Hyper Growth For SaaS Brands With The Right MarTech

Over the last few years, MarTech, or marketing technology, has been dominating the tech world. It is evolving at an incredible pace, and for a good reason. MarTech has not only transformed how marketing teams across industries operate but has also propelled several technological innovations at the workplace.

You must have heard of Scott Brinker’s famous Martech5000 – dubbed as the most cited reference of all time ever since its release in 2017. Little did we know that by 2021, the supergraphic will need a revision to accommodate 7,040 marketing software companies battling for market share in a 121 billion dollar industry.

If you don’t know Scott Brinker, he is THE Godfather of MarTech and the VP of Platform  Ecosystem at Hubspot. He created a marketing technology landscape supergraphic in 2017, Martech5000 – named after the 5,000 SaaS companies competing in the global marketing tech space. In 2020, Brinker had to update the supergraphic with over 2,000 more SaaS companies – showcasing over 7,040 SaaS options to choose from. This year, the count has reached 8,000!

This only shows how complex the MarTech field is.

So what exactly is MarTech?

MarTech encompasses tools and software that help marketers engage with their audiences with evolving user behaviour. These tools use cutting-edge tech to automate several manual, redundant tasks, enabling marketers to upskill and focus on the creative and strategic aspects.

To quote Scott Brinker, “MarTech applies to major initiatives, efforts and tools that harness technology to achieve marketing goals and objectives.” It is an ecosystem of sales and marketing tools interconnected to track and engage users throughout their digital journey.

With so much innovation in MarTech, the accessibility of cutting-edge and innovative tools, the emergence of cloud platforms, and the easy adoption of them all because of SaaS, the real question is, how can marketers separate the “must-have” technologies from the expensive “good-to-have” shelfware? And moreover, what are the core tools that every SaaS marketer must have in their arsenal?

Key marketing technologies to build up your ultimate B2B SaaS tech stack

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

All marketing strategies, big and small, have one thing in common – they’re all customer-centric. Robust CRMs, like Salesforce and HubSpot, include a comprehensive dashboard for customer insights that also allows you to record every engagement with the user as they move up in their journeys. From scrolls on a blog post to email open rates and landing page click-through rates, a CRM is intelligently designed to create a customer story, allowing you to personalize marketing strategy to fit the user/customer’s needs.

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Content is at the heart of SaaS marketing. But content can be chaotic if not structured right. Imagine customers coming to your website for resources and struggling to find what they’re looking for in a labyrinth of archives of blogs and resources. With the help of a Content Management System (CMS), you can get a framework for creating, organizing, delivering and optimizing your content. WordPress is the most popular CMS out there.

Marketing Automation

Email is the most archaic form of marketing, and yet, it is the most powerful promotional tool. With the latest marketing automation tools, you can energize your marketing campaigns using segmented emails and lead management to get noticed by the right crowd at the right moment. Think of Marketo or Eloqua when you think of Marketing Automations.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Keyword Research

Search Engine Optimization is quite like a battleground for industries fighting for visibility. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and keyword research tools breathe new life into these search engines. They show the insights you need to improve your search performance, help you identify search trends, optimize content for high-volume keywords, and track backlinks. Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest is a good example of a keyword research tool.

Social Media Marketing (SMM) and Brand Monitoring

Your customers spend most of their waking hours on social media. Why not leverage the most used channels for reaching potential customers? But be warned, building a brand on social media doesn’t happen overnight. It requires patience, serious and concerted efforts to be visible to the right audience. Thankfully, social media marketing tools make your life so much easier – allowing you to schedule content weeks in advance, choose a publishing schedule that matches your audience’s social media behaviours, and analyze your best performing posts. Advanced MarTech SaaS brands, like HootSuite, even offer a live brand monitoring tool that makes it easier to engage with potential customers whenever they talk about your brand.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

CRO tools help you decide which title post or hero image can yield dramatic results. You can use CRO software to trail the smallest variations, using A/B testing and other data-centric tools to gather meaningful data and use it to optimize your marketing strategies. Optimizely is one of the “must-have” CRO tools in the MarTech space today.

Bottomline

Today more than ever, MarTech is the foundation of customer-centric marketing as it provides data-driven, personalised customer experiences. It enables you to engage with the right audience, at the right time, with the right message, on the right channels.

Modern SaaS marketers have a plethora of tools in their arsenal that get their jobs done efficiently. Therefore, having the right MarTech stack is crucial. This involves understanding the tools, identifying gaps, knowing which tools are worth investing in, and having the right MarTech strategy.

With these, you can achieve hyper-growth for your SaaS business by unleashing the power of MarTech and data for a thriving (and evolving) customer experience.