So, you’ve finally built your business. It’s standing strong and even growing. You’ve put in years of hard work to scale it, and the results are showing.
What’s next? To sustain the current growth, your marketing team has to keep pace. They will need to handle large amounts of data, create process maps, and navigate complex buyer lifecycles, all of which require a reliable set of tools, AKA a marketing tech stack.
Imagine your marketing tech stack (or MarTech stack) as the fountainhead of your brand—a combination of powerful tools, each with unique abilities to help you scale your business while overcoming challenges.
If you’re wondering how to build a MarTech arsenal powered by data, automation, and creativity, we’re here to guide you. We’ll show you how to build the best marketing tech stack for your business and some examples that make the job easier.
How to Build a Successful Marketing Tech Stack (with Examples)
- What Is a Marketing Technology Stack?
- Components of a Successful Marketing Tech Stack
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Marketing automation
- Email marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Online advertising
- Website and landing page constructors
- Content management software (CMS)
- Dashboards and data visualization
- Customer engagement and experience tools
- Sales and marketing alignment tools
- What to Include in Your Marketing Technology Stack (Example Tech Stack)
- Bring Your MarTech Stack Together With an All-in-one Marketing Project Management Tool
- The Benefits & Drawbacks of a Marketing Technology Stack
- Embracing New Tech with ClickUp
- FAQs
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Is a Marketing Technology Stack?
A marketing technology stack is a strategic combination of tools that enables businesses to plan, implement, and analyze their marketing activities efficiently.
A powerful marketing stack boosts your business growth in multiple ways:
- Strategic foundation: It serves as a foundation to align your marketing objectives with technological capabilities. The MarTech stack provides a clear roadmap for integrating tools that will help you achieve specific business goals
- Efficiency and automation: A marketing tech stack streamlines your marketing workflows through automation. It reduces repetitive and manual tasks, increases efficiency, and allows your team to focus on the important stuff, i.e., the strategic aspects of marketing campaigns
- Data integration and analytics: A MarTech stack integrates data from various touch points, enabling you to gain actionable business performance insights. With a data-driven approach, marketers can make better decisions, understand customer behavior, and accurately measure the KPIs of their marketing campaigns
- Cross-channel coordination: With a MarTech stack, you can ensure smooth coordination across different marketing channels, from social media and emails to paid ads and beyond. It helps maintain consistency in brand messaging and offers a unified customer experience
- Competitive edge: The marketing world is in a constant state of flux, and staying agile is the only way forward. With a powerful marketing tech stack in place, businesses can keep pace with evolving customer behavior, innovate with new tech, and stay ahead of competitors
The Evolution of Marketing Tech Stacks: A Quick Overview
In 1999, Salesforce shook things up when it introduced the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, giving the MarTech industry a makeover. There’s no exclusive club for giant corporations with custom-developed CRM systems anymore—software has become highly democratized. This started a movement for other tools to adopt the SaaS way.
Businesses could now move on from simple tech stacks of basic tools to comprehensive, sophisticated marketing automation platforms to automate processes like lead nurturing, campaign management, and customer journeys.
With the growth of digital channels and data sources, specialized point solutions began to proliferate. Tools for SEO, social media management, content marketing, advertising, and analytics were added to the stack.
As the number of tools grew, integration became a major challenge. Marketers struggled to connect disparate systems and create a unified view of customer data and campaign performance.
In response, major vendors like Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and others introduced integrated ‘marketing cloud’ solutions, aiming to provide a comprehensive suite of tools under one umbrella. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) also emerged as a way to unify customer data from multiple sources.
More recently, the focus has shifted towards leveraging AI and machine learning for tasks like predictive analytics, content personalization, and automated campaign optimization.
Many organizations are taking a hybrid approach, combining best-of-breed point solutions with a core marketing automation or customer data platform while prioritizing integration and data unification across the stack.
Today, there are over 11,000 MarTech solutions! With so many options, creating the ideal tech stack that works for you is harder than ever. If you plan to redo your MarTech stack or build one from scratch, you first need to understand the essential parts of a marketing technology landscape and then decide which tools would be a good fit.
Summarize this article for me pleaseComponents of a Successful Marketing Tech Stack
What does it take to build a power-packed marketing stack? One that sails the boat of your marketing operations toward success, leaving competitors behind?
