Learn exactly how to build an effective marketing technology stack. Plus, see the exact marketing tools and technologies we use at CoSchedule.

Evaluate these questions to understand what your brand’s data needs really are:
-What Do I Have to Justify?
-What Would I Like to Learn?
-Who Will Eventually See This?

Once you’ve understood what your data needs are, the process of choosing your most efficient marketing tech stack becomes a simple matter of sorting through the marketplace while keeping a few priorities in mind:
Customization and Integration. 
Ease of Use.

We have also worked with marketers and agency leaders to identify where the knowledge and capabilities gaps exist.

1. Do you know all the key technology providers in your marketing and advertising tech stack and the basis on which they are engaged? Do you understand the cost drivers?
2. Have you assessed the technology skills gaps in your organisations and do you have visibility over what skills you are likely to need this time next year that you currently do not possess?
3. Do you know which agencies are responsible for you adtech solutions?
4. Do you know who owns the data if your data is held in a third parties systems?
5. How confident are you that when someone arrives on your website you know who they are?
6. What other non-marketing systems collect personally identifiable information about your customers and are you able to marry these up to data in your marketing tech stack?
7. Do you run programmatic advertising campaigns and who manages the programmatic buying desk, your employees or your agencies?
8. How integrated are your teams when they plan campaigns? For instance does your social desk talk to your search desk, and do they know what display campaigns are running in the market at any given time?
9. Does your direct marketing team have visibility of search, social and display campaigns?
10. Thinking of search, social, display and video do you know how your agency is structured and whether they have an integrated or disjointed approach to managing your campaigns?
11. Is responsibility for search, social and display split across agencies?
12. How sophisticated is your attribution modeling? Are you still relying on first last clicks and are you able attribute across multiple formats and channels? And perhaps more importantly, how quickly can you respond to the insights derived from your models?
If you can answer yes to most of these questions positively you are doing better than many of your peers.

Chart of the Day: The popularity of different martech stack components You will know that our options for using online services to manage marketing and get. Marketing topic(s):Managing marketing technology. Advice by Dave Chaffey.

1. Optimize cold outreach to lookalike prospects with Growbots
Growbots eliminates the back-and-forth aspects of outbound sales, estimated by the company to suck up around 120 of your company’s hours per month. The platform boasts a bounce rate that’s under 10 percent, because once you feed it your existing list of leads, it’ll use machine learning to mine a database of over 200 million decision-makers to find lookalikes and send them optimized pitches, too. This ensures that sales reps only have call contacts with relevant people.

2. Keep your marketing activity aligned with strategic goals with Statsbot
Statsbot has emerged as a smart solution for businesses looking to make sense of their data and monitor their most important metrics. Statsbot integrates with platforms like Google Analytics, Salesforce and Mixpanel to ensure that your business is getting from Point A to Point B based on the goals you set. The platform tracks metrics relating to funnel performance, web traffic and revenue sales alongside your growth predictions, painting a crystal clear picture of your marketing impact in real time.

3. Scale your social presence with Narrow
To help marketers speed up the process of ramping up on relevant Twitter followers, tools such as Narrow have emerged to auto-engage with others, yielding follows.

4. Streamline onboarding and lead nurturing with ActiveTrail
ActiveTrail ensures that lead-nurturing happens around the clock. Through optimized content drips triggered by their audience’s activity, marketers can avoid haphazard and random communication. This results in more responses and fewer opportunities for leads to drop out of your funnel.

5. Tap into the power of automated ads with RevealBot

Reveal has emerged as a means for marketers to tweak Facebook campaigns without having to constantly monitor ad performance themselves. The platform performs actions such as pausing campaigns or ramping up an ad’s budget based on performance in real time. This allows you to run campaigns with peace of mind, knowing you won’t burn through your media budget or miss out on a large spike in demand.

One explanation is the phenomenon of “stack fallacy.” The term, coined by Anshu Sharma partner at VC firm Storm Ventures, refers to “the mistaken belief that it is trivial to build the layer above yours.” The merits of Sharma’s theory are well discussed as they relate to challenges in the IT and SaaS industries, but its application to martech is undeniable – large martech players are finding it difficult to innovate. Stack fallacy helps explain what’s happening in the martech landscape and what we can expect in the future.

