Marketing Technology: The Best Tools for Growth Marketing

To set yourself up for growth marketing success, you need marketing technology that helps manage your programs from acquisition to expansion and retention. While the options for assembling your “Martech Stack” are virtually limitless, here’s a list of the core types of marketing tools you can (and should) use as a short, refined list to maximize growth marketing efforts.

Campaign management tools

To run effective growth campaigns, you need a system that allows you to store all the information you collect on each contact, including their stage along the buyer’s journey, and where and when they engaged.

Sometimes referred to as marketing automation software, this marketing tool allows you to segment contacts into different groups, and design specific campaigns for each audience. You can also set campaign goals (typically conversions or form fills) and analyze results, score incoming leads based on their type and level of engagement, and funnel the best marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to sales.

Campaign management systems are commonly connected to the customer relationship management (CRM) system used by sales and customer service, to share insight and provide a consistent experience across all customer touchpoints.

Campaign execution tools

While some marketing automation platforms now manage several tasks like content and campaigns, you likely need a variety of marketing technology tools to execute on your growth-marketing plans. These include:

• Email marketing – allows you to use professional, branded templates, track email open and click-though rates, and possibly even revenue generated by a campaign, if your email marketing program is connected to an ecommerce provider
• Social media management – for managing your social networks, content, engagement and results
• Influencer marketing – helps you identify and engage with social influencers in your space
• Public relations – for pitching, monitoring and managing your relationship with media
• Content management system – helps streamline the process of creating, approving and managing content assets
• Search engine optimization (SEO) – for keyword research, position tracking, audits and analytics
• Digital advertising – for placing, managing and analyzing online ad campaigns

Sales process tools

Working collaboratively with your sales team is key to the success of any growth marketing strategy. You might share an integrated marketing tool – like a CRM solution, that makes this easy. But if not, you need to develop a good understanding of, and preferably have access to, the tools they use.

These systems contain information on what happened to the leads marketing generated, following the sales process from qualification through needs assessment to quote and close.

There is valuable insight here about topics discussed, questions answered and where roadblocks appeared. Marketing can use this information to develop support tools like FAQs, datasheets and blogs that accelerate the buyer’s journey and increase close ratios.

Post-sale outreach tools

We all know that it costs way less to maintain a customer than gain a new one, which is why growth marketing needs to continue after the sale takes place. Marketing should work collaboratively with your customer success, support, sales and product teams to build deeper, long-term relationships with existing clients.

Fortunately, there are lots of marketing tools that help – from online communities and forums to referral programs, knowledgebase platforms and even 3rd party review sites like TrustRadius, Software Advice and G2Crowd. When customers speak up, they need to know someone is paying attention. Growth marketers listen and engage.

Measurement tools

Growth marketers are obsessed with metrics, and thanks to the exploding Internet of Things (IoT), there’s a huge amount of data available to drive insight and improvement. But not everything you can measure carries the same value. You need to start by defining how you’ll measure your growth marketing success. It’s no longer about brand awareness, lead quantity, click-through rates or webinar attendees.

It’s all about new customer acquisition, revenue contribution, return on investment, customer satisfaction, lifetime value and retention rates. Once you determine which metrics are key to corporate growth, you can set up your marketing technology stack to deliver the answers you need.

Accelerate your growth marketing success

Interested in understanding more about growth marketing and how to leverage technology to be successful? Check out our Ultimate Guide to Growth Marketing Playbook, or book a consultation with our growth marketing experts today.