Building a Martech Stack in 2024? Read Our Detailed Guide!

Marketing has evolved a lot in the last 20 years. Grabbing and holding your audience’s attention requires more than just clever slogans and eye-catching visuals.

To be good at what you do, you need to capitalize on the marketing technology available. Martech stacks can be the secret weapon your marketing team needs to completely dominate the digital battlefield.

But with a seemingly endless array of tools and platforms available, building the right martech stack can feel overwhelming.

This guide breaks down the components and explains how you can put together a marketing technology stack that is tailored to your business’s needs.

What is a Martech Stack?

A martech stack, short for marketing technology stack, is basically a toolbox for marketers. It’s a collection of software and tools that marketers use to plan, execute, analyze, and improve their marketing efforts.

With the help of a robust marketing stack, marketers can plan, execute, analyze, and optimize their marketing activities. The goal of a martech stack is to improve productivity and effectiveness by harnessing various technologies.

As of 2024, there are almost 14,000 marketing technology products on the market — a strong indicator of the popularity of these tools. Comparatively, there were only about 150 such products in 2011. The trend is upward, so you can expect to find a lot more variety to choose from when building your marketing technology stack.

But what are the benefits of building one?

Why Do You Need a Martech Stack?

As marketing trends change and the landscape evolves, it becomes necessary to add an array of marketing tools to your business so that you can keep up.

Build a martech stack for your business to unlock these 12 impactful benefits:

Efficiency: Integrated tools create seamless workflows, minimizing the time spent switching between different platforms.
Scalability: A scalable marketing stack allows you to add or replace tools as your needs evolve without overhauling the entire system.
Data insight: Analytical tools provide an in-depth understanding of marketing performance, helping you identify what works and what doesn’t.
Automation: Tools that automate marketing processes can reduce manual tasks, allowing your team to focus on strategic activities instead.
Improved ROI: With the right tools, you can allocate resources more effectively and optimize your marketing spend.
Improved understanding of customers: CRM systems and sales tools provide detailed customer profiles and behavior patterns.
Better collaboration: Project management tools centralize information, ensuring all your team members are on the same page.
Coordination: Given the variety of marketing channels today, a good martech stack can improve communication, leading to more cohesive and effective marketing campaigns.
Immediate engagement: With real-time data and automation, you can aim for timely and relevant interactions with customers.
Advanced marketing strategies: A cutting-edge martech stack can give you a competitive edge and help achieve superior results.
Reduced mistakes: Integrated systems minimize the risk of errors and redundancies, saving you time and money.
360-degree view: A well-integrated stack provides a unified view of marketing performance across all channels.

Even the smallest startups these days have a marketing technology stack, even if it’s basic.

Breaking Down the Martech Stack: Categories

As mentioned earlier, there are over 14,000 martech tools out there; we’ve organized our picks for this guide into the categories below.

Task management and collaboration tools,
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems,
Content management systems (CMS),
Content marketing tools.

Besides these, there are niche-specific tools that you can add to your marketing technology stack.

Let’s now explore popular martech solutions by category.

Task Management and Collaboration

Task management and collaboration tools are vital additions to any marketing tech stack. These tools bring the marketing team together and provide a central place to share ideas, assign tasks, and track progress.

With the right tools, everyone stays informed, team members avoid confusion over the latest plans, and as a team, you experience smooth workflows. By streamlining communication and centralizing information, such tools are the secret weapon for a marketing team to function as a cohesive unit and achieve its goals.

Different kinds of software can be game-changers for a marketing team and they fall under 4 categories:

Task/project management: Task management software helps manage projects, assign tasks, and track progress. This ensures everyone knows what they’re responsible for and deadlines are met.
Communication: These tools facilitate communication between team members through features like chat, video conferencing, and file sharing. This fosters better brainstorming and decision-making.
Data sharing: Certain tools can act as a central hub for storing and sharing marketing assets like campaign plans, creative materials, and brand guidelines. This reduces confusion and ensures everyone has access to the latest information.
Spreadsheets: Marketing involves a lot of data-crunching; spreadsheet tools are necessary to speed up the process and make sense of the numbers.

