you need to follow criteria to make a perfect Marketing Stack as per your company’s requirements. The following steps to how to build a Marketing Stack are listed below:

1) Identifying Primary Marketing Goals and Strategies 

A Marketing Stack should contain Marketing tools based on the requirements and strategies used by a team or company. If you already have some strategies implemented, review all the plans and strategies and choose the right tools accordingly.

You should make a list of all the primary Marketing goals you want to achieve and what strategies you will use for them. Accordingly, write what tools you would like to use for each of them. Research a bit for tools best suitable for your team according to budget and need.

You don’t need to overdo things, just have a basic idea of the requirements, goals, and strategies. It will help you choose the right tools for your Marketing Stack.

2) Identify Challenges Faced by your Team

The primary aim to create a Marketing Stack or having the right tool is to ease the workflow and get more accurate information. You may or may not know the problems or challenges faced by your team while performing day-to-day tasks. Survey each team member and ask 

the problems they face when they do any Marketing task, whether it’s contacting clients, sending E-Mails, Content Optimization, etc.

Try to find out what makes their workflow more time-consuming or which task makes their job harder. For example, if a member says that keyword research and competitor analysis becomes difficult for them because of the lack of data. So it points out that your team needs a good Keyword research tool. Write all the points in a document. 

3) Create an Estimated Budget

There is no use to list down all the expensive tools for your Marketing Stack if you can’t afford them. To make an effective budget-friendly Marketing Stack, one should plan the budget monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Dor small scale business monthly budget works best because it doesn’t require any finance team.

There are various ways to create a Marketing Stack according to budget. You can allocate a total monthly or quarterly budget for Marketing and then choose the right tools or choose a budget for every strategy and then invest in those tools accordingly, like allocation of $300 for SEO tools.

One important thing to keep in check is that subscription sharing plays a huge role in taking a tool for your Marketing Stack as it allows you to share the same tools with your team members which will save extra costs. 

4) Researching the Right Tools For your Marketing Stack

Now you have the perfect plan, know the requirements of your team, and a budget. This step will take time but, it’s the most important thing for your Marketing Stack. Research for all the tools available in Marketing that will work for your strategy and team members. 

Every tool will deliver some unique features and different subscription models. Jot down all the details as a summary in a spreadsheet on pricing, general description, features, etc.

Suppose you are looking for tools for your SEO strategy and keyword research, then list down the top keyword research tools used by other Marketers and review them from your sheet until you choose one tool. Do this for every strategy and prepare a list, then investigate thoroughly and choose the right tools for your Marketing Stack.

5) Adding Non-marketing Tools to your Marketing Stack

Only having Marketing tools will give you better workflow and increase your productivity. While creating a Marketing Stack, many Marketers ignore the importance of Non- Marketing tools in a Marketing Stack. A Non- Marketing tool can optimize your team’s workflow, which in turn increases productivity. 

There are different Project Management tools, team collaboration tools, data sync tools, Cloud Storage platforms, etc. that help teams to work more effectively. Adding these tools to your Marketing Stack indirectly helps you save a lot of time. For this also, create a spreadsheet for description, pricing, features, and other details and review it.

6) Compiling All the Data to Transfer Into Tools

After purchasing all the required tools for your Marketing Stack, you need to transfer all the data to the right tools or organize it. Ask you, team members, to compile different types of data in different folders. Like the templates that you use for social media posts will come in one folder, the contacts of leads can be shifted to Google docs and shared with all the team members. It will allow team members to collaboratively edit the documents.

The step is to avoid any confusion in a later stage when you sign up for the tools and instantly transfer data to the right tools. 

7) Assign One Team Member to Create a Workflow Per Tool

You can’t expect your team to work on the new tools from the very first day. It will waste time and money if they don’t know how to use a tool, and when no one is using it. Assign your team member a task to create step by step guide to using a tool with screenshots. Once that is ready call up for a meeting where that team members can guide all other members in the same workflow. 

This step is better than using guesswork to solve accomplish your daily tasks, and it avoids any haphazard situations. It also ensures that all the team members follow a uniform process.

8) Analyze the Tool’s Success and Switch to Another If Needed

You don’t want your team members to use the tools that are not helping them and wasting all the subscription fees. Analyzing the success rate of the tools after some time will let you know if the tools are helping your team or not. There is no need to keep a tool in your Marketing Stack that no one is using.

If you think the tool needs to be changed with another one, cancel the subscription and move to another tool after doing your research.

What are the best tools for creating your own Marketing Stack?

