The Marketing Manager’s Survival Kit

Recent stats on marketing spending habits indicate an increased commitment of budget to the latest marketing technologies. Here are 6 platforms that Pixel Lab highly recommend.

[us_image image="13065" size="full"][us_separator size="small"]Ever decided to go on an investigative journey through the landscape of marketing technology?

If you haven’t, it’s a dizzying one – even for the most experienced marketing managers and CMOs.

Scott Brinker’s “Martech 5000” Supergraphic" in 2017 presented marketeers with the grievous reality of the martech industry’s saturation in a snapshot – only for it to be muddied further as an additional 2,000 vendors joined the mix within two short years.

And when sudden sea changes such as a new Google algorithm or even the damning words of a Kardashian can completely redefine the state of play, it can be hard to know which is the right horse to back.

In our opinion, there are 6 platforms and solutions that have serious long-term staying potential in the field of marketing technology.

1. HubSpot

Having evolved from an idea between peers at MIT in 2006 to a software company bringing in reported revenues upwards of 600 million US dollars today, HubSpot’s growth has been nothing short of astronomical.

They defined the principles of inbound marketing and forecast the death of the cold-calling generation, and have been a hugely influential voice in the sector ever since.

Not only does HubSpot offer a powerful and intuitive marketing and sales enablement platform that fuels the growth of ambitious businesses, but their staff back their software with a common sense approach to effective, people-centric marketing that just works.

With payment packages starting from as little as, well, zero pounds, HubSpot is a perfect foundation to build your marketing function upon. It gives you the analytics and insights needed to really know your audience, and the functionality to build workflows that quickly convert the curiosity of your visitors into a one-to-one conversation.

See how we use HubSpot to help ambitious businesses scale up

2. Turtl

Turtl is a content publishing platform that empowers the, shall we say, less tech-literate minds in marketing to create immersive end-to-end content experiences.

Turtl gives users a highly intuitive interface with which they can design and curate content assets that appeal to ‘the reading brain’, achieving deeper resonance with prospects that drive more successful conversions.

Its analytics tools allow you to drill down into the minutiae of your readers’ responses to your content as well, which you can then act upon to increase its relevance and performance.

This case study reveals how The Economist used Turtl to achieve a 50% uptick in reach, and a 30% increase in subscriptions.

3. Vidyard

Video content is becoming not only an increasingly powerful driver of marketing success, but an increasingly vital component of marketing campaigns in general.

The problem for many wanting to implement video into their strategy however, is it can be hard to pinpoint specific areas of improvement if your content isn’t hitting home.

Vidyard is the platform built to bring an end to this problem, with detailed data insights to help you understand the success of your video content, while prescribing ways to improve its placement, engagement and rate of conversion to sale.

Vidyard also offers a huge amount of customisation across your videos, easily allowing the addition of CTAs, dropdowns, forms and other features that make for a unique deep-dive customer experience.

4. Drift

Through an intuitive suite of features that work well right out-the-box, Drift allows you to construct a chatbot that effectively channels the voice of your brand in every interaction – no coding knowledge required.

Refine and perfect the conversational flow of your bot to curate a more natural, responsive method of leading customers down the sales funnel, generating leads and capturing customer data through conversations rather than tick boxes and opt-in forms.

You can tailor pre-made conversation elements according to the particular activity of your prospect, and Drift’s AI will also jump in to periodically help connect visitors to the right contact in your organisation, or the content they appear to be looking for.

5. Similarweb

SimilarWeb gives marketeers the insights they need to understand and monitor the digital playing field of their market.

Their powerful engine draws from reams of global multi-device intelligence to give users a snapshot of their own ‘digital market share’, before supplying the intel needed to adequately grow their presence within that market.

Similarweb currently hold data on a total of 80 million websites, and 3 million mobile apps, which is continually expanding as the software provider cements its status as the go-to resource for web page and app insights.

Even as a free user doing a one-off search, the granular level of detail available on a given website or app across a total of 240 different data categories, and the rapid time you’ll get it in, is impressive to say the least.

In fact, why not head to their website right now, add a known website or app into their search engine and see what you can dig up – we’ll wait.

6. Nightwatch

Since the Adwords days that turned a wave of disenfranchised nine-to-fivers into preachers of the 4-hour work week, many SEO tools have come and gone.

Many of the old school influencers and authorities in this area are still worthy of honourable mention (Moz, SEMRush, Ubersuggest), but in terms of useability, extensive functionality and amount of bang delivered per buck spent, we think Nightwatch is leading the way as an all-in-one SEO solution.

Nightwatch aggregates data from a wealth of major sources such as Google Analytics, Search Console, Keyword Planner and more and makes it visible in one single, easy-to-interpret window.

Unlike any other SEO tool, it allows you to see specifically how different segments of your keywords are performing, and how they stack up to those of your competitors.

It also has highly intuitive graph systems which allow you to track the impact of your own SEO efforts, while powerful filtering features allow you to unpick the behavioural patterns behind your audience data.

Want to have a conversation about the right martech stack for your business?

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