As a CEO at a startup, you're likely working with a small marketing team or even no team at all. That also means it can be more difficult for you to run marketing campaigns, generate leads efficiently, and keep track of sales performance without a large, dedicated team backing you up.
Building a marketing technology (MarTech) stack can help overcome some of these challenges. An ideal marketing stack, if employed properly, can help target the right audience online, improve customer engagement, provide clear data on your sales pipeline and make your team's workflow more efficient, resulting in the overall growth of your business.
The best MarTech stack for your business is entirely tailored to your needs, but here are a few tools we recommend — especially if you’re just building out your marketing team.
Collaboration: Google Drive
Google Drive allows your team to collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and folders — all on the cloud. There’s no need for anyone to download any software on their laptop. The best part is that losing work is nearly impossible with Google Drive.
Pricing: Free
Alternatives: OneDrive, Dropbox
Communication: Slack
Slack is an instant messaging platform that’s specifically designed for work (and not leisure chatting). This tool makes it easy for your marketing team to share quick updates, send files, and communicate live if necessary. With Slack, there’s no need to send emails that can be covered in a quick conversation.
Pricing: Free; $6.67/user/month (Pro); $12.50/user/month (Business +); Custom (Enterprise Grid)
Alternatives: Google Chat, Microsoft Teams
Project Management: Asana
Project management is the heart and soul of marketing. Whether your team is scheduling campaigns, managing complicated workflows, or working on a project-to-project basis, you don’t want anything to fall through the cracks. Asana makes it easy by providing a collaborative space for your team to check off tasks and share project updates.
Pricing: Free; $10.99/user/month (Premium); $24.99/user/month (Business)
Alternatives: Trello, Freedcamp, Project.co
Asset Creation: Canva
Canva offers a wide range of helpful templates to help your marketing team create assets for anything. Social media posts, Facebook banners, posters, infographics, presentations, flyers, and brochures can all be created with Canva. The best part is that you can start for free, and there’s virtually no learning curve. You can sign up and start using it right away.
Pricing: Free; $199.99/year (Pro); $30/user/month (Enterprise)
Alternatives: Visme, Snappa, Adobe Creative Cloud (recommended for advanced users)
Stock Images: Unsplash
Stock images are used in any type of marketing material, such as blog posts, banners, flyers, and brochures. It’s illegal to use images you find online unless they’re under a Creative Commons license. Some of these images are also not of professional quality. Unsplash is a great option for getting access to and downloading high-quality stock photos for free.
Pricing: Free
Alternatives: Pexels, Shutterstock (Paid), Getty Images (Paid), iStock Photos (Paid)
Image Optimisation: Toolur
After you download stock images, it’s important to compress them so that they don’t slow down your website. There are many image compression tools out there, but Toolur is one of the best. You can upload up to 25 images at a time, choose different compression methods, set image quality, and resize them all to a preset width. Competitors only allow you to upload an image at a time or try to upsell you by restricting compression options.
If you’re optimising GIFs, we recommend Ezgif.com.
Pricing: Free
Alternatives: Squoosh.app, TinyJPG
Grammar Checker: Grammarly
Publishing error-free copy is paramount to presenting your business professionally online. With Grammarly, you can take all the manual work out of copy-editing your work. Although it’s still recommended to give your pieces one final read-through before publication, Grammarly will catch most errors.
Pricing: Free; $12/month (Premium); $12.50/user/month (Business)
Alternatives: ProWritingAid, Hemingway App
Content Management and Blogging: Hubspot CMS Hub
If you don’t yet have a website or blog and need to create one, you’ll need a scalable CMS system to power your website. If you already have a website but the CMS is clunky and hard-to-use, you’ll also need to seek a replacement that makes it easier to publish and update content.
Hubspot CMS Hub is one of the best options in the business. You can build landing pages, create forms, add pop-up CTAs, publish blog posts, and see all of your performance metrics in one easy-to-use platform. It’s integrated with Hubspot Marketing Hub, allowing you to seamlessly connect your other marketing initiatives to your website. Because it’s an all-in-one solution, there’s no need to pay for plugins and add-ons that slow down your site.
Pricing: $270/month (Professional); $900/month (Enterprise)
Alternatives: WordPress, Joomla, Drupal
Website Visitor Analytics: Google Analytics
Knowing who’s visiting your site, when they’re visiting, where they’re visiting from, and whether they bounce off is critical to understanding and improving your overall website performance. Google Analytics also helps you measure your organic traffic, see top landing pages, and see top exit pages.
