Some marketing teams rely on one to four trusted tools in their marketing tech stack, while others have as many as 21 or more. And the more tools your team needs, the more time they’ll likely spend testing different tools to identify the best ones. Your team may also incur more costs in the process as not all tools can be used for free.
To save your marketing team such time and financial costs, we’re going to share our top five recommended tools for adding to your marketing technology stack in 2022.
What should marketers consider when developing their marketing tech stack?
Different marketing teams have different modes of operation, so you can’t give your marketing team another business’ marketing tech stack and expect it to work just as well. Instead, you’ll need to tailor your marketing tech stack according to issues such as:
- What is your marketing strategy? For example, which multiple channels does your business use to market itself? And which channels do your customers regularly use? You’ll want the tools in your marketing tech stack to integrate well with these channels.
- What challenges is your team facing with your existing marketing workflows? Look for tools that can help smoothen out these points of frustration. In particular, tools with automation capabilities can be extremely beneficial for getting repetitive tasks done on autopilot.
- What is your budget? Needless to say, your chosen marketing tools have to fit your budget for acquiring new technology.
- Can the tools in your marketing tech stack talk to each other well? If you need to send data from one tool to another, it’s worth checking if these tools have native integrations that create a seamless data synchronisation.
Here are the tools you’ll need in your marketing tech stack for 2022
A well-developed, robust marketing tech stack can help marketers execute more effective campaigns while reducing the costs incurred in the process. Scroll our list of recommended marketing tools to kick-start the development of your own marketing tech stack!
1. An audience research tool
Successful marketing starts with first understanding your customers. You may have already created customer personas that describe your customers’ backgrounds, desires, and pain points. But where are they spending their time online? Without this information, you could end up blindly launching campaigns across many channels and still fail to connect with the majority of your customer base.
This is where an audience research tool comes in. It provides insights into the social media accounts that your customers follow and the websites they visit, among other data. Armed with this vital intel, you can hone in on specific channels to develop campaigns for—because you know for certain that you’ll find your customers there.
According to a 2022 Market Research Trends report by Qualtrics, 67% of businesses surveyed expressed greater interest in acquiring new specialised market research technology. Will your business be one of them?
Recommended audience research tool: SparkToro
2. An omnichannel marketing tool
After learning your customers’ favourite channels, it’s time to market to them on these channels. With an omnichannel marketing tool like Mobile Marketing Cloud, you can build targeted marketing campaigns to engage customers on their preferred mobile channels—be it WhatsApp, SMS, email, or something else.
Here are the before-and-after differences when a business adds an omnichannel marketing tool to its martech stack:
Before using an omnichannel marketing tool:
- Marketing teams have to manually execute campaigns, introducing lag time into the process.
- Marketing workflows are fragmented across separate marketing channels.
- Customers are subjected to generic marketing campaigns that may not suit their tastes or address their pain points.
After using an omnichannel marketing tool:
- Marketing campaigns launch automatically upon being triggered, helping your business to capitalise on marketing opportunities without delay.
- Marketing workflows on various channels are consolidated into a single platform for ease of management.
- Customers receive marketing communications tailored to their preferences and enjoy a more personalised customer experience.
Recommended omnichannel marketing tool: Mobile Marketing Cloud
3. A Customer Data Platform (CDP)
Your business may have collected a significant amount of customer data in the course of its operations. But you may have difficulty making the most of such data if you’re unable to determine which data points belong to which customer. This in turn makes it challenging to tailor your marketing campaigns according to your customers’ needs and interests.
You wouldn’t be alone in facing such issues. In the February 2022 edition of The CMO Survey, fellow marketers also reported wanting tools for tracking integrating customer data across touchpoints. However, fewer than 40% of them were sure they had found such tools.
Well, we’re here to reveal the ideal solution—namely, a customer data platform. This software helps unify your customer data across different touchpoints and build comprehensive profiles of each customer who has interacted with your business. Analysing these profiles, you’ll gain a clearer understanding of your customers and how to market to them for higher engagement and conversion rates.
Download your guide to Customer Data Platforms here to increase conversion by unifying your online and offline customer data.
Recommended customer data platform: Mobile Marketing Cloud (which also has a customer data platform built in!)
4. A website Content Management System
Having an online presence is virtually mandatory these days. And despite the power of social media, nothing beats having a website where you have full control over your brand presentation.
Enter the website content management system. This software provides a dedicated online space for you to showcase content related to your business, such as a resource blog, e-commerce pages, and video tutorials.
And as you market your business’ offerings, guess where your marketing campaigns will likely point to? You got it—it’s your website content management system, which can host the landing pages you’ve created for your campaigns.
Recommended website content management system: WordPress
5. A social media management tool
While running social media campaigns on multiple platforms at once, you’ll quickly find logging into each platform separately to be a chore. A social media management tool removes such hassle by letting you create and oversee your campaigns on various social platforms in one place.
Apart from that, social media management tools typically offer other useful features such as:
- Content scheduling to automate the publishing of posts at any time of the day
- A content calendar for convenient visualisation of upcoming campaigns
- Comprehensive analytics for reviewing campaign performance across platforms
Recommended social media management tool: Sprout Social
Assemble your dream team of tools for your marketing tech stack
Just like how handymen can’t work without their toolbox, marketing teams need the right tools if they are to deliver impactful campaigns. And no matter your industry or business size, you’ll find an omnichannel marketing tool like Mobile Marketing Cloud a worthy addition to your marketing tech stack.
Mobile Marketing Cloud’s built-in customer data platform integrates with a wide range of platforms to extract and streamline customer data into detailed customer profiles. Using these profiles, your marketing team can tap on Mobile Marketing Cloud’s advanced yet intuitive marketing automation capabilities to craft hyper-targeted campaigns.
Mobile Marketing Cloud is trusted worldwide by brands that have improved their customer experience and conversions after deploying it in their business. Adding Mobile Marketing Cloud—and the other tools we’ve recommended above—to your marketing tech stack, your marketing team will be well placed to drive the growth and sales that your business seeks. Explore Mobile Marketing Cloud here to learn more about the roles it can play in your marketing tech stack.