Marketing Tech stack modern marketers better have a grip on!

In today’s high-tech business world, the proliferation of marketing technology has changed the way we use to do marketing to grow our business and boost revenue. The digital age has drastically altered the speed, relevancy, and scope of marketing campaigns. Old-school marketers were more into creative aspects of marketing while the technological areas were shouldered on geeks and nerds. But the rapid growth of technology has changed the way we used to think and act on.

Today’s successful marketing programs are driven by technology and data, and marketers across the industries are intensely focused on technology solutions to understand customers better and improve conversions. Their role becomes more data-driven and analytical. What was once the role of a CMO has been completely pushed aside. Although, technology cannot replace the creative flair, and the principles of marketing remain largely the same - but the role of modern marketers completely transformed as it propelled by the rise of innovative solutions, big data, AI, and the need to engage customers across all channels, on a more personal, interactive levels. 

Though, technology has complicated marketing in various ways, but it has also caught up on the business side to lend a helping hand. So, being a modern-day marketer, if you are least comfortable with the evolving tools & technologies – then the technology would outpace your ability, and you would find yourself on the wrong neighborhood.

Every business is unique, and when it comes down to choosing the right technology stack for your marketing programs, references & recommendations comes next. It is always a good idea to do some research at the first place and see which marketing tools are right for your business, which technologies are most fundamental to your goals, and to understand how technology can help you positively affect your business.

To create data-driven marketing campaigns and insightful analysis to better understand your target audience, improve conversions, and ultimately help you fulfill your business objectives – you require right marketing stack to back you up. What I am trying to give you here is an overview of some marketing tools that I find most perfect. I believe today's marketers should better have a grip on these tools, and I’m sure you too would love to have these in your marketing toolbox.

Email Marketing Tools:

We know that Email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing channel available to businesses of all types and sizes. Many of the top marketers from some of the most successful companies in the world believe email is the #1 channel for growing your business. An effective tool to reach your target customers in a very personal way, and is one of the best investments a marketer, or a business owner can make. 

Mailchimp - My first choice & one of the most popular email marketing service providers, co-founded by Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius in 2001. Mailchimp offers a very easy to use interface with great tools, merge tags, autoresponders, segmenting contacts into groups, tracking and analytics. It integrates with many third-party applications, including Facebook, Twitter, Hootsuite, Pinterest, Instagram, SurveyMonkey, Eventbrite, Etsy, Salesforce, WordPress, Magento, Joomla, Drupal and Google Analytics. It also allows you to set up delivery times based on user’s time zones and setup segmenting based on geolocation.

MailChimp is one of the more popular choices for email marketing software, largely because they offer the best free plan compared to all other services. And it’s an impressive plan – you get 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month, free forever.

AWeber - Founded by Tom Kulzer in 1998 with a goal to make email marketing simpler and more profitable for small businesses, AWeber is also considered as one of the most popular email marketing services used by over 120,000 small businesses, bloggers and entrepreneurs around the globe. AWeber offer a wide-range of tools that includes free templates, a drag-and-drop email editor, list segmentation, contact management, email marketing tracking and autoresponders. They offer a 30-day free trial. After that, their pricing starts from $19/month. For me, AWeber is second best email marketing software.

GetResponse - Another popular email marketing solution - founded by Simon Grabowski in 1998. It comes with beautiful responsive forms, landing pages, A/B testing, tracking, and autoresponders. It also integrates with third party lead generation software like OptinMonster, SalesForce, Google Docs, ZenDesk, etc. The software offers an extremely easy to use and simplifies email marketing for small businesses and absolute beginners. They also offer a 30-day free trial. Their pricing starts from $15/month.

Pure360 - A UK-based email & SMS marketing provider - founded in 2001. The solution offer marketers a combination of data-driven marketing suite and a best practice framework, focused on accelerating customer results across email, mobile, web and social. With the Pure360 marketing suite marketers are equipped to Drag & Drop Editor, multi-channel dynamic email and SMS campaigns, and PureIntelligence module which provide a 360-customer view. The software easily integrates with third party systems like Faststats, Magento, Salesforce and more. But the sad part is they do not offer free service.

There are lots of other Email marketing tools out there, but choosing the best Email marketing tool for your business will depend on your budget, the size of your list, whether you require marketing automation, which integrations you require, and much more.

