Marketing tool stack used by high-growth companies in Silicon Valley
In Silicon Valley, high-growth tech companies and growth-focused startups know the value of excellent marketing tools.
You simply cannot have a good marketing campaign or advertising plan without a set of tools to make collaboration and automation easier. This is more true than even in our current climate. Companies are operating remotely more than ever before– and every team member and employee needs access to tools that make this new climate manageable.
Not only do marketing tools involve automation tools and applications specifically for implementing marketing materials, but collaboration and project management tools are also vital to keeping one’s marketing endeavors productive and efficient.
So what kind of marketing tool stack should a high-growth tech brand take advantage of? And what exactly IS a marketing tool stock? Let’s take a look at our top picks, plus a few handy definitions to get the ball rolling.
What is a Marketing Tool Stack?
A tool or tech stack is a collection of tools, mainly software and applications, that are designed to work within different areas of a business. The term is usually used in the information technology world.
Essentially, a marketing tech stack is a list of tools that could be beneficial if used by marketing teams. Such tools don’t have to be exclusively for marketing– they can include collaboration, project management, communication, and organization tools as well. Just as well, a marketing tech stack like the one we’re about to dive into doesn’t having to be wholly utilized by a business. Ten tools are quite a few to bounce around! Rather, this marketing tool stack is merely a recommendation list for tech companies that are growth-focused in particular.
Marketing Tools for Employee Advocacy
Employee advocacy and brand advocacy tools tend to get overlooked when it comes to marketing tool stack. This is unfortunate, but employee ambassadors can make or break a business. Social advocacy can really spread brand awareness. And if you have happy employees who believe in your brand, they can provide a lot of marketing advantages. Because of this, we’ll be covering a few marketing tools that are perfect for employee advocacy, particularly our own platform Drumup!
Ready to take a look at some excellent marketing tools? Let’s dive in.
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1. MailChimp
If you’ve ever done email marketing, chances are you’re heard of this extremely popular email marketing tools. MailChimp can integrate with a wide variety of apps and makes it simple to sync data across all apps. You can also plug in content from secondary sources and see how your email campaigns are doing on the spot. Complete with reports, analytics, and a user-friendly interface that makes automating emails easy, MailChimp is a must-have for your tool stack.
2. SendGrid
Cloud-based tools and applications are the new norm, and SendGrid is one of them. This email platform, like MailChimp, makes sending out emails easy. The only difference is that this service is heavily marketed towards developers and businesses that need to send out non-marketing emails like shipping notifications, confirmations of purchases, receipts, etc. You can even track when emails are opened or when email subscribers unsubscribe for the purpose of retargeting. If you prefer A/N testing, SendGrid’s got that too.
3. Drumup
Like we’ve mentioned before, employee advocacy matters. Unfortunately, many tech startups don’t really know how to facilitate employee advocacy and provide employees with incentives for promoting the brand online. When it comes to brand awareness, some companies may suffer because they simply don’t know how to curate good content for their social media accounts. Luckily, Drumup offers a great solution.
With Drumup, you can do a variety of things for brand advocacy, including:
- Schedule curated content automatically
- Generate leads from social channels
- Post repeated posts and receive recommendations for content
- Discover great content to curate
- Cut down social media management time by up to 90%
- Manage multiple social media account with one dashboard
- Get better hashtag recommendations
- Use Drumup via mobile devices
- Use Drumup via a user-friendly Chrome extension
- Measure social media engagement
This tool really makes social media management easier, and also makes it easier for your employees to promote your brand via curated content.
4. Trello
Like we’ve mentioned before, collaboration is key to keeping a marketing team synced up when working from home. Trello is a great collaboration platform that is highly visual. You can plan tasks, manage projects, and use Trello for virtually any department of your business, not just marketing. Trello is also quite popular with large software development companies and is used for a wide range of needs, such as organization, management, prioritization, communication, and more. Plus, Trello can integrate with a ton of CRMs that tech companies use.
5. Renderforest
Keeping your branded visuals in check is an important part of marketing, particularly social media marketing. They help your business build up their brand awareness and can help create meaningful connections between your message and your audience. Renderforest is an all-in-one solution that helps businesses create websites, animations, videos, slideshows, logos, and more. With tons of templates available, you can get professional-looking visuals without the need of a graphic designer.
6. Hootsuite
Another tried and true platform for marketing in virtually every industry, Hootsuite makes the list because it’s one of the greats that still dominate the content marketing tool industry. You can use Hootsuite to manage social media websites and launch new marketing campaigns. Through a user-friendly dashboard, users can even collaborate with each other and schedule social media feed updates and curate content. If you want to track the results of a particular ad campaign, Hootsuite’s got you covered there too.
7. Salesforce
If you’ve been in the marketing world for more than five minutes, you’ve heard of Salesforce. And it certainly is deserved. Salesforce is probably the biggest customer relationship management (CRM) platform in the world. This platform packs a punch with a massive volume of tools that deal with the following:
- Lead management
- Automation
- Sales data management
- Partner management
- Contact management
- Opportunity management
- Email integration
- Easy-to-use dashboards
- Mobile-friendly application
- File sync and sharing
- Quote management
The whole of this platform focuses on a lead-to-conversion methodology that virtually any industry could benefit from, but particularly the tech world. It’s got all the basis necessities for marketing and then some. You can even take advantage of a neat drag-and-drop editor that lets you add in discounts and deals.
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8. Mopinion
Mopinion is not as well known as some of the tanks on this list, but it offers a unique and incredibly useful advantage in terms of advanced feedback analytics. This platform makes it possible for digital marketers to gather website-based and mobile-based customer feedback and analyze it. The interface is insanely simple to use, and any user from any technical or design background can build and configure feedback-specific forms. Users can also target groups of their choice online with forms to get better insights into why they are just not converting. This information is compiled into a visual dashboard, complete with charts and graphs that are easy to understand. On top of that, digital teams can collaborate, share, and change feedback items quickly with automated alerts and reminders.
9. Google Analytics
It’s no secret that Google Analytics is the most popular web analytics tool out there. Google is a massive enterprise and its products are high-quality and highly useful. Their Analytics product is simply no different. And it’s free. Who doesn’t love free tools? Fewer licenses and fewer headaches to deal with.
Google Analytics provides users with predictive and prescriptive analytics that make it easy to keep an eye on trends and get a better idea of how user flows are moving. The only downfall to Google Analytics is that you’ll probably have to read up on some beginner tutorials to understand how it works, but once you’ve done that, Google Analytics is smooth sailing. Did we mention that it’s free?
10. Asana
Asana has been a popular communication and collaboration platform for some, and it definitely makes sense why. Its framework is basic but simple in a very good way. Basically, users make little tasks with and tag them under specific projects with specific due dates. Once a task is complete, the user can simply check the checkmark next to it (super satisfying, by the way) and make that task disappear. The platform can be used for an individual team member’s work planner as well as an entire team’s group task board as well.
Don’t forget to follow the Drumup.io blog for more great tech and tool stacks, Silicone Valley news, and guides about employee advocacy! We believe that tech brands can substantially benefit from employee and brand advocacy. In an economic climate where consumers are less trustful of brands, it’s so important to have employees that help push brand awareness for your company. Check out our blog to learn more about employee advocacy today!