Most businesses do not rely solely on one tool.

There are two questions to consider when selecting tools for your growth marketing stack:

• What they’re up to
• What they have to do with the rest of your marketing

There are so many fantastic tools available, and more are being developed all the time. It’s difficult to keep up with the latest and greatest. That is why we have compiled a top ten list for you.

Before you choose any tools, you must first ask yourself, “What are my goals?” Your response will assist you in determining which tools you truly require.

Goals may include the following:

• Customer live chat questions should be answered faster.
• Create a more personal, relaxed environment where customers can share their stories and you can learn from them.
• Help people find you organically by publishing good, regular content that solves people’s problems.

Your entire marketing stack will not be identical to anyone else’s. A marketing tech stack can include the following tools to get you started:

• Advertising
• Customer support
• Creating forms
• Creating landing pages
• Social media management
• Analytics
• SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
• Email marketing + automation
• CMS (Content Management System)
• CRM (Customer Relationship Management)

The top tools for each marketing need are listed below.

• For Advertising: Google Ads:

Google Ads targets potential leads or existing customers who are interested in your product. Advertisers compete for keywords, and the winning ad is displayed:

• On the first page of search results
• Videos on YouTube
• On appropriate websites

Your ad could come up first when someone searches for your keywords.

When users search for a product or anything else on the internet, Google Ads can display ads.

You can set a budget limit for each campaign when you purchase advertising services. You’re charged for each ad click.

• For customer support: Zendesk:

Zendesk, for example, completely transforms how your company handles customer service.

Zendesk is a customer service platform that aims to help businesses build more meaningful, personal, and productive customer relationships. Zendesk can help you manage inbound ticket requests from any marketing channel, such as:

• Email
• Web
• Social
• Phone
• Chat

Zendesk’s chat function.

Zendesk makes customer service simple and stress-free. The Zendesk Suite contains (but is not limited to) the following features:

• Ticketing system
• Reports and analytics
• Call center software
• Chat

Zendesk has several pricing options depending on the features you want. The Professional membership costs $89 per agent/per month, while the Enterprise membership costs $189.

• For creating forms: Typeform:

You want to expand your email contact list, and you’ll need email addresses. What’s the best way to get them? Forms are one of the most straightforward ways to collect email addresses. You can create them using Typeform.

Typeform allows you to collect feedback and build email lists using a variety of opt-in techniques, including;

• Forms
• Surveys
• Questionnaires
• Contests

Typeform is simple to use and learn, and it turns complicated forms into a fun interactive tool. It has simple controls for creating forms and surveys, and you can organize your forms into folders easily.

A Typeform filled-out custom form’s results view.

Learning how to use Typeform doesn’t take long. Typeform takes you step by step through the process of creating your forms.

You can add various types of fields thanks to the numerous customization options. You can customize forms for specific events, promotions, and topics by creating and editing them.

It is completely free. If you want more advanced features, Pro or Pro+ can cost anywhere from $30 to 59 per month.

• For creating landing pages: Unbounce: A landing page can be used for several things:

• Content that is restricted
• Introducing a new product
• In-depth discussion of a specific feature
• If you have forms, you almost certainly need landing pages. Unbounce can assist with this.

Unbounce allows you to create and publish your own landing pages without having to hire a developer. It’s a simpler and faster way to increase traffic conversions.

The library of Unbounce landing page templates, organized by need.

It’s simple to create the exact custom page you want with the easy drag-and-drop platform (which includes over 100 templates). A good ROI becomes a reality thanks to the ability to A/B test your pages to see exactly what works.

Other characteristics include:

• A/B Testing
• Conversion Goal
• Percentage of Traffic
• Confidence Level
• Multivariate Testing
• WYSIWYG Editor
• Experiment with messaging, design, and forms to find out what makes more visitors convert, more often.

Spend some of your spare time completing a 14-day free trial. Unbounce then offers three paid plans: Essential, Premium, and Enterprise, with prices ranging from $79 to $159 per month.

• For social media management: Sprout Social:

Most people agree that 1-2 is ideal, but you’ll need content for various social media platforms. And they must all leave at different times. All of this can be handled with the help of a social media management tool like Sprout Social.
Sprout Social is a popular social media management platform that allows you to easily publish to social media and collaborate with others.
Sprout Social’s calendar schedule view. From publishing to reporting, everything is available in one place.

You can automatically publish social media content that you create and schedule. Analytic reports provide insight into what content people want to see on social media at the same time.

