Popularly known as CRMs. These are tools marketers (together with sales teams) use to keep important information about their leads and customers.
Using spreadsheets for this purpose is a thing of the past. Modern CRMs have the advantage of being central, dynamic databases that send and receive information from other tools automatically.
A great illustration of the role that CRMs have in digital marketing is the promise that one of the biggest marketing automation providers, HubSpot, aims to deliver: first and foremost, a great CRM.
Excerpt of HubSpot article talking about its CRM
How to build a martech stack
Before you even think about building a martech stack, make sure you’ve identified your marketing goals and chosen your marketing tactics. It’s impossible to build a useful stack without first deciding these things because the purpose of the stack is to help improve your marketing activities. If you need help with these two things, read our guides on choosing marketing goals and marketing tactics.
With that out of the way, let’s see the next steps of creating your own martech stack.
1. Identify your needs and match that with your current stack
Your needs pertaining to the martech stack will likely stem out of two things: your marketing goals and your team’s need to make everyday operational work happen.
If you’re doing digital marketing, your goals almost automatically translate into software needs. For instance, improving organic traffic without an SEO tool is a guessing game. Trying to increase your share of voice on social media effectively without analytics and scheduling tools is just crazy. And you won’t set up a single email workflow without an email automation tool… you get the idea.
Affiliate marketing whatsapp number list has a simple premise. Just like Batman and Robin, vendors team up with affiliate marketers for mutual gain, making it a win-win for many business owners.
So here’s what you can do. Simply write down your marketing goals and see if you’ve got the right tools for the job already. If not, make a note next to the goal. This way, you will buy what’s really necessary, save some money, and avoid the confusion of having too many workspaces.
Depending on your company size, digging through your current stack can take several minutes or several hours. Larger organizations will most likely have a martech stack built up over the years. Some tools in the stack may not even be used anymore for some reason. If so, it may be worth coming back to the tried and tested tools.
At Ahrefs, we keep a list of our marketing tech that also mentions people with access to it. This way, we know:
The tools we use/don’t use.
Whether we should still be paying for them or not.
List of Ahrefs' martech
Here’s another thing to add to the list: your team’s needs. This is an important component of your software requirements, but it’s so obvious that it can slip the managers’ minds. The end result is them buying software that simply suits their personal opinions.