It’s no secret that marketing teams have significant responsibilities within an organization. Their priorities can range from increasing brand awareness to positioning the company as a thought leader to generating and converting leads. Marketers are constantly A/B testing emails, strategizing for social media campaigns, writing blogs, and optimizing search engine performance.
While these responsibilities rarely change, the digital landscape is evolving at a significant rate. To keep up with trends and to ensure that marketing efforts are on point, marketing teams can benefit from a highly curated tech stack. When it’s estimated that companies have an average of 120 marketing technology tools, it’s even more important to ensure your team finds the sweet spot for how much software it needs.
However, with endless technology choices, it can become difficult to determine which tools and software will benefit your marketing efforts. And choosing the wrong technology can be a costly mistake, both for your budget and for your efforts. Marketing teams need a technology that helps meet marketing goals with efficiency (and maybe even automation) and makes it easier for them to communicate, collaborate, and be productive.
In this blog post, you’ll learn the importance of auditing your current technology and find out how to get the ultimate tech stack every marketer needs in the new year for reaching goals and scaling your organization.
The importance of auditing your current martech stack
Just like all marketing efforts, analyzing your current marketing technology is just as important as ensuring your goals and metrics are on track. An audit allows your team to assess how effective the software is at streamlining processes, improving collaboration, bringing in leads, and more. With regular auditing, you can be sure the tools you’re using are driving success for your department and not causing missed revenue opportunities for your organization.
Begin your tech stack audit by creating a list of your current software or tools and the function of each. This will make it easier to organize each into categories, such as social media, email marketing, and lead generation. The next step is to evaluate each software for performance, effectiveness, versatility, integration, and overall ROI for your marketing team. Once this evaluation is complete, you now have a clear picture of the benefits and limitations of your martech stack and where you may need to replace or eliminate software.
What to consider before updating your tech stack
With an audit complete, you are most likely more aware of the tools your marketing team really needs to be productive, efficient, and meet your department goals. The next step in your journey to building the ultimate tech stack is to consider three main areas:
- Your team’s overall marketing strategies
- Software cost and your budget
- How versatile and integratable the software needs to be
Start by determining the goals of your marketing team. Do you want to boost traffic to the website? Gain more email subscribers? Also, analyze the current strategies your team already has implemented. Understanding what the goals are will help your team determine how best to achieve them with a particular set of martech software.
The next consideration is the budget for your department and the cost of the software you need. These software and tools are often priced as a monthly subscription, so this is often the best way to determine which options your team can afford. Be sure to research what each software subscription allows (such as how many team members can have an account or limits to email sends). You might need a more advanced subscription or find you can choose a less expensive one.
Finally, it’s a good idea to consider how well each software can integrate with another you’re already using, or how versatile and customizable it will be for your team’s specific needs. Your team will quickly be overcome with endless busy work if the new software doesn’t connect with your CRM or other marketing automation tools. The more third-party integrations that are missing, the more difficult it will be for your team to remain productive and efficient.
Building the ultimate marketing tech stack
Now that you’ve completed a software audit and determined the needs, budget, and goals of your department, you can begin building a tech stack for each segment of your marketing efforts.
Lead generation
One of the biggest responsibilities of marketing teams is attracting leads to the pipeline. In 2022, marketing strategies are evolving to meet the changing habits of consumers. In a remote world where lead generation is now digital, meaning marketers will need to take a fresh approach—and invest in fresh tools—to spark interest and attract new customers. Marketers must also increasingly focus on hyper-personalized and value-based experiences for customers.
In a digital age, the trend is moving toward video marketing content and more targeted account-based marketing (ABM) strategies. To streamline and automate these processes this year, invest in tools like HubSpot, Wistia, and Google Ads or Facebook Ads that allow you to segment prospects, target niches, organize data, and analyze performance with ease.
Lead management
Once leads have been generated, it’s critical that teams can manage the data, leverage it for future marketing and sales campaigns, and automate wherever possible. While today, it’s common to see many niche tools that only manage a few parts of lead management, finding robust software is critical to ensuring marketing teams are remaining productive and efficient. Salesforce and HubSpot are great CRM software options that provide marketing teams with tools for effective lead management.
