[Music] hey everybody it's Jenny from growth mode marketing you're listening to demand gen fix the podcast where our team of growth Motors and our guests discuss the ins and outs of demand generation and why we believe it's the key to long-term sustainable growth especially in HR tech industry [Music] hello welcome to the demand gen fix a podcast from growth mode marketing about demand generation today's topic that we're talking about is building a marketing technology stack to support the man g
eneration Deanna and Eric and I will get into a little bit more about martech if you're listening to this podcast you're interested in marketing so you probably know about her Tech Stacks or you've at least heard the term so we'll just quickly talk about what that is and what it means simply the term refers to tools and Technologies like software online platforms SAS products things like that that companies use to plan and Implement and measure their marketing so you put all that stuff together
and we call it a martech stack there are thousands and thousands of options out there I'm sure that you've probably seen that run into you know they're just so many different things but we're just going to break it down into a few different categories and talk about each one today if you're wondering what pieces you might need to build your demand generation engine we're going to just kind of let you know what we know starting with the martech landscape the marketing technology landscape is mass
ive I remember eight years ago looking at it and new technologies for coming out and back then like marketing automation was the primary one but there were all these ancillary type of technologies that started plugging into marketing Automation and I think companies started innovating and coming up with new ways and new things that could become marketing technology back then there were like four thousand five thousand different Technologies that's a lot today like I I did some research for this
conversation to see where are we at now and I found a couple different articles where numbers varied between 10 000 marketing technology options and 15 000 marketing technology options so it's massive Market it's there's so many different things you can do out there you know I think it's overwhelming for a lot of people and obviously if you're building out a marketing technology stack you're not going to go Implement 15 000 different Technologies some of them do the exact same things but even if
you narrow it down to the different categories that there are there are so many different types of marketing technology and I think it's everything from like digital ad management to website management to marketing automation to you know the list goes on and on and on and from my perspective if you look at the different types of marketing technology this is a very very simplified categorization but I think you're looking at there's tools for Content creation there's tools for program management
there's tools for program execution and there's tools for program measurement now I am sure there are lots of smart marketing technologists out there that could come in and say that list is too simplified and ridiculous here's the 40 categories that there actually are but that's just my perspective like how to think about the different technologies that are out there any uh Tech Pros out there who want to come and be a podcast guest come on you know send us a message we'd love to have you on ye
ah yeah I think Dan I agree I think that's a good way of simplifying it and like you said maybe over simplifying but I think those are the categories that we think about when we come across most often so let's talk a little bit about different types of marketing technology that we feel like we're asked most about and I think from my perspective I think there's four specific types of technology that were most often in conversation with clients about and that would be marketing automation like you
mentioned which is a big one intent data tools ABM platforms and then analytics tools so those kind of fit into those four categories that you just mentioned I think you can kind of align the types of Technology with those categories and we're going to get into each of these a little bit more in detail so the first one let's talk about marketing Automation and kind of what it is and then what roles does it play Within demand generation and I think we could probably conclude this entire episode
on marketing automation alone so we will summarize and kind of put a little bit of background or color to what roles it plays in demand generation just keep in mind that this is again kind of a simplified version but marketing automation ultimately the most simple term that it is a technology that will manage your processes and campaigns in an automated way so it's technically it's a software that will handle routine marketing tasks um without the need for let's say manual or human intervention
in a lot of ways so it's a way to set up and build this platform around your CRM and around these contacts and Prospects that you have and customer data and actually start to build campaigns and automate some of that so that you have engagement type activities going on at all times and that's not something that the marketing team is sending out one-off emails or the sales team is entering someone into a program or things like that it's really a way to build and automate some of those routine tas
ks so some roles that marketing automation plays within demand generation so we have this conversation with clients constantly and I would say marketing automation is typically a lot of the more mid-size or smaller businesses that we work with marketing automation is one of the first conversations we have because a lot of times clients come in with either a marketing automation platform that they have but they aren't utilizing to its potential or they just don't have marketing automation so this
