What is a marketing technology stack?

A marketing tech stack, or MarTech stack, streamlines digital marketing operations, improves marketing team efficiency, and accelerates the digital asset lifecycle using tools, integrations, automation, and AI.

Marketing solutions work together to generate better business outcomes by eliminating tedious manual processes using built-in integrations or application programming interfaces (APIs). These automated touchpoints create bridges between tools for data to flow freely in your tech stack.

Marketing stacks generate revenue by improving the user experience and marketing processes such as:

• Sales enablement
• Search engine marketing (SEM)
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Content marketing
• Lead generation
• Launching products
• E-commerce automation
• Email marketing
• Data analysis
• Social media marketing

Streamlining your tech stack makes your team more productive across the board, amplifies your sales pipeline, and improves overall business results.

How to build a smarter marketing stack

Getting the right business technology to power your operations isn’t something you should piece together lightly. After all, this technology needs to drive actual growth toward revenue goals, not just improve productivity.

Here are a few tips as you research new tools to include in your 2024 marketing budget. Any new platform needs to:

1. Align with your marketing strategy

The tools you choose shouldn’t necessarily follow the next trend or be the favorite solution of new executives coming in the door. Every tool needs to meet the biggest challenges of your business head-on. The best tools are the ones that effectively execute business strategy.

For example, while one marketing automation platform may be an industry standard, an emerging solution in automation may have exactly the features and capabilities your sales and demand generation teams need to compete in the market — with a lower price point, faster adoption, and seamless integration.

2. Hit pain points head on

Ensure that the tools you select meet the current pain points that teams are experiencing. Sit down and talk with managers and contributors in different departments to find out where the headaches are (and which platforms are causing them).

Once you have a list of challenges, identify common themes and tools listed and see which tools might be able to solve both while fostering business growth.

Don’t forget to think about the future growth of your organization and the features you may need when selecting new tools, too.

3. Integrate with your existing stack

Check integration compatibility between the tools you’re researching and your existing tech stack. It would be a complete disaster to onboard a new work management solution only to find out that the tool doesn’t integrate with your creative or storage solutions.

Optimize your marketing platform operations by ensuring the different tools in your stack integrate to amplify workflows for all of your teams.

4. Include AI features

Purchase new tools that have AI features to meet your marketing goals faster. Your team is expected to produce more marketing campaigns, market more products, and produce more pipeline in 2024, all of which takes more on-brand content. Power up teams to produce content at scale by investing in future-focused tools that include AI to accelerate content workflows and skyrocket productivity. Also, make sure to invest in mature AI tools for a better ROI.

The ultimate marketing technology stack list for 2024

Get the conclusive list to build the ultimate marketing tech stack, from work management and digital asset management solutions all the way to marketing automation, social management, and the latest AI tools.

Here are the platforms you should have in your stack in 2024:

Digital asset management solution

Digital asset management (DAM) platforms like Canto provide a single place to store, organize, find, and distribute all your organization’s digital content. DAM software creates a single source of truth for all your digital assets across the content lifecycle, so everyone’s always working from the same approved on-brand content in your library. DAM platforms integrate with your work management, content management system, marketing automation, and social media management solutions, to name a few. Modern DAM platforms like Canto offer AI tools that accelerate content management, video marketing, and distribution. Elevate the customer experience with DAM at the center of your stack, keeping all teams on-brand across every touchpoint.

Work management solution

Work management tools, such as monday.com, Wrike, and Adobe WorkFront, are crucial for ensuring your projects and tasks are managed efficiently and completed on time, within scope, and even on budget. Ensure project files integrate across your stack using integrations. If you don’t, manual processes from your creative and project management teams will slow down creative workflows, which could stall out important projects.

