We’re pleased to announce that we walked away from MarTech 2016 with a win! Our marketing stack won a “Stackie“, which is an award for sharing visualizations of how marketing technology stacks are organized within a company.
Last year our stack placed third, so this year we focused on creating a better story around why and how we use all of the different technologies. Here’s how we organized our stack:
Focusing on the 4 pillars of content marketing
The core of our content marketing strategy focuses on the 4 pillars of content marketing: creation, experience, distribution, and insights. We wanted to organize our stack with these pillars as the focal point and expand out from there to cover our technologies in demand gen, sales, and success – all branching out from a particular pillar.
While we talk a lot about how the 4 pillars support content marketing, in reality, everything we do in all departments come back to these four points.
Acknowledge multiple uses
Many marketing stacks group technologies by one specific task and keep them in one bucket. Heck, that’s how we organized our stack last year. This year, we took a good hard look at what each of our technologies do for us and determined there were so many tools that fit multiple needs.
Take HubSpot, for example. In the past, we may have just looked at it as a tool for nurturing or demand gen and that’s it. In reality, HubSpot fits into four areas of our stack as it helps us with content distribution and insights as well as distribution and insights for our demand generation efforts. Just focusing on one area that HubSpot helps our team wouldn’t be giving it the props it deserves!
Don’t forget about the rest of the organization
Sales and Customer Success are not traditional marketing teams, but they do in fact help market our product – and they use specific tools to do so!
Our sales and success teams share a ton of our content every day with prospects and current customers, using tools like Shout or Influitive to create better experiences around the content. While our marketing team may not use some of these tools, they’re still important to note as part of the marketing stack since they still make a big impact.
So there you have it: our tips for creating a successful and award-winning marketing stack. Now go forth and create your own and maybe we’ll see you at MarTech next year!