is a conversation we have very early on in our engagements with you know demand gen strategy and things like that but there's a lot of ways that this plays into or plays a role in demand generation and the biggest one and I think we're constantly sharing this with clients is that marketing automation is kind of the center or the core of your demand generation activity and it's a way to again manage the activity that's going on in the background from marketing and activity that's going on with s
ales in order to really Implement and Target um and build more targeted marketing campaigns so just keeping that in mind that we really kind of consider this the core of your demand gen engine some common marketing automation workflows that I think we could talk about today are things like email marketing of course nurture or engagement type campaigns whether it's a drip campaign or it's a multi-touch nurture campaign behavioral targeting so looking at engagement that people are taking on your w
ebsite and the different activities that people are doing and targeting groups of prospects or customers based on their behavior that you're seeing another one is lead scoring and Lead prioritization where a technology like this the intent is that all of this activity are doing in this activity that you're able to automate you're also able to start scoring and watching that activity and monitoring levels of Engagement people's intent you know conversion rates things like that and start to see wh
at does that buyer's Journey really look like and in turn you're able to actually prioritize those leads and better align with marketing and sales I think one thing to think about with marketing automation like a lot of companies think of it as it's an email platform today is marketing automation I mean there are certainly platforms out there that still are very email Centric but when you're looking at some of the options that are out there a lot of them actually have a much more robust set of c
apabilities and modules you can add in to help build out that Tech stack so that it can do more than just emails I mean you can manage your social media from it you can manage ad campaigns from it depending on the platform you can manage your website and your blogs from it you can do ABM like there's so much that kind of centers around marketing automation these days you know even as we talk about the other three types of technology that we commonly get asked about those features and functionali
ty might actually be part of a marketing automation system depending on what you select we at growth mode marketing actually use HubSpot for our own internal marketing and um so that's the one that I am most familiar with and let me tell you it does a ton of stuff and it's really nice to be able to get our emails and our social media and our landing pages and all of that kind of stuff all automated and you know it really does help my day-to-day workload to just be able to have all of that like r
eady to go so we're familiar with HubSpot that's a big one we also have worked with uh Marketo that's one that you know a lot of different companies use and then of course Salesforce is out there Salesforce marketing Cloud which a lot of companies use and eloqua there are other ones too but I think those are probably the the top four that you really hear about yeah those those are the four that the clients we've worked with typically bring to the table and we're a HubSpot certified partner so we
work with HubSpot a lot but we also see a lot of the other three as well there are probably hundreds of different options out there from a standpoint of marketing automation systems for sure the next category that we often get asked about in the marketing technology stack is intent data tools and I think you know with these tools if you're not familiar with what intent data is it's basically technology that helps you look at data sets that show what a prospect is interested in so a lot of times
that intent data tool will use IP addresses and browser cookies to track activity so you can start to see what web pages are people looking at what searches are they doing what is showing up in the news about them like different things where you can set triggers to say I want to know this type of information on these accounts and by knowing this type of data in theory we can identify what that Prospect or company is actually interested in and so I think intent data really can enable you to iden
tify companies that are more likely in Market to make a purchase and it also gives you the ability to create more personalized campaigns I think intent data can be a great tool especially if you're going to be looking at doing account based marketing programs because you can start to kind of track the activities and what seems to be pop up from a data perspective for specific accounts that you're trying to Target and then you can take a step back and if you're doing that one-to-one ABM where you
're creating content and Outreach and programs specifically you know customized to that account you can start to get a little more personal and a little more customized because you've got data that's giving you some background to kind of make that justification for the personalization and the approach that you're going to take so that can be pretty powerful but that being said you know a lot of times companies will come to us and they'll be like we need to build out our demand generation engine
we are really interested in intent data we know who our ideal customer profile is let's figure this out and we've had to say whoa let's take a step back you don't even have marketing automation yet let's make sure we get that implemented and that you can wrap your arms around that before we start to plug in additional things into your marketing technology stack to make sure that at the end of the day you guys are going to use what you have and you're gonna you know optimize the programs to suppo