Pricing: Free
Alternatives: StatCounter (Paid), Simple Analytics (Paid)
Web Page Analytics: Google Search Console
While Google Analytics is an excellent way to measure overall website performance, Google Search Console takes it a step further by providing analytics page-by-page. You can use it to see your top queries for either the whole site or a specific page, compare time periods, and compare two or more URLs on your site.
Pricing: Free
Alternatives: Ahrefs (Paid), Moz (Paid)
Website Analytics Dashboard: Google Data Studio
You’d create a dashboard for nearly anything in marketing: email marketing performance, landing page performance, user acquisition stats, and more. For those, you’d be better off with a dedicated reporting dashboard software.
For creating dashboards on website analytics, however, Google Data Studio is a budget-friendly tool that automatically imports data from Google Analytics. This makes it an easy choice for current Google Analytics users. Simply choose the data you want to show and configure it using the drag-and-drop dashboard editor.
Pricing: Free
Alternatives: HubSpot’s Dashboard and Reporting Software (included in Marketing Hub), Databox (Paid)
Email Marketing: Hubspot Marketing Hub's Email Marketing Tool
Hubspot Marketing Hub’s free email marketing tool allows you to create rich HTML emails without writing a single line of code. You can also personalise the emails using smart rules and A/B test campaigns to increase click-through rates. The tool is integrated with all of Hubspot Marketing Hub’s features — so a lead from any form on your website automatically turns into a subscriber.
Pricing: Free
Alternatives: Constant Contact (Paid), MailChimp (Paid)
Marketing Automation: Hubspot Marketing Hub
Marketing automation allows you to nurture leads with drip campaigns that are triggered based on a lead’s specific action. Hubspot Marketing Hub allows you to automate campaigns and personalise workflows with segmentation logic. You can also score leads, send leads to sales, and trigger internal notifications.
The workflow feature is included in the Professional and Enterprise subscription tiers.
Pricing: $800/month (Professional); $3,200/month (Enterprise)
Alternatives: Marketo
SEO: Ahrefs
SEO has many facets: keyword research, backlink-building, competitive research, and rank tracking. But you don’t want to pay for different tools to do each one of those things. Ahrefs has a keyword explorer, rack tracker, and site explorer where you can audit the inbound links pointing to your competitors.
Pricing: $99/month (Lite); $179/month (Standard); $399/month (Advanced); $999/month (Agency)
Alternatives: Moz, SEMRush
Technical SEO: Screaming Frog
A robust technical infrastructure can take your website from serviceable to outstanding. Screaming Frog is an essential tool for finding 404 errors, identifying broken links, generating sitemaps, finding duplicate content (which can greatly harm your rankings), and analysing your pages’ metadata.
Pricing: Free; $211 USD/year
Alternatives: DeepCrawl, Ahrefs, Moz
SEM (Paid Ads): Google Ads
When considering an SEM tool to add to your martech stack, there’s no better option than Google Ads. This tool allows you to place sponsored results on the search engine results pages (SERPs), and also allows you to display ads on Google’s display partners.
Pricing: Varies (Pay-Per-Click)
Alternatives: Media.net, AdRoll
Social Media Marketing: Hubspot Marketing Hub’s Social Inbox
Social media marketing is critical for growing your follower base and increasing lead generation. It’s important to use a tool that allows you to post, comment, and manage your brand across multiple platforms.
Hubspot Marketing Hub’s social media tool empowers your team to do all of this and more. You can schedule posts up to three years in advance, analyse your performance on social platforms, monitor brand mentions, and participate in the conversations that most matter to you. It’s included in the Professional and Enterprise subscription tiers.
Pricing: $800/month (Professional); $3,200/month (Enterprise)
Alternatives: HootSuite, SproutSocial
Video Marketing: Wyzowl
If your team does any video marketing, you’ll need a video marketing tool to help you create engaging videos that increase brand awareness and effectively explain your product. Wyzowl makes it easy because you don’t have to hire a videographer, animator, script writer, and voiceover actor to create polished, shareable videos.
Pricing: Available upon request
Alternatives: Testimonial Hero, Content Beta
Webinars: ON24
Webinars are an important tool for B2B marketers and an effective way to generate leads. If your team runs webinars or is planning to, ON24 is a top option for creating engaging webinars, gauging your event’s performance, and identifying potential leads.
Pricing: Available on request
Alternatives: GoToWebinar, Zoho Meeting
Final words
Assembling the right tools and creating the best possible MarTech stack for your business will drive its growth while keeping it affordable in the long run. If all its parts are working together in harmony, complementing each other without areas left underutilised, you could be paying half the price of what most companies pay. This would place you in the ideal position to accelerate your growth.
Smarketrs can help you capitalise on the best MarTech tools out there and make your marketing efforts as efficient as possible. Book a free MarTech audit or reach out to us for a free consultation.