Here are popular collaboration tools used in marketing stacks:

Categories	Reputed tools
Project Management	‣ Asana, ‣ Trello, ‣ Monday.com.
Communication	‣ Slack, ‣ Microsoft Teams, ‣ Google Workspace.
File Sharing	‣ Google Drive, ‣ Dropbox.
Spreadsheets	‣ Google Sheets, ‣ Microsoft Excel.

Popular tools used for task management, communication, and collaboration

Below, we learn a bit more about the most popular tools in these categories.

Asana

Asana is primarily a project management tool, but it also offers communication features like task comments and messaging.

You can also upload and share files on the platform. It’s a good option for teams (both large and small) that need strong project management functionality but may require additional communication tools. It’s considered user-friendly.

Slack

For companies not using Microsoft Teams, Slack makes for a great alternative. Known for its user-friendly chat interface, Slack excels at team communication.

It integrates with many other tools and services, making it a versatile option for marketing, sales, and development teams. However, it doesn’t really have any project management features.

Google Drive

Most people may not need an introduction to Google Drive. It’s one of the most popular file-sharing services out there, thanks to its connection to Gmail. It also integrates seamlessly with other Google Workspace apps like Docs, Sheets, and Slides, making it a central hub for your work.

This cloud-based storage platform lets you store and access your files from anywhere, on any device.

Google Sheets

Google Sheets is a web-based spreadsheet application that’s part of the free Google Workspace suite.

With Google Sheets in your martech stack, you can create and edit spreadsheets, organize data, perform calculations, and build charts to visualize your information. It offers real-time collaboration, allowing multiple people to work on the same spreadsheet simultaneously.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

In a marketing technology stack, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system acts as a central hub for all your customer interactions and data. It plays a vital role in understanding your customers, nurturing leads, and driving sales.

Adding a CRM to your marketing tech stack helps you with these processes:

Customer insights: A CRM gathers customer data from various touchpoints, including website visits, email interactions, phone calls, and purchases. This data provides valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and buying journeys.
Lead management: CRMs help manage and nurture leads throughout the sales funnel. You can track lead activity, assign tasks to sales reps, and qualify leads to improve conversion rates.
Marketing automation: Many CRMs integrate with marketing automation tools, allowing for targeted email campaigns, personalized content recommendations, and automated workflows based on customer behavior.
Support to sales and customer service: CRMs bridge the gap between sales and customer service teams. By sharing customer data and interaction history, both teams can provide a more consistent and personalized customer experience.

Popular CRM solutions commonly found in marketing tech stacks include:

Salesforce,
Freshworks CRM,
HubSpot.

The best CRM for your business will depend on your specific requirements (and budget, of course). You could even consider signing up with an email marketing CRM. Consider factors such as the size of your business, your industry, and the features that are most important to you.

Salesforce

Salesforce is one of the most well-known and established CRMs and is a popular choice with large businesses.

It offers a comprehensive and scalable platform with a wide range of features for sales, marketing, service, and more. It boasts robust customization options, powerful analytics, and a vast ecosystem of integrations.

Freshworks CRM

Freshworks CRM is a cloud-based CRM solution that has built a good reputation for its ease of use and affordability. It offers a free tier with core CRM features and paid plans with additional features like sales and marketing automation.

HubSpot

A popular choice for small and medium-sized businesses, HubSpot CRM offers a free tier with CRM features such as contact management, deal tracking, and email marketing. As it integrates seamlessly with other HubSpot marketing tools, HubSpot has been pushing its platform as an all-in-one marketing solution.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

A content management system (CMS) helps with the creation, editing, organization, and publication of digital content. If you plan on creating and managing a website or blog, you need a CMS.

These tools are essential for managing websites and blogs. A key feature of these systems is their user-friendly interface, which allows individuals with little to no technical expertise to manage content efficiently.