rt that and so sometimes I think everybody thinks they need in 10 data but you may not be mature enough on your marketing build out in your demand gen engine to incorporate it quite yet simply because you don't have the more foundational marketing Automation in place and it's not always easy to put that technology in and run with it you know there's a learning curve to using marketing automation you've got to be able to build out all of the programs around it and get it humming before you start
to plug in all these other tools that can certainly add value and improve the programs you're doing but only if you know how to use it and you consistently use it like as Deanna mentioned there's so many things that you want to have other things built out before and be prepared with some of these campaigns in place within your marketing automation platform before you look to something like intent data which is gonna start to feed the activity you're doing within your marketing automation platfor
ms and not to mention you need to have content in order to build these campaigns so I think the moral of this story is just remember like all of these platforms don't need to be in place at once look at the broader picture and think about your strategy and figure out a way to start to go in the direction you want to go but don't bite off more than you can chew if you want to dig in a little deeper on intent data tools some of the places you could look are at six cents is one demand base I'm sure
people have heard of Zoom info or bombora those are a few different ones if you wanted to do a little bit more of research on your own to kind of get an idea of what those kinds of tools can do yeah and some of these examples actually are more than just an intent data platform you know and you'll find that when you're looking at the marketing technology stack a lot of times there are tools out there that will do one thing and it plugs into other things and specializes in that one area but a lot
of the Technologies out there actually overlap quite a bit so for example people Sixth Sense and demand base those also fall under the ABM platform category because intent data and ABM go together really well so it makes sense for them to be coupled together there's also overlap with like say Marketo and HubSpot and you know as you look at the different Technologies it's overwhelming and it's confusing you know and you're not going to find anybody out there that is an expert in all Technologies
because there are up to 15 000 Technologies out there but you can certainly get a sense if you just go out and Google it to see what the options are and how these different Technologies are positioning themselves and what the capabilities are and the you know features and functionality within each of these platforms just as a reminder account based marketing or ABM is really a hyper focused approach to Target and engage with your best fit accounts so you've identified these accounts or you're i
n the process of identifying these accounts using intent data to identify who these best fit accounts are and it's a hyper it's a way to hyper Focus your approach or your campaigns on these accounts and the accounts that are going to be a best fit for your products or services do you animate a good point in the fact that there's a lot of crossover in these platforms and quite frankly the most effective ABM strategies or ABM programs are going to be driven by intent data and have intent data that
's helping drive your strategy and your program hence why there's a lot of crossover in these platforms because that data is helping Drive the way that you're targeting these accounts so an ABM platform is simply put it's a tool that is going to support your marketing strategy and a strategy that is structured to really aim at those high value accounts and those accounts that have a higher chance of converting so number of accounts you would focus on will vary but it's really a it's an exercise
of narrowing down and choosing those highest value accounts and identifying who they are and building your strategy around around them and around you know what you're seeing in that data and the information you know about those accounts but the platform itself is really a tool that will support that strategy and help you to do this so talking about the role that an ABM platform will play in demand generation so there's a lot of ways ABM platforms tie into your demand generation strategy and if a
ccount based marketing is a big piece of your strategy I would recommend again you need to have other pieces in place such as marketing Automation and things like that as a foundation but I would recommend that an account based marketing tool is on your mind and that you're doing that research as far as what types of tools might help you execute so you know when it comes to ABM and the ABM platforms I I think you know it's important to talk about when it makes sense to have an ABM platform becau
se I think some people assume like oh I want to do ABM programs I've got to have a platform you can do ABM without having the platform I think it's a difference between doing like an Enterprise level type of ABM program versus a smaller scale ABM program those platforms can do some really cool things but they're also very expensive you know and when I think about it like an example of how to use an ABM platform would be let's say you're selling your HR technology and 3M is on your short list tha
t is a company that you've determined is a very good fit they meet your ideal customer profile you're going to be doing some one-to-one marketing with them with a platform like ABM you can actually build out content on your website that is customized for 3M anytime anyone from 3M that has the 3M IP addresses comes to your site website that they see is different than say you know someone from a different company will see where it's very customized to that that's the type of things you know like a
