Intro to martech stacks

A marketing tech stack is composed of analytics, advertising pixels, and customer data platforms that gives your team valuable information on your website, on ad platforms, and insight into potential and ongoing deal flow.
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How expensive are martech stacks

Nowadays there are so many free options for analytics, pixels and customer data that the cost of your martech can be negligible .

The real costs can accrue if you need hyper specific reports and technical implementation - then activating professional marketing operations folks makes sense 

An example of this could be if you are a software company and need to track users that come from your marketing website and end up signing on your app.

There may need to be a sync between the engineering team and the marketing team to ensure marketing session data doesn’t fall off at any point.

What do analytics platforms do for you?

Your website accomplishes a lot in terms of explaining your product/service quickly while also offering very curious users the opportunity to click down into more in depth information about you.

Because of this, wouldn’t you like to know what your users are spending the most amount of time on your website?

Alternatively wouldn't you like to know if people aren’t reading parts of your website?

This is why quantitative & qualitative feedback is useful

Quantitative Feedback

Behavioral metrics like time on page, pages per session and conversions are what we want to get an understanding of

Furthermore, we can measure these metrics based on where the user came from - if they came from social media, they will have different behavioral metrics associated with them in comparison to people that came from email campaigns.

This can help inform you of the channels that lead to the most revenue for your business - and therefore where you can double down your marketing efforts.

Qualitative Feedback

Observable feedback like heatmaps, session recordings, and scroll depth are all things that can be viewed and acted upon.

Heat maps are made of what people click on in your site.

This is helpful because people can be particularly interested in some pages or buttons than others - therefore we want to make sure the content is optimized when they click through.

Session recordings and scroll depth give us an idea of what people spend the most time consuming as well as if they drop off at a point, then we can try to place more compelling content where we see the drop off happening.

Why you need advertising pixels on your website

Pixels are so important for paid search and paid media campaigns.

Without them you won’t be able to follow up with your prospects.

This means you won’t be able to control the specific kinds of messages that are needed to move your prospects through the marketing funnel.

Kinds of campaigns you can’t run without pixels

When you visit a website, you get tagged with a tracking pixel.

This means that the advertiser can show you ads in the social media feed that the pixel is from.

When ads are setup, you are allowed to also segment audiences based on pages they visited or actions then took - as well as layer on contact or company data to make your advertising audience very specific.

The benefit of this is that you can speak very clearly to these people with hyper relevant kinds of messaging and images.

This is all done with ad pixels - without them - you are in the dark on who is seeing your ads and visiting your website.

Why is a CRM is important

CRMs were created because keeping track of customer interactions can be challenging.

This is especially important in the B2B space here buying cycles take longer.

So being able to keep tabs on communication, offers made, objections handled, and just action items associated with a contact is important.

How CRMs work with Ad Platforms

Ad platforms like Google ads are able to sync to your CRM and thus be able to share data between platforms

This is really helpful from an optimization perspective because when a deal is assigned to a contact that came from Google Ads, then that deal value is shared with Google Ads.

By doing this, we are able to assign an accurate ROI figure - which results in Google being able to spend efficiently while maintaining a certain ROI for the business.

What we recommend in terms of a free martech setup

So what do we recommend you install on your website? Here is a quick list of free software that help with everything described above.

Analytics Platforms

For quantitative analysis, you can’t beat Google Analytics 4.

It has out of the box dashboards and reporting tables that make it easy to set it up and start using immediately

Also, it allows you to create very specific visualizations.

For qualitative analysis, you can use Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar.

Clarity gives unlimited free heatmaps and session recordings while Hotjar gives you limited capabilities.

We recommend clarity until Hotjar comes up with a more compelling free offer.

Ad Pixels

• You could install any pixel you think you may run run ads with in the future - however the big hitters here are:
  • Google Ads Tag
  • Microsoft UET Tag
  • LinkedIn Insight Tag
  • Facebook Pixel
  • With these guys installed you will be able to run over 10 different campaigns across 10ish platforms meaning you have a lot of flexibility in terms of ad spots.

CRM

Hands down, we recommend Hubspot if you’re in the B2B space.

All other CRM’s are either more expensive or have very limited functionality.

Hubspot has so many integration partners, it just makes data syncs, auto enrichments, and more so much easier.

It’s also one of the most well known CRMs on the market, so finding specialists that know how to use it becomes infinitely easier, as well.

Wrapping Up - When should you set up your tech stack?

In short, as early as possible.

The reason for this is simple. 

You don’t collect the data retroactively - meaning if someone visited your site weeks ago, but you dind’t have any of your tags installed - then they will not be a part of your data set.

So do this quickly.

If you need help, we have a blog and YouTube guide that walks you through exactly how to do this!

Until next time.