CMOs and marketing teams want the best-of-breed solutions and they are more than willing to mix providers. In fact, a recent Morgan Stanley survey found only 9% of surveyed CMOs stated it was necessary to purchase all solutions from a single vendor.

These two macro forces – the failure to move upstream by larger martech companies and CMOs willingness to cobble together many providers – have created a perfect environment for smaller martech startups. Thousands of newly minted providers have established profitable business models on layers above the big players, offering up-stream marketing services like email marketing automation, webcast hosting, and content management.

But while understanding how to build and manage a solid marketing technology stack is an important part of marketing in the modern age, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. By itself, marketing technology is not a panacea.

Harnessing the potential of this technology requires developing new organizational capital: new organizational structures and processes, new skills and talents on the marketing team, new management approaches to operating in a fast-paced digital environment — even new elements of culture and philosophy to truly “be digital.”

Wrangling the technology is easy in comparison. Figuring out the right organizational capital to build — and actually building it — is the real challenge.

For analytics, a full-stack system has to include its own user interface, query engine, persistence and data ingest framework. That is, it has to include functionality for every service on the backend but also have the frontend user interface that makes it usable.
The key here is that good full-stack analytics solutions should be flexible enough to allow you to really get into answering questions with your data. You should be able to do more than just set a few parameters on a funnel, like some out-of-the-box solutions. You should be able to create the metrics you need easily within your analytics interface.
Full-stack analytics also need to be able to scale to your needs with ease. Any good full-stack solution should be able to handle however much data your product and users can throw at it. Having the capacity to scale is crucial for any full-stack solution.

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• Select tools that fit into an ecosystem
• Make sure your tech comes with real, live human support
• Insist on attribution
  Lots of MarTech promises to show ROI from specific campaigns. Very few tools, however, are truly engineered with attribution in mind. Partly, this is because this is no small feat. Prospects touch a product at many points before becoming customers: they might watch a video, respond to a tweet and attend an in-person event before committing to a purchase, so quantifying the impact of any one campaign isn’t easy. Not to mention, what constitutes ROI can vary widely depending on company and  context: some companies only count actual sales pipeline, while others might consider website traffic alone to be a successful conversion. The best tools out there today, however, are confronting these hurdles head-on and finding increasingly sophisticated ways to track results and bottom-line impact.
• Invest in your people, not just technology"

"Although we might not think of it this way, businesses get technology foundations in place, but in different layers (depending on your business itself).

Consider a SaaS business:

Primary technology stack: What are the tools or the kind of

• Application Architecture that the SaaS tool is built with? What kind of technology stack runs under the hood to make the product work?).
• Presentation stack: The product – what is it hosted on? How does it run? What’s the platform for the website of the SaaS business in question? (HTML/CSS? WordPress?)
• Collaboration Stack: How do the teams communicate (Slack?). How do they plan projects? (Asana, Trello?)
• Marketing Stack: What are the various tools used for the SaaS startup for marketing?
• Customer Support Stack: What tools and processes are used to manage customers, customer support, onboarding, training, education, and other needs for business?

Now, your case will be different depending on your business. Assuming your business needs X, Y and Z tech stacks in that order – you just can’t skip one for the other.

Don’t look for Y when what you really need is X first."

Figuring out how to organize your marketing stack is almost like putting together a 1,000 piece blank jigsaw puzzle -- impossible.

If you are looking for a way to build your inbound marketing stack, you don't have to worry! This is a real-life case of an inbound marketing stack we built

• How do you organize your own martech stack? It starts with the technology you already have in place. Most organizations already have the ingredients for a stack, they just haven’t conceptualized these parts as a single entity.
• Eventually, you will map out all of your technologies and their relationships to one another. But first, you should identify your core technologies, which will function as “hubs” for your overall stack. A content management platform is one of these three central hubs, and may be paired with a digital asset management platform, especially if you’re using content in a number of different applications and need better control of where and how it gets is used.
• The two other main hubs are your CRM solution and marketing automation solution. Since all three of these technologies will interact with many other softwares, it’s often easiest to start drawing your stack in relation to these three solutions. ChiefMarTec.com recently handed out awards for the best visual representations of enterprise martech stacks, and the winners illustrate just how diverse this organizational approach can be.

A flow chart to create a marketing stack tailored to your business needs We talk about the importance of using the right digital marketing tools a lot here. Marketing topic(s):Managing digital marketing. Advice by Robert Allen.