Social Media Management Tools

Social media has become a big part of almost everything we do online. With so many different networks to manage, it can be difficult to stay organized, and the challenge is time management. But there are tools which are designed to help us save time and stay organized.

HootSuite - My all-time favorite, and the best tool for social media marketers out there. I don’t think this tool require any introduction. A powerful social media management and marketing tool that you would fall in love with. It gives you the ability to manage all your social networks like scheduling messages and tweets, analyzing social media traffic, tracking conversions, and measuring campaign results - all in one user-friendly dashboard. This tool is really a social media management time-saver.

Buffer - One of the best and easiest to use social media management tool. It also covers all Social Networks except for Instagram, and is definitely the best publishing system out there. It allows you to create a posting schedule for your Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest and Google+ pages all in one place, creating a queue. From the shortening of URLs to setting your posts in a queue, Buffer also lets you manage different pages at once. I'm using Buffer since last one year & a lot of marketers prefer Buffer over Hootsuite because of its high-end analytics and seamless interface.

Both Hootsuite and Buffer are awesome social management tools that will help you become more organized and deliver better social media results. Which tool you ultimately choose will depend largely on your specific requirements.

EveryPost - EveryPost is somehow similar to Hootsuite. I haven't use this tool so far, but I got positive feedback from my friends about this tool. It also supports Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tumblr, Dropbox and email. This tool allows you to schedule posts, curate content, follow influencers, and track your analytics, among other things. You can choose from several different plans to suit your needs, and you can add up to five users that you can also manage.

There are dozens of other social media management tools out there, and you can easily spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars a month on them, depending on how big your team is and what kind of features you need. 

Website Speed & Performance Optimization Tools

The speed of a website can be a critical factor to its success. From higher SEO rankings, higher conversion rates, lower bounce rates, longer visitor duration on site, better overall user experience, and engagement - these all affects a lot by a slow-loading webpage. In order to eliminate all these risks, you need to check and optimize your website for speed. There are a number of tools that can help you with website speed testing & optimizations.

KeyCDN Speed Test - One of the best website speed test tool out there. A fast and lightweight tool which you can use to get detailed insights on how your website performs. It offers 14 locations to choose from around the globe, and it fully supports HTTP/2. You also have the options of making your test results private or public. The test includes a waterfall breakdown and a visual website preview at the bottom. It is one of the only tools besides PageSpeed that is responsive and works great on mobile devices.

GTMetrix - GT-Metrix is my second favorite. It provides a lot of details of why a site runs slow, or general advice about this. It also analyzes around 30 different ways to improve your website’s speed and performance. I find GT-Metrix a very useful tool, as it measures both Pagespeed and Y-slow in one session, giving you a nice overview of both. Many other page-speed tools exist, but GTMetrix is an office favorite, because of its balance between being thorough and user-friendly. I recommend you give it a try – you would love it.

Google PageSpeed Insights - Another web performance tool created by Google to help you easily identify ways to make your site faster and more mobile-friendly, by following recommendations on best web practices. Google’s PageSpeed Insights service will give you a score on a scale of 1 – 100. The higher the number the better optimized your site is. PageSpeed gives you reports for both the desktop and mobile versions of your site.

Sucuri Load Time Tester - This tool provides a quick and easy way to test the performance of your sites from around the globe. Sucuri is best known for their security products and services, however they also provide a free test that measures how long it takes to connect to your site and for one page to fully load. Many speed testing services process a report based upon the performance from one data centre, while Sucuri Load Time Tester will test a page against over a dozen servers around the world. This will give you a more accurate picture of your website speed.

DareBoost - This tool is relatively a newcomer, similar to GTmetrix and such other tools. DareBoost provides detailed information, but provides filters for navigating the results and a more modern look. In addition, comparative analyzes can be made between two websites (for example own and co-authors) or between the desktop and the mobile version of a website (similar to Google PageSpeed). This allows a quick overview of all possible factors. It is available in a free and some paid packages, but the free checks are already quite nice.

There are a number of website speed test tools you can choose from. Each of them has their own unique features & functions, with different depth of data interpretation. Some tools shine with optics, simplicity, intelligibility, while others have data depth, different option and query modes, and special features. It is always a good idea to regularly test your site with different tools and establish a benchmark so over time you can make improvements.