Salesforce’s most recent Marketing Cloud release provides users with advanced data analytics and personalization insights to build more effective campaigns while enhancing the CRM. With these tools, you’ll be able to track sales activities, keep records and contact information, and analyze data to develop marketing strategies. FormAssembly’s web form builder and recently released Workflow solution streamlines processes for collecting data from leads and connecting it to systems you already use like Salesforce.Â
Team collaboration
Marketing efforts are only as good as the effectiveness of a marketing team’s communication. But with many teams now working separately and from home, it can be difficult to effectively collaborate on campaigns and ideas. Cloud-based communication, such as Google Drive and Docs makes it easier to stay on the same page with marketing efforts no matter which states or time zones your team members are in.
Additionally, marketing teams can rely on a unified platform like Slack or Monday.com to simplify communication between team members, other departments, and entire organizations. Using these tools, it’s also easy to share files, update team members, and manage projects—all without extra emails or meetings.
Project management
Equally important as team collaboration software, having a robust project management tool will keep your marketing efforts running smoothly. 2022 making a push toward blending efforts across departments on projects (such as between sales and marketing) and enhancing team communication amidst the hybrid/fully remote workforce. Project management software today needs to be more agile for this new type of collaboration and robust enough to handle the increasing complexity of modern marketing projects.
Project management software like Asana, Trello, and Zoho is where your team can build out complex project workflows, create and schedule campaign tasks, streamline processes, and keep everyone on the same page. With individual task lists, deadlines, and communication, it’s easy to collaborate and update each other on projects. With agile software in place, teams will be better equipped to make informed and strategic decisions that help hit their ROI goals.
Design and development
No matter the industry or if your organization is B2B or B2C, all businesses need marketing assets. Today, customer expectations are fast evolving and users expect more immersive experiences. Trends are turning to illustrations to tell stories and animations to demo more complicated information. A new strategy is hyper-personalizing websites with more relevant content, video, and chat experiences for users.
From videos and social images to flyers and blog graphics, having the right design tools for campaigns, ads, presentations, and more is necessary for attracting leads as well as creating a consistent brand identity. Certain tools like Adobe Creative Cloud products (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) and Shutterstock aids graphic designers while Cinema 4D and other editing software empower videographers on your team to create engaging and on-brand assets for your marketing campaigns and website.
Online engagement
In an increasingly digital and remote world, webinars and online events are becoming a popular way to generate new leads for organizations. In an uncertain world post-pandemic, events have continued to remain hybrid or online, with a trend toward micro-events with a focus on safety instead of large annual conferences. Additionally, with so many professionals experiencing Zoom fatigue, webinar strategies must also adapt and move toward more personalized experiences with quality content that keep participants engaged.
Modern webinar platforms such as GoToWebinar or Demio provide a variety of resources that make hosting an online session a breeze. Depending on the subscription, you can keep your audience engaged with interactive features and leverage audience data with automated communication options, analytic tools to track performance, and integrations with systems like Salesforce.
Performance and optimization
Knowing just how content, website, and ads are performing is key to improving your marketing strategies. It’s no secret that video and mobile responsiveness will continue to play a big role in performance and website optimization. Additionally, page experience and content quality are quickly becoming a more critical measurement of how well a website performs.
To keep an eye on SEO and performance, tools like Ahrefs, Google Analytics, and Screaming Frog help simplify website analysis and provide insights into keyword performance, website ranking, customer experience, and more. These tools also help you discover broken links or page errors, provide heat maps, and give you insights into where content can be improved.
FormAssembly: An essential piece of the ultimate tech stack
Collecting and managing data from leads and customers is a crucial part of being an effective marketing team. Without this information, it is nearly impossible to develop engaging campaigns, generate new leads, and assist your organization in boosting ROI and sales. If your team is struggling with outdated processes using spreadsheets and paper forms, you could be missing out on key information and analytics—not to mention losing productivity and organization.
FormAssembly’s robust data collection platform provides the flexibility and versatility to complete any marketing data collection use case, including contact forms, surveys, demo scheduling, download forms, and more. Using our platform, your team can boost productivity and efficiency by streamlining processes for lead generation, content downloads, and more. Discover all the ways your marketing team can leverage FormAssembly in your tech stack!