Search engine optimization solution

Search engine optimization (SEO) is essential for any type of business. You may be handling SEO services in-house using SEO software, or you could be working with an SEO agency that handles site auditing, on-page and off-page optimization recommendations, and new SEO content for you. Teams using SEO tools that produce massive amounts of SEO-rich content may also want to consider the latest AI content planning tools that combine planning, competitor and keyword research, and copywriting into one platform for a streamlined workflow. Regardless, SEO must be part of your tool stack if you are going to take market share from competitors, own specific keywords in your industry, generate more leads, and increase organic traffic to your site.

Productivity solutions

All teams need a place to get the actual task work accomplished, which is where productivity staples such as Microsoft Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Teams can help. Teams can get together quickly to brainstorm and then move seamlessly into collaborative task work. And the real magic happens when work management and productivity solutions sync files and assets through integration in your marketing stack.

Asset creation solutions

Your creative team needs a place where they can design assets such as animations, custom graphics, branded videos, or landing page layouts. That’s where free design tools like Canva and premium solutions such as Figma or Adobe apps such as Lightroom Classic, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere Pro are useful.

Generative AI solutions

Need to scale your content engine? Text-to-image AI tools can assist with the co-creation of original art quickly, make art concepting faster, create variations of art, and provide more creativity for teams needing an out-of-the-box approach in their next campaign. For copy teams, consider the latest AI content writing tools to combine the power of AI with content templates, brand voice synthesis, and AI-generated copywriting to get content to market faster.

Content management system (CMS) solution

Content management system (CMS) tools such as WordPress and Drupal bring your finished digital assets onto your website for viewing. CMS tools populate essential web pages such as product pages, landing pages, blogs, and more. There are both open source and proprietary software versions of CMS to choose from. To create a seamless website content delivery workflow, ensure your CMS and DAM tools integrate or include media delivery tools in your stack.

CMS tools and DAM solutions are not the same thing. When comparing DAM vs CMS, note that CMS distributes only finalized assets ready for consumers to your site, whereas your DAM holds all digital assets and metadata surrounding them. Both of the platforms are essential for your success.

Web analytics solution

Web analytics platforms play a huge role in helping marketing leaders with direction on overall marketing strategy, including understanding which marketing activities and web pages are the most impactful, what marketing efforts aren’t working, and alerting teams on trends in website visitors and overall traffic. At a minimum, make sure your CMS and DAM platforms integrate with Google Analytics, a powerful and widely-known website analytics platform, although it’s best if your SEO tools and social management solutions also integrate.

Marketing automation solution

If your organization is going to scale outbound email marketing campaigns to prospects and customers effectively, you must automate processes for your team with marketing automation tools. Tools such as Mailchimp allow teams to easily pair customer or lead contact lists with personalized and scheduled emails in order to increase conversions and push products. Use Zapier to integrate your tech stack with automation for even better workflows.

Social management solution

Brands must be present and engaged on social media channels in order to build followers and brand loyalty. However, with the growing number of social platforms and social media assets required to engage visitors, organizations struggle to keep consistent with on-brand publishing and engagement cadences. Marketing tech stack tools such as Hootsuite enable users to write social copy using AI, schedule posts across social media platforms at the best times and days, check post engagement using analytics tools built into Hootsuite, and collaborate across teams easily. Detailed social analytics can also up your game on social media strategy.

Make digital asset management part of your marketing tech stack

Digital asset management platforms are a hub for your technology ecosystem, streamlining all marketing efforts that require digital assets to power them.

If you don’t already have a digital asset management system in place, you’re probably relying on a basic cloud storage service such as Google Drive or Dropbox to manage your brand’s digital assets.

Consider the following:

• Are all your teams able to find and use the right files when they need them?
• Do you know what content is being used the most?
• Is your content syncing with the other tools in your stack?

Digital asset management solutions are more sophisticated and better suited to organize, find, and share files of all types. That means on-brand files are ready for every team member right when they need them, leading to better campaign results, more customers, and a more powerful brand.

According to research conducted by Ascend2, DAM users are more than twice as likely to be highly satisfied with how their digital content is currently managed and stored compared to those who use other tools for content storage.