Web Analytic Tools

To really understand what’s working for your business and what is not - you need a good analytics tool. Every business, big or small, must understand the performance of their website and marketing to achieve success.

Clicky - Clicky is considered to be one of the most robust web analytics tool today. With Clicky, you can monitor, analyze, and react to your website traffic in real time. It provides you live stats about your website traffic and so you can learn how visitors interact with your website in real time which enables you to respond to new media mentions, ad campaigns and much more. Moreover, Clicky provides you detailed reports on every segment of visitors and so you come to know what’s working and what’s not for your website. The only reason which gives Clicky a clear edge over Google Analytics is the fact that Google Analytics can only provide you information up to the day before viewing, whereas Clicky gives you real time information.

Google Analytics - The most conventionally used analytics tools by marketers and businesses. I don’t think this tool require any introduction. It’s such a popular and the most widely used free Web Analytic Tool providing you strong results across all your sites, apps, and offline channels. What separates Google Analytics from the rest of the crowd is its power to offer detailed insights into your website’s performance. With the help of this tool, you will have the opportunity of identifying crucial factors capable driving unlimited traffic to your websites. With almost every website owner relying on Google Analytics, this particular tool has inevitably emerged as the go-to tool for perfect web analytics.

GoSquared - GoSquared is also a powerful and feature-rich Web Analytics Tool that measures visitor engagement. Unlike typical web analytics tools, GoSquared keeps a separate section devoted to tracking and the analysis of data originating from e-commerce websites. It delivers real-time reporting system, and thus you get to know visitor behaviors, traffic spikes, social trends and much more, all in real time. With its powerful tools, GoSquared tells you how long a visitor has stayed on your website. It provides a very user-friendly interface and it also comes with integrated chat support.

There are plenty of other analytics tools that have developed since the inception of Google. All have done their best to somehow mimic Google Analytics, while offering something in addition to differentiate themselves.

SEO & Competitive Intelligence Tools

Gaining a competitive advantage in today’s fast-moving business world is harder than ever before. Maintaining that advantage in digital marketing is even more difficult.

SEMrush - When it comes to keyword research, spy on your competition’s SEO and PPC strategies, do backlink analysis, and much more, SEMrush is the leader. It often called as a Swiss army knife. From this tool, you can research search data, traffic, and competitors for a domain or a keyword. If you are into paid advertising, you can get a deep look into what keywords your competitors are bidding on and how much traffic they are generating from their efforts.

It is the world’s leading competitive research service for online marketing and one of the most popular SEO tools in the market. SEMrush offers an extremely comprehensive range of competitive analysis for both organic and paid traffic.

SpyFU - It's a competitive analytics tool specifically for PPC marketers, revealing brands' most profitable keywords (both pay per click and organic). SpyFu offers deep insights into both SEO and PPC, and helps you improve your search rankings by tapping into your competitors’ keyword strategies.

Both SEMrush and SpyFU are great tools for spying on your competitors' PPC strategies. Choosing one over other is a matter of your personal preference.

SEO PowerSuite - All-In-One Suite with is an impressive set of SEO applications that do a variety of different SEO tasks like Rank Tracker, SEO SpyGlass, WebSite Auditor and LinkAssistant. They offer a free version that has a ton of features, but you can’t save any of your projects. To get the most out of SEO PowerSuite, you must first pay a one-time fee for the software license and then pay a monthly fee for Search algorithm updates — these keep your software in line with search engines’ changing algorithms and let you store projects in SEO PowerSuite Cloud. It proves to be the best tool especially for small business owners since it is a simple way to track and conduct the SEO campaigns.

Content Marketing Tools

When it comes to the fast-paced world of digital marketing, content is still king - perhaps more so than ever. Managing the volume of marketing content that needs to be created, distributed, analyzed, and managed has become complicated, time consuming and costly.

Buzzsumo - To discover which content of competitor have performed best and which social media channels are getting high engagement - BuzzSumo tops the list. With the help of this tool, you can populate the highest ranking, most social and most influential content trending on the web that matches your search terms. This can help you find better ways of titling your content, as well as help you discover where to advertise based on relevant audience reach. And the best part is you can create alerts which will notify you when one of your competitors publishes a new content.

