There are easily 7,000 marketing technology apps on the market today (seriously! Check out how many vendors attend the MarTech conference!) and all of them promise the same thing - easy solutions for your business marketing needs.
The truth is with so much martech out there, it can be super challenging discovering a solution that works best for both your biz and the workflow of your team. And apps are NOT one size fits all, so what works for a brand that’s just starting out would likely be drastically different than what works for one that’s been trucking for awhile! Ask yourself the following questions when determining what solutions work best for your for you biz:
What are my overall marketing goals?
What problem(s) am I trying to solve?
What current technologies are in place to help me remedy this need?
What functionality should a tool have?
How do I want to use a tool?
What benefit do I want to receive from using this tool?
Be prepared to invest some time in discovering the tools you need to create your foundational marketing technology stack. We created a list of relatively easy-to-use apps we love to get you started!
Email Marketing
Mailchimp
We love Mailchimp! These hometown heroes created a platform that's great email marketing and expanded to offer users more flexibility when it comes to sprucing up their marketing strategies. Mailchimp now offers the ability to create social media and Google targeting ads, design landing pages, send postcards, and offers CRM tools.
Klaviyo
Klaviyo offers similar solutions to Mailchimp, but focuses primarily on helping e-commerce merchants grow their businesses and make more money. Klaviyo boasts enterprise-ready marketing solutions for small businesses in growth mode.
Content Creation
Anchor
Calling all podcaster wannabes! Anchor is a content creation solution for podcast hosts who want a simple way to create, distribute, host, and monetize their podcasts. Even better, Anchor is 100% free!
Canva
You don’t have to be a graphic designer to create eye-catching marketing collateral. Use Canva's drag-and-drop features to design, share and print business cards, logos, presentations and graphics for your social media.
Cut Story
If you’re currently recording several 15-second videos to upload one long message to your Instagram Stories, there’s an easier way to do it! All you have to do is import long videos to CutStory and let the app handle the rest. In a few short seconds there’ll be several 15-second video segments saved chronologically in your Camera Roll.
Social Media Management
Coschedule
We are big fans of CoSchedule! This app allows us to automate our social media scheduling as well as our email newsletter and blog post creation. You can use the ReQueue feature to automate the sharing of evergreen content across marketing channels and replace your project management app by assigning tasks to team members directly in CoSchedule.
Grammarly
Write marketing emails and social media captions like a pro with Grammarly. The writing assistant offers online grammar checking, spell checking, and plagiarism detection.
Planoly
While we use CoSchedule for social media scheduling, the one drawback with the app is that unlike Planoly, there isn’t a visual planning option to schedule Instagram posts. If you don’t need a solution as robust as CS for your social media marketing, take a stab at planning and scheduling Instagram posts visually using Planoly.
Project Management
Asana
Manage all the moving parts of your marketing strategy using Asana. The platform allows teams to track, manage, and collaborate on projects.
Google Drive
You’ll need somewhere to store all the content you’re creating and Google Drive is just the place! Hold on to photos, stories, designs, drawings, recordings, videos, and more. Plus, the first 15 GB of storage are free with a Google account.
When it comes to creating your marketing technology stack, make sure you don’t end up choosing solutions that create more work for you! If you don’t have the time or skills (or desire, lol), hire someone to help you! If you've got questions about crafting a killer marketing strategy, give us a shout!
0 comments