The Best Marketing Tools to Empower Demand Generation Teams in 2018

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Feel like you’re drowning in marketing technology? You’re not the only one.

In 2011, only 150 companies identified as martech vendors. By mid-2017, MarTech Today reported the number had jumped to 4,891. Almost five thousand vendors now offer software and tools for marketing automation, CRM, lead generation, and many other processes and tactics.

Fast forward to 2018, and the tools needed to support a complex, full-funnel demand generation program can include several different integrated and specialized apps.

Let’s take a look at some of the must-have technologies that B2B marketers from industry-leading organizations have added to their marketing tech stacks.

7 Tools to Add to Your MarTech Stack

The tools that work for one B2B marketing program may not be the right fit for another. When evaluating software, it’s important for marketers to focus on categories rather than specific brands. Finding the right tools to fill core foundational needs will help your marketing team drive sales pipeline and revenue.

Tool #1: CRM

Recommended by Game Changers: Salesforce

CRM is the foundation of all sales and marketing organizations. It manages much of the customer journey and, when used effectively, unifies people and processes. While there are numerous CRM tools available, Salesforce.com ranks as the undisputed leader of the pack.

Joe Gelata, former Head of Global Demand Gen and Revenue Operations at Vidyard, stated that…

“The center of [Vidyard’s] revenue stack has been Salesforce since day one. Its flexibility enabled [the company] to build scalable processes  and integrate all the tools needed to move and grow fast.”

Tool #2: Marketing Automation Platform

Recommended by Game Changers: Marketo

Automation is at the core of many B2B marketing programs. The most effective demand gen strategies use marketing automation to create personalized customer experiences at scale, nurturing new prospects into sales opportunities.

More Demand Marketing and Marketing Ops Game Changers choose Marketo than any other marketing automation platform.

During the 2017 Marketing Ops Game Changers program, Mitch Diamond, then Director of Sales & Marketing of McKesson described Marketo as…

“the core infrastructure to power all [McKesson’s] operations: lead management, lead scoring, lead capture, tracking and analytics. Marketo empowers “intelligent outbound” strategy by providing high score alerts, web site visitor reporting and prospect engagement information to the
inside sales team.”

Tool #3: Top-Funnel Automation

Recommended By Game Changers: Integrate

Managing top-of-funnel marketing processes is a common challenge for B2B marketers, especially when it comes to common barriers like working with third-party data sources, processing and validating lead data, and quickly routing leads to the appropriate follow-up tracks. Demand marketers are increasingly discovering a need for a unifying tool that scales and integrates with both CRM and marketing automation software, to enable a full-funnel, orchestrated approach to demand marketing.

Stephanie MacArthur, in her role as Program Manager of Global Integrated Marketing at CA Technologies, credits Integrate as helping CA…

“streamline content syndication programs in so many ways. [Marketing can] keep media partners accountable to its needs, control data quality and integrity, and have complete visibility into which leads are truly performing the best. It allows [the team] to make real decisions. [They] no longer have to just wing it, but can read that data and proceed. Quality always trumps quantity.”

Tool #4: Account-Based Targeting

Recommended By Game Changers: Engagio

Great B2B marketers are working to more effectively target the right companies and decision makers that will have the biggest impact on pipeline. Various account-based marketing softwares support this effort in a variety of way.

Linda Fitzek, VP of Business Operations of Everstring, recommends Engagio, stating that…

“In our industry, there is a large focus on making digital content more relevant by leveraging scoring and behavioral signals, but [for Everstring] it makes more sense to look at [our] best customers and identify similar
companies before deploying [our] message using Engagio plays. [It drives] cost savings in display, ppc and all ABM activities, not to mention the downstream efficiencies in the Sales Development team.”

Tool #5: Performance and ROI Intelligence

Recommended By Game Changers: Allocadia

As more B2B marketing teams are expected to contribute to revenue, it’s more important than ever before to effectively track marketing performance and ROI. With so many performance data tools available, this is often one of the more difficult areas to evaluate.  

Tim West, Director of Marketing Operations at Box, credits Allocadia as a must-have part of Box’s marketing tech stack and strategy.

“As marketing budgets are stretched, Marketing Ops needs to know which dollars are performing and which need to be re-allocated to more efficient tactics. Allocadia plays a vital role in our planning and in our marketing performance analysis.”

Tool #6: Content Management System

Recommended By Game Changers: Drupal

Behind every informative B2B website is a content management system (CMS). Marketers need to be able to scale content resources while optimizing for both search engines and user experience. CMS tools must support A/B testing, lead capture, automation and other key operations.

While CMS capabilities vary widely, Mike Braund, the Director of Marketing Ops at Tableau, relies on Drupal as the CMS behind his firm’s data visualization app. Braund states,

“Our web developers use Drupal not only to make a beautiful website but to create and capture meaningful marketing data, and make a user-friendly UI for our campaign managers to interact with.”

Tool #7: Project Management Tool

Recommended By Game Changers: Trello

To scale effectively, marketers need efficiency. This means impelementing simple and unified ways to manage complex initiatives, shared across the company landscape with sales, customer success teams. In some cases, third-party contractors or agency vendors may also need to be in the loop.

Travis Taylor, Director of Global Demand Center at Veritas, namesTrello as one of Veritas’s most essential marketing tools. 

Although [project management tools] would fall out of the typical marketing landscape, by shifting to more of an agile marketing methodology, [Trello] has helped us manage our projects in a logical fashion with little to no overhead.

Demand Marketing Platforms, Tools & Technology aren’t Everything

It would be remiss if we didn’t admit that, as a demand marketing software company, Integrate is pro-martech. Technology enables B2B marketers to do remarkable things, like manage global demand generation initiatives across multiple continents, scale highly-personalized marketing experiences and measure results across various lead sources for full-funnel insights.

However, technology is only one component of the demand generation marketing equation. Technology can’t solve broken processes.

The game-changing B2B demand marketing and marketing operations pros highlighted above are unified in their belief that the right martech for your organization matters a whole lot more than having the next shiny object. We recommend thoughtfully auditing your processes, and carefully evaluate different technologies that can empower your team to be more effective and efficient.

This Marketing Tech Blueprint Workbook has helped hundreds of B2B marketing organizations implement and evolve their marketing tech strategies. It includes easy-to-use fillable workbook tables and a customizable PowerPoint template that your team can use to visualize your martech needs.

According to Leslie Alore, Director of Regional Marketing at Iron Mountina, the secret to benefiting from martech is to 

Integrate it or reject it. Accept nothing that doesn’t connect to the rest of your stack. If you have to manually move data across systems, you’re doing it wrong (or your vendors are).

What MarTech tools can you not live without? Share with us in the comments!

To discover other tools that the Marketing Ops Game Changers are leveraging to up-level their marketing organizations, download a copy of the Secrets and Strategies of Marketing Ops Game Changers eBook.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Triniti Burton
Triniti Burton is Marketing & Communications Director at Integrate. Once upon a time a sales rep, she now handles all things marketing and focuses tirelessly on infusing the often gray world of B2B tech with as much color as her colleagues can handle.

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