Ahrefs - This tool is ideal for marketers and social media managers who want to improve backlinks and relative SEO while also tracking content and mentions. It helps you to learn why your competitors are ranking so high and what you need to do to outrank them by providing the data of exact keywords that your competitors are ranking for in organic search results and how much traffic this brings them. The best features in Ahrefs are Content Explorer and Keyword Explorer. Using these tools, you're able to see the top content by domain, topic or keyword. And If you’re serious about building high quality backlinks for your site, Ahrefs is the tool you should invest in.

NinjaOutreach - NinjaOutreach is a blogger outreach software ideal for digital marketers and small businesses interested in growing their presence online. Doing research and reaching out and connecting with influencers, whether it’s through social media or through email or by any other means of communication - NinjaOutreach comes to your rescue. Simply put, if you are looking to connect with industry influencers, bloggers, small businesses, freelancers, agency’s etc then this tool helps you with that very easily.

A/B Testing and Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Tools

To increase sales and conversion rate on your website, you need to test and optimize each page and flow. Selecting the right conversion optimization tool is key to the success of your optimization strategy.

Optimizely - A very popular set of tools designed to help you build the best website for your target audience on desktop, mobile and in mobile apps. Optimizely is the leader in A/B testing that allows you to visually try different variations and easily set up tests on promotions, pricing, buttons, sale text, banners, colors and more. It has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface that creates impressive A/B, multivariate, and mobile testing options. It's WYSIWYG editing tool allows for A/B and multivariate testing and offers real-time reporting.

Omniconvert - Previously known as the Marketizator, Omniconvert is more likely to be one of the younger suite that integrates three major aspects of conversion – web personalization, surveys, and A/B testing – into one compact and complete conversion optimization solution.

It’s primary features include a WYSIWYG editor, multiple page tests, a statistical relevance calculator, reporting, custom goals, and multi-variate testing. Plus, it also has many features for its online surveys, popup banners, and advanced segmentation. A premium version is available for greater traffic needs as well.

Project Management Tools

There are times when you've got too much to juggle and you need a way to hit the deadlines, track the time your team spent working on tasks, and collaborate with them. You need a project management app to sort it out into projects, tasks, and deadlines. Fortunately, there are such tools that help you out.

Asana - A web-based software tool designed by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, used to help with team collaboration. With over 40,000 customers, including Dropbox, Tesla, and Uber, Asana promises “teamwork without email, and it is just that. This project management tool is full of useful features for collaborative work under one roof. Multiple projects, task management and tracking, third-party tools integration, individual workplaces, calendars and project dashboards are all available within this one single platform. Asana is aesthetically pleasing with a nod to its social network roots, easy to use, and includes a comprehensive range of features.

Trello - Trello is another awesome project management tool that helps you to manage projects and stay on the same page as your team. It's an efficient one too as it makes use of the kanban paradigm, first popularized by Toyota back in the 1980s for supply chain management. (Kanban is a system that organizes workflow visually, often with cards organized into columns (such as “To Do,” “Doing,” and “Done”) on a board).

With Trello, everything related to your online marketing strategy can be shared in the same place. It only takes a few minutes to set up a board. Trello is great for anyone looking for a visual way to virtually brainstorm ideas and display your thoughts in a stream.

Podio - Podio is a cloud-based collaboration tool that makes project progress transparent and flexible with all content and conversations integrated smoothly. It is completely customizable to suit your project needs. With a form style builder, you'll drag-and-drop the fields you want in your projects and tasks to gather the data your projects need. You can then visualize your projects and tasks in lists, cards, or calendar views.

What makes Podio different is that Podio is used to build custom business Apps. For example, you can create a Projects App and a Tasks App and connect them to each other. Or create your own CRM workspace.

“Any software or tools are only as good as the people who use them.”

Market is brimful of tools and technologies to choose from. According to Marketing Technology Landscape by MarTech.com, a total of 5,381 technology vendors (and counting) existed in the market. There is an array of all types of tools & solutions that are designed to help you fulfill your business objectives. 

Now, you are overwhelmed with options, get distracted by how each technology fits into your strategy, which tools to incorporate and implement, which solutions will truly address your marketing needs - it’s like solving a complex jigsaw puzzle. Ultimately, you will have to decide which tools give you the best return on your investments. With the right tools, you can save more money and time, gain you more efficiencies, more leads, improve conversions, better analytical insights, and all what it takes to stay ahead of the competition.

Should there be any best alternatives to these tools that you think worthy to include, I would love to hear in the comment section.