They typically help with tasks such as workflow management and collaborative editing, ensuring teams can work together seamlessly.

Popular examples of CMS include:

As the most reputed option among the three on this list, read on to learn more about WordPress.

WordPress

WordPress reigns supreme as the most popular CMS, by a stretch. Its user-friendly interface and emphasis on blogging make it a favorite for beginners and bloggers alike.

With minimal technical knowledge, you can create and manage a website, complete with eye-catching themes and plugins that extend functionality. WordPress has a massive online community and you won’t struggle to find resources for troubleshooting and customization. However, its core features may fall short for complex websites that require a high degree of customization.

Content Marketing

So your content is ready, but you need tools to get the word out.

Content marketing tools are the backbone of attracting and engaging your audience through valuable content. They play a crucial role in your martech stack by helping you with various stages of the content marketing lifecycle, from ideation to promotion and analysis.

Content Marketing Categories

There are thousands of tools in the content marketing software category, but we can arrange the most popular choices into the categories below.

Content Research: These tools provide insights into what content is popular and engaging across different platforms, enabling marketers to create relevant and timely content that resonates with their audience.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO tools assist in keyword research, on-page optimization, backlink analysis, and tracking search engine performance, helping content rank higher in search results and attract organic traffic.
Social Media Management: These tools allow marketers to plan and automate social media posts, monitor engagement, and analyze performance metrics, ensuring a consistent and effective social media presence.
Email Marketing: Email marketing tools help create visually appealing emails, create customer segments, automate email sequences, and track engagement statistics, facilitating targeted and effective email marketing efforts.
Content Calendars: These tools provide a visual overview of content plans, helping teams coordinate content production, ensure timely publication, and maintain a strategic content marketing schedule.
Web Analytics: Web analytics tools provide data on how users interact with a website, including traffic sources, user demographics, behavior patterns, and conversion rates, enabling data-driven decisions to optimize web performance.
Ad Tech: Ad tech tools help create, manage, and analyze online ad campaigns across various platforms, providing insights into ad performance, audience targeting, and budget optimization to maximize return on investment (ROI).

Numerous platforms combine the functionalities listed above, but they usually come with a higher price tag, as well. Ensure you do adequate research before you lock on a tool to add to your martech stack.

Content marketing category	Popular tools
Content research	‣ BuzzSumo, ‣ Google Trends.
SEO	‣ Semrush, ‣ Ahrefs.
Social media management	‣ Hootsuite, ‣ Buffer.
Email marketing	‣ HubSpot, ‣ Campaign Refinery.
Content calendars	‣ CoSchedule, ‣ Loomly.
Web Analytics	‣ Google Analytics, ‣ Adobe Analytics, ‣ Google Search Console.
Ad tech	‣ Google Ads, ‣ Facebook Ads Manager

Google Trends

Google Trends is a free tool offered by Google that provides insights into what people are searching for online. It’s a great way to get an idea of the specific terms or topics trending across different regions (and in the past).

This goldmine of information is fantastic for understanding what content your target audience is interested in. You can use it to identify trending topics, compare search popularity between different terms, and even see related searches that might spark new content ideas.

Note that Google Trends doesn’t offer in-depth keyword research features. For that, you can use Semrush.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs is an extremely popular SEO tool that is great at basic keyword research, but it can do a lot more. You can use it to uncover high-volume, low-competition keywords to target. It also lets you analyze your competitor’s SEO strategies and identify technical SEO issues on your website. You can even track the performance of your existing content.

This powerful subscription-based toolkit caters to various digital marketing needs, such as:

Keyword research,
Competitor analysis,
Website audits,
Backlink tracking.

CoSchedule

Managing content marketing can turn into a mess without a tool to help you manage it all. And that’s why CoSchedule is a good fit into martech stacks.

This popular content calendar tool is designed to streamline your content creation workflow and foster collaboration within your marketing team. CoSchedule offers a visual content calendar where you can plan, organize, and track all aspects of your content marketing process.

