Inbound Marketing Insights

Building a successful inbound marketing journey will be challenging to accomplish without technology tools to streamline your inbound marketing processes and deploy your marketing programs in an integrated way. Your marketing technology stack is the next important consideration when building your inbound marketing program. If you are unfamiliar with it, a marketing technology stack is your grouping of technology tools that help execute and improve your marketing activities. A marketing technology stack may be one single tool, or you may have 5 – 10 different tools you need to use based on your marketing and sales objectives. With over 8,000 tools on the market, it is important to take an organized and systematic approach to choosing the tools that align with your organization based on your business goals. The idea of finding and evaluating technology platforms can seem daunting, but here are key elements to consider to help you narrow down your search.

Identify Your Challenges:

Determine your current challenges, so you know what to look for in a marketing technology tool. Are you currently struggling to drive traffic to your website? Or are you currently unable to convert your website traffic into leads? Whatever the case, be sure to identify your challenges and focus on the right initiatives as you begin to identify the best marketing technology tools to meet your needs. The following is a chart from HubSpot’s Annual State of Inbound Marketing Report showing the top challenges organizations face globally. It will give you an idea of where to start when considering your current challenges and the areas you want to optimize.

Get the Right Individuals Involved:

Before you move forward with marketing technology tools, make sure you have the appropriate buy-in from everyone in the organization involved in the decision. At the C-Level, you must solve all of their challenges by implementing a marketing technology tool that aligns with business goals and provides comprehensive analytics. Within your marketing department, make sure you either have a team to manage the new tool or are prepared to work with an outside partner to get you started. Ensure your chosen tool can support your content, email, website optimization, social media, analytics, and more. Within the sales department, connect with the sales team to see how their processes could be improved through sales automation. You would be surprised to see the impact that a technology tool can have on your team’s sales processes. Having sales buy-in and knowing how your technology tools will impact the sales team’s daily activities is essential. If you involve everyone at the beginning of the process, you will have a much smoother transition once you decide to roll out your new technology tools.

Determine Your Feature Needs:

Make a list of absolutely everything you want to use your marketing technology tool for the present and the future. It’s important to take a future-focused look at what your marketing technology tool should include. The last thing you want to do is choose a marketing technology tool and realize you have outgrown it after 12 or 18 months. I often see that people are focused on what they need right now and don’t have a long-term vision of how their marketing will evolve. Features to consider when looking at technology tools include:

These features are a starting point. Based on your previously defined goals, you may have other aspects of a technology tool that are important to your business. Make sure you look at your marketing goals through a long-term lens to make the best decision for your current and future needs.

As you can see, a lot goes into creating an integrated marketing technology stack. It's important to choose the right tools for your company's needs but not to add so many new technologies that it becomes overwhelming to manage. Focus on what is needed to help you reach your marketing and sales goals so you can prove revenue and ROI from adding these new marketing technology tools.

Are you looking for ways to optimize your inbound strategy? The "book "Mastering Inbound Marketing: Your Complete Guide to Building a Results-Driven Inbound Strategy," written by Elyse Flynn Meyer, Owner & Founder of Prism Global Marketing Solutions, covers every aspect of the inbound marketing methodology, including the revenue generation trifecta of marketing, sales, and the customer experience. Check out the book to see how to most efficiently and effectively develop, implement, and maintain your inbound strategy.