9 tools for your SMB marketing technology stack in 2019

The marketing technology landscape has continued to grow year after year with new tools and solutions releasing quite frequently. According to ChiefMarTec, in 2011 there were about 150 marketing solutions, and as of April 4th, 2019 there were 7,040 on the market. I’m sure that number has grown within the last couple of weeks.

Martech Landscape: 2011-2019
There’s plenty of tools available at your fingertips to help automate tasks and deliver powerful analytics to help make your life as a marketer easier. When you successfully choose the right tools to include in your marketing tech stack you can build a marketing strategy that creates optimized collateral and generates qualified leads for your sales team. But how do you know what solutions are worth investing in to include in your marketing technology stack?

In order to figure out what tools are needed for your marketing strategy, it’s important to think about your goals, your budget, and look at multiple options. We know that can be a daunting task so we’ve created a list (in no particular order) to help you get started.

1. Social Media

Social media is a valuable part of any marketing strategy. With most of your target audience on many platforms (such as LinkedIn or Facebook), it’s a great way to keep your company fresh in their minds and increase exposure. You can automate the mundane social media tasks such as scheduling and publishing content.

MarTech Stack Tool: HootSuite

With an easy to use interface, you can schedule posts in advance to create a content calendar. You don’t have to worry about missing your prime time of posting because it’s already scheduled and published. HootSuite gives you analytics for each campaign so you can track results and make adjustments to your content strategy. They offer different tiers of pricing, starting with a free plan and moving up from there.

Alternatives: Planoly, Buffer, MeetEdgar, CoSchedule

2. Sales Enablement Platform

You have all this awesome content you created, but how do you make sure that it gets into your sales rep’s hand and gets utilized? A sales enablement platform helps deliver content to your reps while giving you powerful insights on how it’s being used. We could go on about the powerful features of a sales enablement platform, but we already have a page on that.

MarTech Stack Tool: SoloFire

We may be biased but SoloFire is our favorite tool in our marketing technology stack. When we create marketing collateral, we upload it into SoloFire and distribute it to our sales reps. As they present and share content, we can track the engagement and see how it’s performing. Not to mention the administrative platform is user-friendly and looks just as good as the sales app. With SoloFire we seamlessly manage our marketing content and our sales reps. It’s also a great way to train and onboard employees!

Alternatives: None 😉

3. SEO

You have this awesome product and sleek looking website but your customers can’t find you. Sound familiar? This is where SEO comes into play. Search engine algorithms are constantly changing and you need to keep up. Luckily there are some pretty insightful SEO tools to help make sure that your customers (and search engines) can find you!

MarTech Stack Tool: SEMrush

SEMrush is loaded with marketing tools to help measure and improve online visibility. Their SEO dashboard serves as a good starting point to see what problems you need to tackle first, and continues tracking your progress as changes are made. Their features include reports and tools around keywords, backlinks, competitors, content research and more. Definitely a powerful marketing tool for the price you pay.

Google Search Console deserves a quick mention too. It won’t give you as much data as SEMrush or other SEO tools, but when connected to your Google Analytics it can be very helpful to see what your Google searches your site is appearing for.

Alternatives: Moz, Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs

4. Collaboration

Collaboration software allows team members to successfully communicate with each other and improves overall team productivity. Members can message each other, coordinate tasks, and delegate responsibilities. As more and more people are working remotely, efficient collaboration between team members is more important than ever.

MarTech Stack Tool: Slack

Slack is a popular collaboration software that helps team members work together and save time. By being the single place for messaging, calling, and sharing files your conversations stay organized and you don’t have to worry about threads and email chains.

Alternatives: Trello, Evernote Business, Asana, Monday

5. Webinars

Over the last couple of years, webinars have become a popular, fun way to capture and engage with prospects. Webinars help you establish a real-time connection, gain more credibility, and offer value to those participating.

MarTech Stack Tool: Zoom

Conference calls and meetings stand in the spotlight for Zoom but one feature that seems to be in the background that people tend to forget about is the ability to host webinars. You can have up to 100 interactive video participants and a large panel of speakers, with the option to broadcast your webinar to Facebook Live and YouTube. Zoom is the video conferencing platform and webinar tool all in one!

Alternatives: GoToMeeting, Livestorm, EverWebinar

6. Email Marketing

Email marketing is an easy and effective way to keep your customers connected to what your company is doing in a personalized way. You can send out helpful information, coupons, updates, really whatever you want! There are a variety of tools out there depending on how simple or complex you want your email messages to be.

MarTech Stack Tool: MailChimp

MailChimp might be one of the most well-known email marketing tools out there and there’s a reason for it. They offer features and plans for marketers of all sizes, whether you are a team of one or a company with a distinct marketing department. With an easy drag and drop email builder, landing page creator, and plenty of integrations, it’s a great all in one marketing suite with an affordable price tag.

Alternatives: Constant Contact, Drip, SendGrid

7. Web Analytics

Your website is an analytics goldmine that you might not be utilizing to your advantage! Analytics are probably the most powerful insights about your business and sometimes they don’t cost you anything! It’s up to you to take that data and turn it into a valuable part of your marketing strategy!

MarTech Stack Tool: Google Analytics

There’s a lot of different web analytics tools and software out there but sometimes sticking to the tried and trued way can be the most beneficial, and in this case, it is. Google Analytics is a free tool that gives you valuable insights into your pages, your audience demographics, their behavior and more! Plus they offer tutorials if you aren’t sure what all the data means and what to do with it!

Alternatives: Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics, Amplitude

8. Live Chat & Customer Support

By the time a customer reaches out to you with questions, your window of opportunity is really only a couple minutes to make an impact. Live chat allows you to quickly respond, within minutes, and have a real-time conversation. Not to mention that it helps your team give impressive customer support.

MarTech Stack Tool: Crisp

Crisp Chat is an all in one solution for interacting with your customers with a simple pricing plan! Some features they offer are live chat, messaging campaigns, a knowledge base, and they integrate with Slack. One cool feature they offer is called MagicMap, showing you where all your visitors are from in real time. And as a bonus, Crisp has developer-friendly API so you can make sure it works with all your other tools.

Alternatives: Podium, Intercom, Freshdesk

9. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation can be a game changer as you create workflows and processes to handle certain tasks that are apart of your day to day job. Depending on the actions the customer takes, you can take them through a guided sequence that is automated and the only thing left for you to do is interpret the web analytics as they come in, and make changes as needed. With some of your workflows automated, you can focus your attention on other marketing efforts.

MarTech Stack Tool: ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one email marketing tool with many features and integrations, automation being one of the most powerful features they offer. It allows for autoresponders, automation of your contacts, and serves as a small business CRM too. ActiveCampaign does have a bit of a learning curve, but as you learn the system you will see how powerful of a tool it is. And their pricing starts at $9/month!

Alternatives: HubSpot, Marketo, Eloqua, Pardot

Marketing Technology Stack

Even though we are a couple of months into 2019, it’s not too late to start incorporating some of these tools into your marketing technology stack. While this list doesn’t cover every solution out there, hopefully, you found a couple that you want to take a look at for your tech stack.

Good luck on building your marketing tech stack! Interested in adding SoloFire to your tech stack? Request a demo today!

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