Let’s take a look at its key components:
Customer relationship management (CRM)
A CRM is a centralized platform that manages customer data and helps you personalize customer interactions. It facilitates sales and marketing alignment, integrates with automation tools, and provides data-driven insights for more effective decision-making.
| Why you need it in your tech stack: A CRM enables you to monitor and improve the customer experience throughout the lifecycle, ultimately driving more sales by leveraging customer data effectively. |
Marketing automation
Marketing automation tools automate the repetitive tasks in marketing processes so you can focus on strategic, creative work. They help nurture leads, improve efficiency, and enhance lead scoring, segmentation, and personalized communication to save time and improve conversions.
| Why you need it in your tech stack: Marketing automation software helps you maintain focus on existing customers while sustaining marketing efforts to grow your customer base. |
Email marketing
Email marketing tools aim at targeted communication and nurture leads through strategic email campaigns. They are direct and effective communication tools.
| Why you need it in your tech stack: These tools strengthen inbound marketing, drive engagement, and promote customer retention by delivering tailored content to specific customer segments and tracking engagement metrics. |
Search engine optimization (SEO)
SEO tools improve your business’s search engine rankings and online visibility. They enhance organic keyword targeting, on-page optimization, and backlink management.
| Why you need it in your tech stack: These tools help you design an effective content marketing strategy and improve website credibility so that your website can draw more visitors (organic traffic) who will convert into potential customers. |
Online advertising
These marketing tools drive targeted traffic and conversions through paid channels. The most popular online ad tool is Google Ads, which delivers targeted ads to a specific audience.
| Why you need it in your tech stack: The tools offer precision targeting and data-driven ad campaigns, deliver measurable results, and, with optimized ad spending, bring you a high return on investment. |
Website and landing page constructors
Website maker tools create functional web pages and landing pages quickly from scratch. They allow you to customize and test the pages. You can even run A/B tests to check which version performs better.
| Why you need it in your tech stack: These tools help you build campaign-specific landing pages, offer customizations to keep the website on-brand and ensure an agile and responsive page experience. |
Content management software (CMS)
Content management tools help create, publish, and update digital content seamlessly. They manage content from creation to publication.
| Why you need it in your tech stack: The tools offer collaborative content creation, allow you to publish website content without any technical expertise, and provide robust analytics to track the results of your published content. |
Dashboards and data visualization
Such tools offer insights into website and campaign performance. Most marketers are fans of Google Analytics and Google Data Studio. The former provides insights into website performance, while the latter visualizes data for reporting.
| Why you need it in your tech stack: Dashboard and data visualization tools promote informed, data-backed decision-making and visually represent KPIs for quick analysis. |
Customer engagement and experience tools
These tools aim to enhance customer interactions and experiences. Some examples of customer engagement and experience tools include chatbots, surveys, and feedback mechanisms.
| Why you need it in your tech stack: Customer experience and engagement tools create a positive brand experience and help improve your understanding of customer behavior. They foster real-time engagement, customer satisfaction, and loyalty. |
Sales and marketing alignment tools
These tools establish coordination between the marketing and sales teams. Tools such as Outreach optimize sales communication and, well, outreach.
| Why you need it in your tech stack: Marketing and sales alignment tools empower you with personalized prospecting, promote seamless transition of leads through the sales funnel, align goals between teams, help cross-functional teams communicate better, automate follow-ups, boost sales efficiency, and improve revenue generation. |
Besides these marketing-specific tools, you might also need some general software to streamline how marketers operate and handle tasks. And what can be a better option than a trusted project management software?
It will empower your marketing team to plan, organize, and keep track of tasks efficiently and make way for hassle-free collaboration with internal and external stakeholders.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat to Include in Your Marketing Technology Stack (Example Tech Stack)
Your tech stack can make or break your marketing efforts. So, while picking individual digital marketing tools to build your stack, ensure they meet your unique business needs and add value to your team.
Here’s a tech stack example you can use as a guide:
CRM: ClickUp
Rated as the #1 CRM worldwide by G2, ClickUp helps manage all your customer data in one place, making it easy to analyze sales opportunities and design a marketing campaign accordingly.
Here’s how you can streamline customer workflow and build lasting customer relationships using ClickUp CRM:
- Keep a tab on your sales pipelines and customer engagement with ClickUp’s 15+ Views (List, Kanban, and Table view, to mention a few)
- Visualize all customer insights with ClickUp’s Dashboards, from customer lifetime value to average deal size
- Integrate emails with ClickUp and collaborate on deals, send updates to stakeholders, and onboard customers without leaving the platform
- Build a customer data repository with client contact and project details. Set tasks and goals for each customer, with progress tracking
When you use ClickUp CRM as a part of your tech stack, you’ll stay on top of account management, keep clients in the loop with project updates, deliver a smooth customer experience, and ultimately drive more sales.