You can sign up for a risk-free trial (for 30 days). There are three tiers of paid plans after that:

• Standard for $99 per month per user
• Professional for $149 per month per user
• Advanced for $249 per month per user

• For analytics: Google Analytics:

Google Analytics is your ultimate companion for a successful business when it comes to gathering user insights. This tool is for you if you want to learn how to make the best decisions for your customers.

Google Analytics is fantastic if you need to know:

• Where do your website’s visitors come from?
• How did they find you?
• What they were watching
• How long did they spend on your site?

There are seven different types of reporting.

• Individual customer behaviours and lifetime value are examined in audience reporting.
• Post-click performance metrics for users who clicked on your Ads campaigns and then went to your website or used your mobile app are available through advertising reporting
• Acquisition Reporting: Learn how search and social media influence how you acquire customers.
• Understand how people use your site with behaviour reporting.
• Conversion Reporting: Track your users’ journeys across multiple channels and see how advertising and organic search influence their purchasing decisions.
• Real-time Reporting: Keep track of everything that happens with your clients in real time.
• User-flow Reporting: Use content groupings to see how visitors navigate your site.
• Google Analytics makes it simple to understand how users access your content on your website and app, so you can figure out what’s working and what isn’t. For a more comprehensive view, you can connect other systems (such as CRM and point of sale).

Google Analytics is a free service. Google Analytics 360 is a premium version of Google Analytics that costs around $150,000. However, most businesses will be satisfied with the free version.

Fortunately for small and medium-sized business marketers, Google Analytics’ standard, the free version can provide more than enough information to successfully guide their marketing efforts.

• For SEO: Moz Pro or Ahrefs:

For many years, Moz has been one of the most popular SEO toolkits. It aids in the discovery of potential customers – as well as increased qualified website traffic.

The right keyword rankings can make or break a website’s success. With 500 million keyword suggestions and 7 million SERPs analyzed daily, Moz contributes to this success.

Keyword research, link research, site audits, and page optimization insights are all included in Moz Pro.
Moz subscriptions include the following features:

• Keyword research with the Keyword Explorer tool (a favorite resource of ours)
• Site audits
• Rank tracking
• Backlink analysis
• Site crawl
• On-page optimization
• Custom reports
• Link research

Moz Pro costs $99 per month and comes with a 30-day free trial. For more basic features, there’s also a Moz Local option.

• For email marketing + automation: ActiveCampaign:

Businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects generate 451 percent more qualified leads, according to the Annuitas Group.

ActiveCampaign is marketing automation, email marketing, and sales CRM software platform that helps businesses create the ideal customer experience. We assist small and mid-sized businesses in developing meaningful customer relationships.

• Site Tracking
• Event Tracking
• Automation Map
• Split Action
• Split Testing
• Email Segmentation
• Forms
• Easy integration with your other tools

To create automations for each customer journey, you can use tags, time conditions, and any other custom elements you want.

It’s also compatible with our automated sales CRM. That will be discussed further down.

It’s entirely up to you. Your price is determined by the number of contacts you have and the features you need. We offer four different monthly plans that range from $9 to $249:

• Lite
• Plus
• Professional
• Enterprise
• Plus, we migrate all of your info to our platform for free.

• For CMS (Content Management System): WordPress.org:

WordPress now powers over 34% of the internet, and that number is growing every day. WordPress can handle everything from simple websites to blogs to complex portals and enterprise websites, as well as applications.

WordPress.com and WordPress.org are your two options.

If you want complete control over the appearance of your website (as well as the tools you can use to interact with it), WordPress.org is the place to go. This option allows you to self-host your website, giving you more freedom to customise and monetize it. WordPress.com has more restrictions, and any site you create there may be restricted in the future.

WordPress.org includes the following features:

• Content Authoring
• Content Repository
• SEO
• Pre-built Templates
• Rich Text Editor
• Plug-ins/Widgets/Apps
• Content Queue
• Dashboard and Reports
• Mobile Optimization
• WordPress.org sites also get access to over 54,000 plugins – so your website does what you need it to. Add things like an online store, galleries, mailing lists, forums, spam filters, and analytics.

The free version of WordPress.com is available, but the premium version costs $99 per year. You can download WordPress.org for free, but you’ll need a domain and hosting, which will set you back a few bucks per month.

• For CRM (Customer Relationship Management): Salesforce and ActiveCampaign:

To ensure that no leads fall through the cracks, you’ll need a CRM (customer relationship management).

Fortunately, we have two excellent CRM options for you.