It supports drag-and-drop functionality, which makes it easy to schedule content creation tasks, assign them to team members, and ensure everyone is on the same page.

CoSchedule also integrates with various marketing tools and social media platforms, allowing you to schedule and publish your content directly from the platform.

Google Analytics

If you want insightful data about your website traffic and user behavior, Google Analytics is an amazing option. The best part? It’s free!

Google Analytics lets you understand various aspects of your website. It helps answer questions such as:

Where did your visitors come from?
What pages did they visit?
How long do they stay?
What actions did they take on your website?

This data empowers you to understand your audience better, identify areas for improvement, and optimize your website for conversions and success.

Google Ads

Google Ads is Google’s advertising platform that lets you reach a massive online audience. With this tool, you can bid for targeted ad placements across various Google properties like Search results, YouTube videos, and websites.

For ads, you have to write text, design images, or craft videos tailored to your ideal customer, Google then displays them to users searching for relevant keywords or browsing websites within your target audience. You can craft compelling ads for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns and drive high-quality traffic to your website, support email marketing efforts, generate leads, and boost sales.

Email Marketing

If your marketing technology stack is a toolbox, an email marketing platform is your most versatile tool. It allows you to directly connect with your audience, nurture leads, drive sales, and measure the success of your marketing efforts.

With an email service provider, you can run different types of email campaigns:

A Solid ESP is a Must in Your Martech Stack

Why a good email marketing platform is crucial to a martech stack:

It’s a high ROI channel that reaches and engages the audience directly.
With features like email segmentation and email personalization, you can deliver targeted campaigns.
You can save time and boost efficiency with email automation.
It’s convenient to track performance and accurately measure email campaign metrics.
It integrates with other tools.

By joining a robust email platform, your marketing strategy would have a powerful and cost-effective way to connect and engage with your target audience.

For your email marketing needs, you can consider:

HubSpot,
Mailchimp,
Campaign Refinery.

Read on to discover why Campaign Refinery is a great fit for your martech stack.

Campaign Refinery

Landing your emails in the inbox — aka, email deliverability — is one of the biggest challenges email marketers face. To achieve this, you need an email platform you can count on.

Why not pick the email service provider with the best deliverability rates in the industry? That’s Campaign Refinery.

Campaign Refinery is a perfect fit into your martech stack for these reasons:

Native integration + Zapier support: Seamlessly include Campaign Refinery into your marketing flowchart with our native support or by using Zapier, which connects to thousands of popular marketing tools.
Powerful automation: Make the most of automation workflows with our builder.
Robust segmentation: How you segment your list will decide your email performance. We’ve simplified it with our segmentation and tagging tools.
Gamification: Add this strategy to your email arsenal and clock open rates of 76.37% and click rates of 72.76%!
Strict anti-spam policy: Bad actors on your email platform can wreck your inbox placement. On our platform, we screen customers before onboarding them and monitor activities for spammy behavior.
Unlimited contacts: Unlike most email marketing platforms, you only pay for what you use.

Our clients are extremely happy with the email marketing results they’ve unlocked at Campaign Refinery.

To do the same, apply to become a customer today!

Social Media Tools

Social media is a powerhouse for connecting and engaging with your audience — something you cannot ignore, as a marketer.

Social media tools can be powerful additions to your marketing technology stack, amplifying your brand voice and message across various platforms.

They streamline tasks such as:

Scheduling posts,
Managing content,
Tracking performance.

This saves you time and allows for consistent brand communication and real-time interaction with your audience.

With the right social media tools, you can build brand awareness, drive website traffic and leads, and convert followers into customers.

If you’re looking for social media tools to add to your martech stack, consider one of these:

Hootsuite,
Buffer,
Sprout Social.

Hootsuite

Most marketers would already have heard of Hootsuite, thanks to its popularity. Hootsuite became famous thanks to its ability to schedule posts in advance and manage multiple social media accounts on different platforms.