It’s the perfect marketing project management software that encompasses all marketing and sales activities, including managing campaigns, online content, cross-marketing workstreams, and inter-team collaboration.
Alternatives: Salesforce, monday.com
Marketing automation: HubSpot
You need a marketing automation tool like HubSpot to create effective marketing campaigns at scale.
With this marketing agency software, using your CRM data, you can automate a major chunk of repetitive marketing tasks, such as lead nurturing with email drip campaigns, lead scoring, and following up. You also get detailed analytics to make data-driven decisions and make future campaigns more impactful.
Alternatives: ClickUp, Marketo
Email marketing: Mailchimp
With Mailchimp, you can create and send professional-looking emails as part of your email marketing campaign.
You don’t need design expertise to use this software. Its drag-and-drop editor allows you to instantly add images and personalized messages and create customized emails.
It also comes with a reliable analytics and reporting feature. Use it to track your email marketing KPIs, such as open rates, click-through rates (CTRs), and subscriber engagement.
Alternatives: Drip, Zoho Campaigns
SEO: Semrush
Semrush is a popular SEO tool that helps you measure your marketing efforts.
This product marketing software offers in-depth insight into optimizing your business’s online visibility, from keyword research, site auditing, and backlink analysis to competitor tracking.
Beyond SEO, Semrush also comes in handy for managing pay-per-click ads (PPC) and social media marketing.
Alternatives: Ahrefs, Moz
Online advertising: Google Ads
Google Ads is a powerful online advertising tool that allows advertisers to create and display ads on Google’s search results and other partner websites.
You can tailor your ad campaigns based on keyword research, demographics, and user behavior, ensuring that the ads reach your targeted audience.
The pay-per-click (PPC) model makes this tool cost-effective. You can use the analytics and tracking tools provided by Google Ads to measure the performance of the marketing campaigns and improve your strategies.
Alternatives: Bing Ads, Apple Search Ads
Bonus: PPC Reporting Templates!
Website and landing page builder: WordPress
WordPress empowers you to build a full-fledged website or a landing page tailored to a specific campaign, even if you’re not a coding expert.
A user-friendly interface, a vast library of themes, and hundreds of plugins make WordPress a preferred tool for creating visually appealing web pages that reflect your brand’s identity.
A tool like this is essential in your MarTech stack as it saves time, offers access to website analytics, and helps maintain a polished online presence.
Alternatives: Wix, Squarespace, Webflow
Content management software: ClickUp
ClickUp makes an appearance again as an all-rounder project management tool. You can configure it to suit your business needs and use it as a content management system.
Here’s how ClickUp can help you manage all things content:
- Visualize content plans using ClickUp Whiteboards and collaborate with your content team using ClickUp Docs
- Offer feedback through proofing and fast-track the process of approval from both internal and external stakeholders
- Build your content calendar and track progress using custom fields, statuses, and project views
- Use ClickUp Brain’s AI Writer for Work to speed up the ideation and writing process
- Integrate your favorite content marketing software and SEO tools with ClickUp and drive your content pipeline from a single platform
If you’re a content marketer looking to stay organized and efficient, ClickUp is a must-have in your marketing tech stack.
Alternatives: WordPress, Drupal
Dashboards and data visualization: Google Analytics & Google Data Studio
Google Analytics is a data powerhouse. It keeps you updated on your website and app performance, including user behavior, traffic sources, and conversion metrics.
On the other hand, Google Data Studio helps you visualize this raw data with the help of engaging dashboards. Use the drag-and-drop feature to create custom reports and incorporate charts, tables, and graphs for easy interpretation.
By integrating Google Data Studio with Google Analytics, you can understand data and present it in a visually appealing manner.
Alternatives: Semrush, Clicky
Customer engagement and experience: Zendesk
Zendesk offers seamless communication across different teams, such as support, sales, and customer interactions.
With features such as a ticketing system, live chat, and analytics, the tool allows businesses to respond promptly to customers across various touchpoints and resolve issues with short response times. The analytics and reporting capabilities help extract valuable insights from customer interactions.
Alternatives: ConvertKit, Intercom
Marketing and sales alignment: ClickUp
Sales and marketing teams cannot function in silos. To scale your business faster, you need a tool that aligns both teams.
Modern-day marketing teams deal with many data points, KPIs, and complex workflows, making it difficult to transport all of it to the sales team.
With ClickUp, you can set common goals for your marketing and sales teams, get a unified view of customer interactions, promote seamless communication between teams, and keep both teams aligned.
Alternatives: HubSpot, Salesforce
Summarize this article for me pleaseBring Your MarTech Stack Together With an All-in-one Marketing Project Management Tool
The key aspect of building a marketing tech stack is to pick tools that are best at what they do and meet your team’s unique needs.
