How to Create a Marketing Stack — Growth Hacking Guide

Perhaps you have already heard about growth hacking. This was a term that was created by Sean Ellis in 2010. Growth hacking is used to describe what most people in the Silicon Valley do. It mainly consists of growing companies to the biggest heights that anyone could have ever imagined within a short period. A lot of companies, especially startups and Fortune 100 companies, have taken up this concept. The main goal of growth hacking is to increase your customer base as much as possible while focusing on the whole sales funnel and making your customer experience better.

In traditional marketing, the focus is put on the top of funnel while in account-based marketing, the focus is on the major accounts. Growth hacking concept is particularly valuable for tech companies that can code their growth into the product itself right from the start. This can be done in several ways; through user workflows, by taking advantage of the effects of networking or coming up with designs that can go viral.

The key to growth marketing is incorporating the marketing element into the design of the product. Usually, these two elements are handled separately; a product is first designed, and then the marketers will figure out how to market it. But for growth marketing to happen, the product developers and marketers should work hand in hand from the beginning and test out different ideas that will enhance customer experience. They will also find ways to attract more customers and to increase conversions. They will then take into consideration customer feedback and use it to improve the product.

For true growth marketing, you must find long-lasting and sustainable solutions that will be helpful to your customers. Don’t try to play smart and come up with short and gimmicky concepts that will shortchange your customers for a short while. This will not be good for the reputation of your company. To come up with good solutions, imagine that you are a customer. Think about what you would like and the kind of experience that would be best for you.

Marketing Stack

According to ChiefMarTec, there were 3,600 marketing companies in 2016 in the US alone. There’s so much to know about marketing stack that the information can confuse you.

This huge number of companies is proof that marketing works. There’s not just one marketing solution for all marketing problems or situations. However, there’s a breakdown of different marketing companies and solutions for different industries and situations, and the key is to apply the best solution for every circumstance. This is what forms the marketing stack. Marketing stacks are quite important. We will give more information on how we came up with our marketing stack on this article.

What’s a Marketing Stack?

A marketing stack is the sum collection of all the technologies that marketers use to carry out their marketing activities, assess and enhance their work.

This is inclusive of all the technological solutions that the marketing team will come up with, such as marketing automation, data analytics, and data improvement.

Why Should You Have a Marketing Stack?

Your company has a marketing stack. This is all the technologies that you will use to improve your marketing. Given that you need to use tech tools to manage your marketing, it’s essential for you to know whether your stack is too complicated to work right. You need to have a good understanding of the technology that you are using and how the flow of information works between them.

Awareness

• Paid Advertising

Paid advertising consists of most people’s digital marketing portfolio. This is a popular option that will be in use for a long time. One of the tools that have given us good results is AdRoll’s prospecting tool. It’s a great way of reaching our customers. It also enhances our retargeting campaigns. This can be likened to using display ads and social ads on steroids.

• Social

Social media is a great way to advertise. Some of the platforms that work rather well include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and surprise surprise, Instagram, has worked well for us. Our preferred platform is Sprout Social.

• Webinars

Webinars have worked well for us, whether we were doing it alone or in collaboration with another company. We use On24, as it’s a good platform that integrates well with Marketo. And they have some extraordinary ‘presentation’ widgets.

Website

• Infrastructure

It takes a lot to keep a website going. Fastly is great when it comes to content delivery networks. Use Pantheon for hosting and GitHub for development.

• Localization

If you are a worldwide company, you need a global website. However, you still need to localize. Smartling works for us. It helps us stay local in the regions that we are targeting, from as far as the US to Japan, Germany and further beyond.

• SEO

SEO has to be a part of any successful marketing mix. Some of the tools to use include webmaster tools. Use Screaming Frog and Moz to crawl, assess and measure your website, identify technical problems and give tips about the content plan.

• UX

You should carry out testing on your website on a regular basis to ensure that users have a good experience and that the website is easy to use. Use Crazy Egg and EyeQuant are great for assessing how users navigate through your pages. Use Optimizely for A/B testing.

Data Management

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Salesforce has worked well for us when it comes to customer relationship management.