Salesforce Sales Cloud CRM is the first CRM option. Option 2: Sales CRM with automation from ActiveCampaign

Sales Cloud by Salesforce
With a single, shared view of every customer’s information, Salesforce CRM integrates all of your marketing, sales, and commerce. It aids you in:

• Obtain additional leads
• Make more sales.
• Boost your output
• Make informed decisions
• Salesforce CRM is simple to use for small businesses and large corporations alike. Its numerous features assist you in growing your business more quickly, including:
• Contact and Lead Management
• Workflow Rules & Automation for Sales Opportunities Customizable Reports & Dashboards
• Application for Mobile

Salesforce CRM allows you to keep track of all sales activity, including leads, opportunities, and customers, and take action from any location. As a result, you’ll have more time to sell to those who are interested, armed with their personal marketing data and social insights.

This CRM Cloud integrates with Salesforce’s other seven clouds, and it’s simple to customise and change as your business grows.

Salesforce CRM has a pay-as-you-go model with four plans in addition to a 30-day free trial.

• Essentials of Sales for $25 per month per user: Out-of-the-box CRM with up to five users
• Professional for $75 per month per user: CRM solution for any team size
• Enterprise for $150 per month per user: CRM that is completely customizable for your company
• Unlimited for $300 per month per user: CRM power and support are limitless.

The sales CRM with automation from ActiveCampaign allows you to:

• Organize your contacts in one place.
• Update contact information automatically
• With a contact record, you can see the entire history of a lead.
• With detailed records, you can pinpoint where each lead is in the sales process and send targeted messages.

The sales CRM with automation from ActiveCampaign keeps leads organised in the sales pipeline.

Our sales CRM is available for $49 per month on our Plus, Professional, and Enterprise plans.

Modern Marketing Stack vs Traditional Marketing Stack

You might be wondering why we keep using the word modern? What exactly has changed in the marketing field over the last few years? Let us look into this.

Marketing isn’t a brand-new concept, however, with today’s technological advancements, how a product or service is marketed has definitely changed. Thanks to the accessibility the internet provides, many businesses are using various digital media to reach a much wider audience. However, this doesn’t mean that traditional marketing is redundant because there are companies that still use traditional marketing strategies. 

Traditional marketing used media such as boards, brochures, pamphlets, radio, and television for advertising while modern marketing uses traditional marketing methods as well as modern methods like online marketing, social media marketing, and many more to reach their target audience. 

Apart from the different platforms used, one of the main differences between traditional and modern marketing strategies is that traditional methods are more focused on selling the product, on the other hand, modern marketing strategies are more customer-oriented. Today, businesses pay more attention to how they interact and communicate with their customers rather than how they sell their products.

Before choosing either of the methods or even using a combination of the two, it is important to answer a few questions- What is your budget? ; What is your target audience?; Which business are you in?

What are the Benefits of the Modern Marketing Stack?

Even though traditional marketing strategies are still in use, we recommend going digital, this is because of the increased reachability and feasibility of modern methods. If you are still not convinced, here are a few more benefits of using the modern marketing stack:

• Improved Customer Experience: The modern marketing stack allows you to interact with your customers in a personalized manner. You can now easily send behaviorally triggered emails. These highly tailored campaigns get sent to customers automatically when they behave in a certain way. This could include signing up for your emails, clicking on a certain link, or abandoning items in an online shopping cart.
• Increased Scope of Campaigns: The various marketing applications that make up your marketing stack enable you to scale your marketing campaigns well beyond your team size. It makes your work faster, easier, and more efficient.
• Empower your Team to Improve Results: A good marketing stack simplifies the work of your team immensely. You no longer have to spend time preparing or understanding your data. You have all your dashboards ready, all you have to do is make the right decisions. 
• Increase Customer Lifetime Value: The purpose of a marketing strategy is not to just acquire new customers but also to maintain your existing customers and establish loyalty. Various CRM software that is part of your marketing stack lets you do just that.
• Facilitates Strategic Thinking: The marketing stack not only provides you with invaluable marketing data that helps you strategize but also eliminates the need to perform repetitive, tedious tasks, giving you the bandwidth and time you need to come up with innovative plans and ideas.

Conclusion

In this article, you have learned what a Modern Marketing Stack is, how it’s different from traditional marketing, and also its components and benefits. 

You have seen that a data integration platform is one of the key components of a Marketing Stack. Try HevoIQ today. HevoIQ supports data integrations from 100+ data sources at a reasonable price.

Give Hevo a try by signing up for a 14-day free trial today.

Have any further questions? Get in touch with us in the comments section below.