Hey {{lead.First Name:default=there}},

Here is email #4 in the "Marketing Transformation Series".

The purpose of this email is to take a deeper look into the work that was done post website launch around the "Marketing Technology Stack", and demonstrate how marketing utilizes a variety of tools to conduct its everyday activities.

First, what is a marketing technology stack?

To explain it simply, a marketing technology stack is a group of technology-based tools (think SaaS platforms, traditional software, social media tools, etc.) that marketers use to efficiently and effectively execute marketing activities, across a numbers of channels.

Determining what tools best fit the company's needs is an intensive process, and ensuring that these tools are compatible is a delicate dance. A lot of attention needs to be paid to determining this technology stack, because it often includes dependencies that will be relied upon heavily years after its initial definition.

Here is a great article documenting what goes into determining a "marketing tech stack".

The process of implementing a new marketing technology stack while business processes are still running requires coordination as precise as this, and monitoring as vigilant as this. It typically occurs over the course of 18 months to accommodate for the complexity around shifting processes.

We did it in 3 months.

Why change tools?

The graphic at the beginning of this email represents a before and after snapshot of Nexthink's operational tooling landscape with regional and departmental ownership superimposed.

There were a couple of things seriously hindering the effective implementation of a modern day marketing technology stack.

Those challenges included:

Proliferation

Many tools like WordPress and Google Analytics had multiple instances, or were being used in vastly different ways. We had 9 google analytics accounts, and several different WordPress instances.

Regional Distribution

Regional ownership of tools influenced the evolution of vastly different, disjointed, and sometimes counterproductive tooling systems, and contributed to much of the proliferation mentioned above. This made scaling out a central marketing machine with planned regional adaptations impossible.

Bad Alignment
A "best of breed" approach had been used previously to select tools that performed best in their individual categories such as landing pages, email services, marketing automation, etc. However this put a poor emphasis on integration, and did not satisfy some of the more enterprise oriented needs of the business that the best of breed tools could not accommodate.

Ownership

Organizational structures, roles, and ownership surrounding the website, CRM, marketing automation, and other interconnected systems over the years had influenced the procurement of systems that were largely unneeded or could have been managed differently.

For these reasons, in addition to many others, we have been in the process of swapping out a number of tools in marketing for tools that better align with the direction and business needs of the varying departments / regions.

Here is the new lineup...

These are just the "big" tools being used in marketing. We use a number of other tools as well.

Marketo

Marketo is an enterprise grade marketing automation tool that is one of the top tools in the marketing automation space alongside HubSpot, Eloqua, Pardot, and others.

Watch a demo

SalesLoft

Salesloft is a tool for creating structured and measurable workflows for BDR teams. It works in conjunction with Salesforce and Office365 to help BDRs more efficiently prospect and communicate with leads.

Watch a demo

Wrike

Wrike is an lesser known enterprise project management tool with great integrations with our existing business processes and tooling such as Salesforce and Office 365.

Watch a demo

Zapier

Zapier is a fun automation tool that connects various other tools via its APIs. This is the tool we use to connect tooling when there is not an explicit integration provided by the company.

Watch a demo

Hotjar

Hotjar is a testing tool that allows us to do screen recordings, form testing, heat mapping, and a number of other really great things to optimize content.

Watch a demo

Full Contact

Full contact is a lead enrichment tool that we use in conjunction with Marketo to add bits of information to our leads and contacts.

Watch a demo

Olark

Olark is the live chat solution we've chosen for our website for its excellent integration with Salesforce / Zendesk as well as its mature API for doing a number of web based things.

Watch a demo

CoSchedule

CoSchedule is one of about a thousand social media tools we could have chosen, but we went with this tool for its excellent integration with WordPress as well as its ability to requeue social messaging to increase volume.

Watch a demo

Litmus

Litmus is an email testing tool that allows use to do cross browser, client, and device testing on emails. It also has great analytics and spam testing that have already helped the company tremendously.

Watch a demo

Google Optimize

Google Optimize is an A/B testing utility that can be used to swap out HTML content on webpages on the fly, as well as structure logic to test the efficacy of those changes.

Watch a demo

Google Tag Manager

We used Google Tag manager for script delivery, GA configuration, and a variety of other things. It's somewhat hard to explain. Watch the video for more information.

Watch a demo

Google Analytics

We used Google analytics previously. However a lot of work had to be done to consolidate this tooling into a centralized view for use by those across the company.

Watch a demo

Tools we have retired...

Instapage, Bizible, Canva, Buffer, etc.

We retired Instapage (for landing pages), autopilot (marketing automation), buffer (social messaging), Bizible (attribution), mailchimp (email), cloudingo (de-duping), as well as other tools.

Watch a demo