• Marketing Automation

If you want to ensure that all your marketing flows seamlessly, then you need to automate with Marketo. The advantage of Marketo is that it integrates with most programs. For instance, you can automate your process from a webinar to a white paper and then emails and a landing page.

• Data Enrichment

It’s not possible to close a deal just by having someone’s email address. That’s why you need to get more information. There’s so much that we can write about this topic, but for now we will be brief and concise. You can use vendors such as Alexa, Clearbit, Infer and Datanyze to help lure your leads better by using descriptive and predictive information that your sales team will come up with. You can increase your conversion rate by providing more information to prospects. You can do this by asking them for a few details upfront and then provide them with more information on the backend.

• Customer Feedback

It’s important that you can get feedback from your clients. We use SatisMeter because it allows our clients access to Net Promoter ratings directly into our app. This feedback is quite helpful to not just the marketers, but to the team as a whole.

Analytics and Measurement

• Site Analytics

Google Analytics is an easy to use the tool. It has lots of valuable information that you can use. Just make sure that you have set it up properly. It’s also important that you know what the key things to check for are, given that this tool can supply you with lots of information, such that you can easily get overwhelmed.

• Business Analytics

In business, the bottom line is what matters, and the only way to measure this is through analytics. There are many tools that you can use to come up with the data that you need. We then usually use Tableau to help make sense of all the data that we have collected. This tool has an easy to use interface.

Your marketing stack is essential to the performance of your business. You should start working on your marketing stack as soon as you can. This should be a conscious and deliberate process. You should get the fundamentals right and then work on your present, as well as future needs for it to grow with your company.

The Marketing Stack That Your Startup Needs

Many startups start by setting up accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. They then write a couple of articles and send out a few press releases to media companies and then they wait and hope for the best.

This strategy is not bad, but you can do so much more to make your marketing strategy much more effective. You can make use of analytics, optimize your conversions and improve your workflow management.

If you want to make the most of your marketing strategy, here are the top tools that you should use:

• Hotjar

This is the kind of tool that every marketer should have. This tool can help you increase your conversion rates as it enables you to understand how visitors are using your site; both web and mobile. Some of the things you can check include heatmaps (to tell which areas visitors are checking and scrolling), funnels (to see where visitors are exiting your site), forms (to increase completion rates and gain insight) among other things. This tool has a free version, but you can upgrade to the premium version.

• Notify

Setting up this tool is quite easy. You can use it to set up alerts about anything that you are interested in online. For instance, you can set up an alert to be notified when your competition does something, or someone mentions your company online or about topics that you are interested in. You can also set alerts from places where you want to get notifications from, for instance from Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Medium, News sites, etc.). This tool integrates with Slack, but you need to be a Slack user.

• Hey Press

This tool is a great way of connecting with journalists. When using this tool, all you need to do is type in a keyword or topic, and the names of all journalists that cover that topic will show up together with their email addresses. You can use this tool for free but if you want to get more contacts, upgrade to the premium version.

• Hemingway Editor 2.0

If you are looking for a way to make your writing much better and clearer, use this tool. It will edit your text and grade its readability. It’s not perfect, and you might encounter a few bugs while using it, but it can help you a lot to improve your writing.

• Narrow

If you want to build a following on Twitter, then it’s worth investing the $9 per month to use this tool. You can use it to find the right keywords, hashtags, and places that will draw the right people to follow you. You can analyze your keywords to see which ones perform better and identify your target audience.

• Canva

If you cannot afford to hire a graphic designer yet, then Canva can help you come up with some amazing designs. You can use it to create graphics to use on your blog or Facebook and Twitter posts. The good thing is that it’s free of charge though there are some features that you might have to pay for, they are not expensive. If you are not a graphic designer, but you want to create some decent graphics or images, then this is the right tool to use.

• Curated

It’s quite likely that you read a lot of things online. The chances are that you might want a simple way to follow all the stuff that you are interested in. Using this tool, you can follow newsletters that you are interested in. You can simply click and save newsletters that you are interested in following and add a short description of what they are about.

As you start reaching out to more people, you can choose to monetize your curated list. The Curated team will help you with this. This is a great way to keep your audience engaged through email when you are just starting out