The Modern Marketing Stack Simplified

Published in

HevoIQ-Blog

7 min readAug 9, 2020

Author: Shruti Garg

Are you spending huge amounts of money to market and promote your business? Do you want to make sure you are getting the best returns on your investment? To ensure this, it is not only important to have a good marketing strategy and choose the right marketing applications but it is equally important to understand and analyse your marketing data and make decisions accordingly. This can be achieved easily by using a modern marketing stack.

In this article, you will be looking at the following:

What is Modern Marketing Stack?

The modern marketing stack is a collection of technologies that marketers use to augment and improve their marketing operations throughout the customer lifecycle. Marketing technologies are used to make difficult processes easier, analyze how marketing campaigns are performing and drive efficient, personalized customer interaction.

We use the term stack because the various applications and systems contained in it follow a particular order and come one after the other. You will understand this better after we look at its various components.

Components of a Modern Marketing Stack

Content Management System (CMS): A content management system is a software tool or application that can be used to create and manage digital content. They are used to power websites, blogs or other relevant digital content through which marketers want to engage or interact with their customers.
Advertising Technology: Advertising Technology is an umbrella term used for software and tools that businesses and organizations use to plan, set up and maintain their digital advertising activities. There are multiple options available in this space but advertising is a key customer acquisition technique for most marketers. It is beneficial to use a strategic combination of SEM (search engine marketing), display ads, re-targeting and ad tracking or attribution software.
Email: People check their emails multiple times a day, so emails are a fantastic way of getting in touch with existing as well as potential customers. It is thus a key customer communications channel that all marketers must have in their arsenal. Various software products available in the market enable you to automate this process and also collects valuable information about the recipients and their behaviour.
Experience Optimization: Experience Optimization is the continuous process of understanding your customers, their needs and providing them with the best possible experience. It allows businesses to improve customer experience through controlled experimentation and dynamic experience delivery. This can include an A/B testing and personalization software or even programs that allow you to take action based on your marketing analytics.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology that manages all your company’s relationships and interactions with existing and potential customers. Its simple goal is to improve business relationships. A CRM software helps you stay connected to your customers, streamline processes and also improve profitability. The CRM will track all customer relationships and also delivers insights on how marketing campaigns influence sales pipeline and customer growth.
Marketing Data Warehouse: Most marketers will use various applications spanning through these different categories. In order to make good and strategic business decisions, it is essential to perform holistic analysis by looking at data from all of these different sources. To perform analysis on consolidated data, it is important to have a central repository to store data from different marketing products. A marketing data warehouse acts as a storage for this data and can be considered as a single source of truth.
Insights and Analysis: Marketers must have access to their data to measure digital marketing activity. Most marketers will use website analytics and their own business analytics tracked in either in-house or third-party tools. A wide array of Business Intelligence (BI) tools are now available too. A BI tool makes analysis and reporting easy, efficient and fast. These tools provide dashboards and visualizations for easy and fast decision making.
Social Media: Social media is one of the most important channels to promote your business because social media is where your customer is. There are so many different platforms you can target here — Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Due to a large number of options available, it is important to have technology that can monitor social activity and make social engagement easier. Many of these platforms have paid advertising services available which you can opt for.

Modern Marketing Stack vs Traditional Marketing Stack

You might be wondering why we keep using the word modern? What exactly has changed in the marketing field over the last few years? Let us look into this.

Marketing isn’t a brand-new concept, however, with today’s technological advancements, how a product or service is marketed has definitely changed. Thanks to the accessibility the internet provides, many businesses are using various digital media to reach a much wider audience. However, this doesn’t mean that traditional marketing is redundant because there are companies that still use traditional marketing strategies.

Traditional marketing used media such as boards, brochures, pamphlets, radio, television for advertising while modern marketing uses traditional marketing methods as well as modern methods like online marketing, social media marketing and many more to reach their target audience.

Apart from the different platforms used, one of the main differences between traditional and modern marketing strategies is that traditional methods are more focused on selling the product, on the other hand, modern marketing strategies are more customer-oriented. Today, businesses pay more attention to how they interact and communicate with their customers rather than how they sell their products.

Before choosing either of the methods or even using a combination of the two, it is important to answer a few questions- What is your budget? ; What is your target audience? ; Which business are you in?

Benefits of the Modern Marketing Stack

Even though traditional marketing strategies are still in use, we recommend going digital, this is because of the increased reachability and feasibility of modern methods. If you are still not convinced, here are a few more benefits of using the modern marketing stack:

Improved Customer Experience: The modern marketing stack allows you to interact with your customers in a personalized manner. You can now easily send behavioral triggered emails. These highly tailored campaigns get sent to customers automatically when they behave in a certain way. This could include signing up for your emails, clicking on a certain link or abandoning items in an online shopping cart.
Increased Scope of Campaigns: The various marketing applications that make up your marketing stack enable you to scale your marketing campaigns well beyond your team size. It makes your work faster, easier and more efficient.
Empower your Team to Improve Results: A good marketing stack simplifies the work of your team immensely. You no longer have to spend time preparing or understanding your data. You have all your dashboards ready, all you have to do is make the right decisions.
Increase Customer Lifetime Value: The purpose of a marketing strategy is not to just acquire new customers but also to maintain your existing customers and establish loyalty. Various CRM software that is part of your marketing stack lets you do just that.
Facilitates Strategic Thinking: The marketing stack not only provides you with invaluable marketing data that helps you strategize but it also eliminates the need to perform repetitive, tedious tasks, giving you the bandwidth and time you need to come up with innovative plans and ideas.

Using HevoIQ: Get Analytics-ready Marketing Data in Minutes

One of the key components of a modern marketing stack is a data integration platform. A tool that brings data from different marketing applications together and ensures they are analysis-ready. We present to you HevoIQ, HevoIQ is a managed warehouse offering that simplifies your marketing efforts. Say goodbye to tedious spreadsheets, macros and scripts. HevoIQ will handle all your marketing data for you.

Don’t have a data warehouse to store your consolidated data? That’s okay too, HevoIQ provides a fully-managed data storage. Now easily analyse and visualize your data within minutes in your preferred BI tool.

Let’s look at some of HevoIQ’s awesome features:

Simplicity: Using HevoIQ is easy and intuitive, ensuring that your data is exported in just a few clicks.
Schema Management: HevoIQ takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
Real-Time Data Transfer: HevoIQ with its strong integration with 100+ sources, allows you to transfer data quickly & efficiently. This ensures efficient utilization of bandwidth on both ends.
Completely Managed Platform: HevoIQ is fully managed. You need not invest time and effort to maintain or monitor the infrastructure involved in executing codes.
Data Transformation: It provides a simple interface to perfect, modify, and enrich the data you want to transfer.
Secure: HevoIQ has a fault-tolerant architecture that ensures that the data is handled in a secure, consistent manner with zero data loss.

Sign-up for your 14-day free trial today!

Conclusion

In this article, you have learnt what a modern marketing stack is, how it’s different from traditional marketing and also its components and benefits.

You have seen that a data integration platform is one of the key components of a marketing stack. Try HevoIQ today. HevoIQ supports data integrations from 100+ data sources at a reasonable price.

Give Hevo a try by signing up for a 14-day free trial today.

Have any further questions? Get in touch with us in the comments section below.