10 Must-have Marketing Technology Stack for Your B2B Tech

Still think your current martech stack doesn't need an upgrade? Think again.

2019 is gradually coming to a close and marketing channels have shown no signs of slowing down. If you’re a marketer who’s part of a technology-dominated industry, you know well that it’s no longer a bonus to be technologically savvy in this day and age. To ensure customers don’t just drop out of your funnel you need to test drive every efficient alternative to get the job done.

A study by Gartner reveals that marketing technology is now the largest portion of the total marketing budget. Putting together a modern technology stack is no joke – especially when every business varies in shapes and sizes. It’s crucial to realize that as marketing departments, we each have functions, needs, and goals. To ensure that your performance scales in 2020 and beyond, you need a proper stack and a diverse set of tools that are perfectly aligned with your marketing structure. However, with over 5000 martech options to choose from, finding the right tools can be overwhelming, to say the least.

Below are 10 must-have marketing technology stacks for your B2B tech that you didn’t know you needed.

Rapidly evolving technology also means that tools are becoming all the more granular. As opposed to the tools that could solve three different tasks before, the modern marketer now requires an advanced set of tools catering to each channel, task, function, and goals.

1. CRM System

Nurturing customer relations is one of the important factors in scaling your business. All your marketing efforts and spend on driving traffic to your website results in most customers only giving you one shot. Not to mention that upselling and reselling to the existing customer presents a huge challenge. 

Just because a customer bought from you last month doesn’t mean they’ll buy again or stick around for good. A study done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company states that increasing customer retention rates by 5% also led to an increase in profits by 25% to 95%. In that sense, it is pretty important that you manage as well as nurture your customer relationship at all times.

When it comes to meeting these needs, Salesforce  checks all the boxes on the list. It is one of the most customizable CRMs available out there that has been known to retain consistent growth for nearly two decades. 

With a CRM system in place, you can engage with your prospects and customers on a personal level. Not only does it help you create better marketing campaigns but also boost your ROI.

2. Account-based Marketing Software

Needless to say that marketers of today are expected to deliver on important parameters such as data enrichment, hyper-personalization, contextual experiences, and multi-channel touch-points. If you’re someone that’s looking for exponential growth in the said areas then ABM is the answer. 

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With the sheer number of technology available these days it can be tricky not to get swayed. Hence, ensure to invest in the right tools that cater to what your business requires to scale your marketing efforts. Choose a tool that provides you with actionable insights and predictive analysis so you can tie your marketing spend to the outcomes. Look for key features such as:-

• A unified platform that provides all the key elements for ABM and has capabilities for account targeting and management, personalizing cross-channel engagement, and revenue-based account analytics in the same platform as other cross-channel marketing campaigns.
• While identifying loopholes and rectifying them is important, you need a solution that easily integrates with the other core technologies.
• See that you have a proper technology in place that provides real-time, account-level view to coordinate outreach and drive alignment across teams so they can go after key accounts in a coordinated and collaborative fashion. 

3.Social

Growing your online presence and reaching out to millions of people is the new protocol. But today’s consumer is omnipresent. And you must establish your influence across multiple platforms at the same time. It is a known fact that the average consumer today has seven different social media accounts. While that presents a whole new multi-channel strategy for marketers, it’s no easy task to manage these different platforms all at once. Reputation management software solutions such as Hootsuite, Yotpo, Sprout Social, etc, can help keep your establishments intact.

These solutions can help you manage all your social channels in one place. Integrated with helpful features such as analytics dashboards in Hootsuite, pulling up reports for your sales and marketing teams will be a cakewalk for reals!

4. Customer Experience Management (CEM or CXM)

 Gartner says customer experience is now one of the top 3 areas for marketing investments. Hence, marketing leaders must guide and empower everyone across the enterprise to optimize their customer interactions. Customer experience management is a key differentiator in today’s hyper-competitive, hyper-connected global marketplace and there’s tangible business value in managing it effectively.

The concept of CXM or CEM is more than just serving your online customers. It is about understanding their pain points and addressing them with actionable solutions. But when it comes down to boosting your sales, do you know how the users experienced your site? 

By using heat mapping tools like Lucky Orange, Hotjar, and Crazy Egg, etc, you can track movements of your visitors and better understand how they respond and interact with your website.

5. Web Experimentation Platform

Whether your focus is on product creation, sales or marketing development, running tests is absolutely crucial to finding your weakness and strengths. While that’s true, oftentimes it’s not enough to rely on your basic knowledge of tests to get the statistically significant data.

Experimentation platforms such as Optimizely, VWO, etc, can help with your A/B testing, split testing, multivariate testing, and multipage experiment across websites, mobile apps and connected devices. 

Every business has its unique set of challenges  that can’t be address with the same old one-size-fits-all approach.  It’s up to you to discover what your unique set of customers prefers.

6. Marketing Automation

Did you know that 91% of companies that use marketing automation find it to be a crucial part of their marketing strategy?

Sure, it may come off as boring when compared to other tools in the market today but Marketo is a “powerhouse of automation designed for marketers by marketers”. If you’re wondering how your prospects are interacting with all your marketing channels then Marketo is your top choice. With features such as consumer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, marketing automation, and marketing management, Marketo is a necessity for any team running multiple channels for customer acquisition.

7. Google Analytics

This is one of the most reliable aspects of any marketing technology stack In fact, it is reported by Marketing Land that the number of companies using Google Analytics range anywhere from 30 to 50 million. And the reason why it’s deemed so powerful can be attributed to these four main points:

• The source of your website visitors
• How they found you
• Which content they viewed
• How long they stayed on your website

Not only does it provide you with deep and meaningful insights into buyer personas but also countless number of data-backed optimization opportunities.

8. Google Adwords

Google Adwords is still the most widely used advertising platform in the world. Despite all the hype around Facebook advertising, getting certified in Adwords is still a criterion for most entry-level digital marketing professionals. Why? Because Adwords has a bigger influece in the form of intent. And intent equals customer acquisition. 

As opposed to Facebook, people on Adwords are actively searching for solutions via keywords. Aside from intent, Adwords also gives a better outreach. 

Google alone handles over 40, 000 searches per second. With the help of Google Adwords you can skip the process of funnel and get right down to selling. You can optimize your campaigns, advertise on Youtube via Adwords, and with diverse demographic targeting and custom audiences, “you can reach users with Facebook-like specificity”. 

Adwords is the backbone of PPC advertising and if used correctly you can drive amazing results.

9. SERP

Keeping up-to-date with SEO is important and SERPs (Search Engine Results Page) is the best way to get valuable insights against your competitors. In today’s constantly algorithm-shifting world your SEO is not good enough until you’ve ranked #1 on Google for every targeted keyword.

By gathering Google ranking index or keyword research database, you can get a deeper insight on which keywords your competitors are targeting, campaign costs, and SEO rankings for specific content.

10. Automated Email Marketing Using Mailchimp

For companies of every strength and size, Mailchimp makes it pretty easy to start an email marketing campaign in just minutes.

Mailchimp’s powerful analytics dashboard makes it easier to get clear data on your campaigns without the help of vanity metrics. Email is still one of the most influential channels for B2B audiences. And Mailchimp makes it a breeze for you and your team to build automated campaigns for drip funnels and promotional marketing. You can easily split your audiences into lists for optimal campaign performance.

Martech round Up

Needless to say that marketing stacks are the backbone of any successful business in this day and age. When choosing your tools for your martech stack, remember that the technology must seamlessly carry out your strategy and not the other way around.