It has since expanded its range of features; you can track brand mentions across the web (social listening), and even run social media ad campaigns directly from the platform. That said, its extensive functionalities come with a steeper learning curve compared to some competitors.

Buffer

Buffer is a user-friendly social media management tool designed for simplicity and efficiency. It excels in scheduling posts across various platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest.

Its intuitive interface makes it easy to queue up content and ensure a consistent social media presence. Buffer also offers basic analytics to track engagement metrics and understand what resonates with your audience.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social strikes a balance between robust features and user-friendly design. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools for social media scheduling, content management, social listening, engagement, and analytics.

Sprout Social shines in its in-depth analytics that provide valuable insights into audience demographics, engagement patterns, and campaign performance. It also offers built-in collaboration features for teams to work together effectively on social media strategy.

How to Build a Marketing Tech Stack in 2024

With all that you know already, you must be eager to get started on your very own martech stack. Below is a 7-step guide to walk you through it.

1. Set Your Marketing Goals

The foundation of any successful martech stack begins with clearly defined marketing goals. These goals should align with your overall business objectives and provide a clear direction.

Whether you aim to increase brand awareness, generate leads, boost customer engagement, or drive sales, having SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals will guide your decision-making process in selecting the right tools for your stack.

2. Solidify Your Marketing Strategies

Once your goals are set, the next step is to establish the strategies that will help you achieve them.

This involves identifying your target audience, understanding their needs and preferences, and determining the best channels and tactics to reach them. A well-defined marketing strategy will help you choose tools that align with your methods, whether it’s content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, SEO, or paid ads.

3. Analyze Current Operations and Processes

Understanding how your marketing department currently operates is crucial for building a martech stack that enhances efficiency. Conduct a thorough analysis of existing workflows, processes, and tools.

Next, identify any gaps or pain points that need to be addressed. This step involves collaboration with your team to gain insights into their daily activities and challenges, ensuring the new tools will integrate seamlessly into their routines.

4. Establish a Budget

Setting a realistic budget is essential for building a sustainable martech stack. Consider both the initial costs and ongoing expenses associated with each tool, including subscriptions, training, and support.

Prioritize your needs and allocate resources accordingly. It’s important to strike a balance between investing in high-quality tools and staying within your financial limits.

5. Conduct Thorough Research

Begin researching potential martech tools by reading reviews, comparing features, and evaluating user experiences.

Look for tools that are scalable and can grow with your business. Consider factors such as ease of use, integration capabilities, customer support, and vendor reputation. Take advantage of free trials and demos.

6. Shortlist Tools and Create a Workflow

After a thorough research, create a shortlist of tools that best meet your needs and goals. Map out a workflow that shows how each tool will be used in your marketing processes.

A well-defined workflow will help you visualize the stack’s functionality and identify any potential bottlenecks.

7. Implement and Upload Data

Once you’ve finalized your tool selection, it’s time to acquire and implement them.

Begin by uploading your existing data into the new tools, ensuring a smooth transition. Provide training for your team to ensure they are comfortable using the new tools.

By following these steps, you can build a robust martech stack that drives business growth.

5 Tips to Remember When Building Your Martech Stack

Keep these points in mind while you build your marketing technology stack:

Don’t get carried away by fancy tools.
Choose tools that directly address marketing goals.
Ensure your chosen tools integrate seamlessly.
A complex martech stack can hinder productivity; choose tools that are easy to learn.
Don’t overwhelm yourself; begin with a few essential tools and gradually add more.

Remember, the best martech stack is one that is flexible and grows alongside your business. So start building yours today, and watch your marketing efforts flourish!

To get the best results from marketing, check out these articles on how different channels work together:

And before you set up your email marketing operation, ensure you download and read The Inbox Formula. This free guidebook will teach you all the things you need to know before you begin sending marketing emails; it will speed up your progress by leads and bounds!
Download the Inbox Formula right now!