But let’s be real. With too many tools, your workflow can become complex, and you might lose valuable data when transferring them from one platform to another.
To avoid these challenges, you need a comprehensive marketing project management tool like ClickUp that unifies all your marketing work under one roof.
Let’s understand how marketers can benefit from the ClickUp Marketing Project Management Software:
- Speed up campaign and content creation: With ClickUp Brain, marketing teams can brainstorm campaign ideas and generate content briefs, blogs, emails, and case studies faster
- Offer collaboration among team members: With ClickUp Whiteboards and ClickUp Docs, your team can brainstorm, visualize, and collaborate on tasks that drive your marketing strategy forward and keep the entire team on the same page
- Identify bottlenecks: Use ClickUp Goals and ClickUp Views to keep track of progress toward a particular goal, see timelines, and identify bottlenecks that might be affecting your workflow
- Analyze progress: Analyze project progress with ClickUp’s agile Dashboard and turn it into visual indicators so every team member stays updated on the status of tasks
- Get started with templates: Maximize your marketing team’s efficiency with the ClickUp Marketing Team Operations Template. The ready-to-use, customizable templates can help you create objectives and key results (OKRs), support the career development of team members, set up employee onboarding processes, and create standard operating procedures (SOPs).
If you’re looking for more resources, ClickUp has multiple free market research templates and marketing plan templates in store. These customizable templates will make your job easier and help you achieve your marketing KPIs faster.
Summarize this article for me pleaseThe Benefits & Drawbacks of a Marketing Technology Stack
A well-built marketing tech stack offers a number of advantages:
- Improved customer experience and satisfaction: The right MarTech stack helps you design targeted marketing strategies that customers find relevant, delivers personalized interactions based on data, and supports integration with third-party tools to offer a smooth customer journey across channels
- Increased business agility and innovation: With new technologies in place, your business can swiftly adapt to marketing changes. As tools become more precise in their analytical capabilities, you can make quick and meaningful decisions and build relevant campaigns based on accurate data
Like every good thing, building a tech stack also has some downsides:
- Learning curve: Some tools come with a learning curve. It can take time for non-technical teams to get accustomed to the new tech stack and use them to their full potential
- Upfront cost: Building a tech stack requires a high upfront cost. You also have to bear the ongoing costs, such as subscription and licensing costs
However, these drawbacks are not deal-breakers. Treat them as minor inconveniences you must endure to get something valuable in return.
Summarize this article for me pleaseEmbracing New Tech with ClickUp
Automation has become a vital part of present-day MarTech stacks, even though we didn’t know of its possibilities until a few years ago. The integration of marketing tools with emerging technologies, such as voice search, is also a relatively new addition. Technology will continue to evolve, and businesses that keep an open mind and remain adaptable will stay ahead of the curve.
Clearly, the time to excel with technology is now! You can start your MarTech stack journey with ClickUp and build from there on. The tool integrates with 1000+ modern tools, including HubSpot, Zendesk, Salesforce, Loom, Zoom, Google Drive, Slack, GitHub, Amazon Alexa, and more. You can also build custom integrations with ClickUp API.
List down the tools you want, integrate them with ClickUp, and your tech stack is ready to use. You can manage your marketing workflow from a single platform—no more wasting time switching between apps.
Get started with ClickUp, and build a winning marketing tech stack!
Summarize this article for me pleaseFAQs
1. What are marketing tech stacks?
Marketing tech stacks are a combination of digital tools that help marketers streamline the process of understanding customer behavior, creating marketing campaigns, and analyzing the impact of their marketing efforts.
2. What is a technology stack for a digital marketer?
A technology stack for a digital marketer is a trusted set of tools that cater to the different components of marketing, including CRM, marketing automation, email marketing, SEO, website building, and marketing project management.
These tools simplify daily marketing workflows, promote collaboration among team members, and help measure the KPIs of marketing campaigns.
3. What is a marketing stack with an example?
A marketing tech stack is a cluster of software that helps you manage relationships with customers, design marketing campaigns, track the performance of the campaigns, and make data-driven decisions to boost KPIs.
Here’s a marketing tech stack example:
CRM: ClickUp
Marketing automation: HubSpot
Email marketing: ClickUp/MailChimp
Content management: ClickUp/ WordPress
Website builder: WordPress
SEO: Semrush/Ahrefs
Paid Ads: Google Ads
Data visualization: Google Data Studio
Customer experience: Zendesk
Marketing project management: ClickUp
Everything you need to stay organized and get work done.
