Marketing in 2017: Return of The Stack
It’s hard to imagine that in the past seven years, the marketing technology landscape has grown to over 5000 companies. The latest MarTech Landscape Supergraphic “MarTech 5000” unveiled (not to be confused with the metal band Powerman 5000) at the recent MarTech Conference in San Francisco explores this captivating space. Whether it’s to drive more engagement, increase sales or improve customer relationships, organizations face increasing challenges in today’s digital age. The challenges will only continue to grow and ultimately this is driving the innovation in the marketing technology space. But before you embark on a marketing tech shopping spree, we would like to share the goodies in our tech stack that keeps our marketing engine running.
At the center of our marketing is Egnyte, of course. It is the intersection of technologies that enhance how our team works to deliver an optimal customer experience.Data Management and AnalyticsSo how are we improving the customer experience? A key member of our marketing team is our Data Scientist and Big Query lets him run optimization and analytics on large data sets in the cloud. Better targeting and messaging is also important to us and that’s where Lean Data’s matching algorithm comes in. Our favorite feature in Google Analytics is Cohort Analysis, helping us better understand what customers want to consume and when they want to consume it. If more granularity is what you need, then Mixpanel will come in handy for both web and mobile analytics. We add Infer to our data management and analytics recipe which applies machine learning to our data and helps predict who is likely to become a customer. Your data has a story to tell, analyze it with the right tools and you'll be able to learn what your audience wants and the type of content they crave.Content Creation and DeliveryCreating impactful content can be an organization’s kryptonite. So if a Creative Director is a superhero, then Adobe would be the modern day utility belt. Adobe offers a powerful repertoire of apps for graphic design, video editing, and photography. Our designer leverages Egnyte Desktop Sync to save massive files onto his desktop and sync to the cloud so he can access the files even when there’s no Internet. With people watching video on the Internet now more than ever before, it’s important to produce different types of videos for all the social platforms. We leverage Facebook and Twitter’s native video features to upload short video snacks but found VimeoPro and YouTube as a good home for our longer pieces. Plus, they both deliver strong analytics and insights into traffic sources and what are our audience likes to view. Better insights equals better content after all.As we’re constantly striving to improve the webinar experience, we found ON24 delivers webinars that go beyond just the talking heads and Powerpoint slides to engaging with our attendees in group chats and far livelier Q & A sessions.OperationsOf course Salesforce sets the standard as the go-to-CRM, so it’s not a surprise that our strong integration makes Egnyte + Salesforce a match made in sales heaven. If your goal is to sell smarter and faster, the integration increases collaboration amongst teams since they can access and share directly from their Salesforce accounts.Since we use many disparate tools, Marketo’s API openness lets us slice and dice records in different ways and tie it back to the different systems to ensure our data is accurate. But before we hit the "send" button, we test out our emails in Litmus to make sure it looks good across different clients and devices. Performance and engagement metrics are important, but it's imperative that your'e able to tie it all together to avoid data silos.SEOGood things come in threes, especially in our SEO marketing mix. Ranking high in search results is important and both Moz and the Google Search Console never fail to help us better understand and monitor our site’s presence. If keywords aren’t a problem but you still got SEO woes then check out Screaming Frog. Though it has a plethora of tools, we use it specifically to build our XML maps to communicate with the search engines whenever content is changed or updated on our site.PR and Media MonitoringResources can be limited so it’s integral for every organization to monitor the impact of its PR. There are many free tools to leverage and because not everything you do requires a press release, a software like Trendkite is fantastic for showing the value of your PR efforts. Execute a more data-driven PR strategy to identify who to target and perform better share of voice.To stay on top of the hot trends and topics, add Buzzsumo to the mix for insights on what’s catching buzz (pun intended) across the Internet. And whether you’re a bootstrap startup or a funded startup, reach out to influencers as part of your marketing strategy. With Buzzsumo, you can find the right influencers for pretty much any subject.Odd fact: Rob Schneider shows up as a key influencer when you search “seafood.”Social EngagementOur Social Media team loves using Buffer to automate sharing content across different channels. And as much as we love to post funny memes and GIFS, we find uploading short snack sized videos in our organic posts on Facebook and Twitter perform very well.The marketing technology landscape never seems to amaze but before you select a tool for your marketing stack, figure out how the tool fits into your holistic marketing strategy. And more importantly, is the tool essential to achieve your organization’s goals? How are you using Egnyte as part of your marketing stack? We’d love to know!
