When you think you don't have a marketing stack but it actually looks like this

Chatting with an acquaintance the other day about marketing ops, and I said that the company I work for didn't have a complex marketing stack. Although we keep it lean, it got me to thinking: exactly what tooling do we use?

Turns out quite a lot.

Adobe Creative Cloud, Buffer, DiscoverOrg, EmailonAcid, Facebook's Analytics, Klipfolio, Landscape by Sprout Social, LinkedIn's/Analytics, Google Analytics, Google Apps, Google Data Studio, Grammarly Pro, InVision, Metorik, New Relic, Pablo by Buffer, Pardot, Salesforce, Sketch, Twitter's Analytics, Wootric, WordPress, Zapier, Zeplin, Zoom.

The missing pieces

The first change would be to bring in Google Tag Manager, and remove any hard coded tracking on our web properties. Tag Manager makes it significantly easier to add a variety of analytics tracking, such as Facebook and Twitter conversion pixels.

For SEO/SEM marketing, I'd consider WordStream for PPC campaign management and more importantly optimization would be smart. But not before Moz for long-tail keyword analysis and site optimization, and SEMrush for competitor analysis too.

Optimizely is a must for testing. It should be there now. The new Google Optimize looks like a promising alternative. As an aside, Google is really upping it's web optimization game: Data Studio is a serious replacement for the more heavyweight business intelligence solutions (if you don't mind building dashboards).

I would also enhance Zapier with the data routing leader Segment.

On the user/behaviorial analytics side, there are a few options that I'd consider, depending on the company requirement:

• Kissmetrics is the go-to for most marketers. It is renowned for the ability to keep user identity across the entire conversion funnel.
• Amplitude is a standout if I worked with a SaaS company where I wanted to understand product usage.
• Mixpanel like Amplitude, but for mobile-based behavior analysis (and if budget permitted).
• Hotjar for heatmaps.

With lead attribution becoming increasingly difficult, multi-touch tooling such as Bizible or Full Circle Insights would be on the short-list too. (There are many others.)

Although not a marketing tool per se, LeanData for lead routing in Salesforce is absolutely essential. Great company btw, keep an eye on them!

An outlier would include GPZ, for working LinkedIn.

I'd also replace GoToMeeting with Zoom.

The last tooling I'm not familiar with is lead enrichment, such as Leadspace, LeadGenius, and Openprise. Definitely something I need to learn more about.

A word of caution. Among all this data analysis there are two things critical to marketing success that cannot be easily quantified: understanding what motivates people, and creativity. Every great marketer I meet has two skills before any other. No matter their role.