t a really high level you could do with an ABM platform there's a lot more functionality that goes into pulling an intent data and targeting these individuals but I think that's an example that people can kind of understand is hey the entire like content that pops up on my website is specific to this account now do you need that to be able to do an ABM program no I think there's a lot of marketers out there that will tell you you know you need to get your strategy right and you need to walk befo
re you run before before you really go out and purchase one of these ABM platforms and put it to play I think you've also got to be ready to do ABM at a much higher volume if you're going to have an ABM platform because it is very expensive to put these into play and they're quite frankly there's a lot of heavy lifting to build out audiences and segmentation and custom content and all those things in the system as well and you've got to have the ability to do that if you're going to make an inve
stment in this technology and honestly I mean we do ABM campaigns with HubSpot a lot of the automation platforms also have a ABM platform built in or you can add it or you can you know depending upon what level you have the specialized ABM platforms might be a bit more sophisticated depending on which marketing automation you have in the modules you get but to Jenny's point you can absolutely execute on ABM with other tools out there besides a dedicated ABM platform orb so yeah I think Marketo a
lso has that capability but if you're looking at some of those high level ones you know maybe uh you could look at engagio or Terminus there's a bunch of them out there but um yeah it just depends on your level of how much you can put into it how much you want to put into it how much you want to spend so the fourth type of tool that we often get asked about is analytics tools and you know I think everyone knows kind of what analytics tools are you know it's the ability to collect data process it
analyze it you know and look at reports and personalized dashboards to be able to see the data and as marketers we are very often asked to demonstrate the ROI of the programs we're doing and to show attribution to which programs are actually delivering on that Roi and I think measurement of marketing programs It's Tricky you know you can put a tool in place and it can measure certain things you can't measure everything in marketing and so as you're looking at these different tools my recommenda
tion don't get stuck in a box where it's like we can only do programs that we can easily measure so we can only do digital advertising and measure how that converts to sales we can only do emails and measure how that converts to sales we can only do XYZ because it's measurable that being said as you look at the analytics tools that are out there many many many of the marketing technology tools that you can purchase have an analytics component built into it so if you're buying marketing automatio
n if you're buying an ABM platform if you're buying a digital ad management platform they're going to have some level of metrics that you have the ability to collect and analyze and make adjustments to your programs if you're looking at taking things to the next level there are tools specifically out there that are like aggregate analytics to tools where you actually can feed the results from all your different technology into one to build out a dashboard you know and we've we've used Google too
ls where we've worked with clients where they were trying to pull in like their Google analytics and their HubSpot and you know Google ads and like all these different things into one View and One dashboard you can absolutely do that but before you make that investment in that I think you need to look at what are the metrics that are important for us to measure what are we're trying to accomplish with it and do we need it all in one place or are we over complicating it because it is expensive to
pull into separate Analytics tool you've already got that information and the other tools that you've probably bought but certainly if you want to stand alone reporting tool you should be able to integrate it into the other programs that you have that are already measuring that data for you that's a good point Deanna that it doesn't necessarily all need to be in one place unless that's how you prefer to see it but keep in mind too that a lot of the marketing automation platforms and specificall
y HubSpot we've found that because all of these other platforms are integrated into HubSpot or into your marketing automation you're able to create dashboards and reports right there to look at the broader picture of all this marketing activity versus having to export HubSpot data into Google data Studio which also houses your Google analytics and your web metrics and your X Y and Z all of these different things typically we've found and we've worked with clients to find this as well is there's
typically a simpler way to do it we just kind of have to take a step back and look at the platforms you have and the Integrations you can make you'll find things like that where hubspot's dashboard can build a report on all of these different areas or some of the other platforms we can you know we've done that same thing actually looking at numbers and everything is so interesting and I it's one of my favorite things about marketing is that you can you know that you can measure stuff but to Dean
na's Point remember that there are a lot of things that don't that are not trackable there's a lot of things that people are doing especially online these days that people may be engaging with your content a lot more than you ever thought they are or they may not be you know there are certain things that just can't be measured I love the numbers and everything but you do have to take it with a grain of salt be wary of of investing a lot in those kind of analytics tools to Erica's Point too if yo
u already have an automation tool or something like that you most likely have something like this that you can use already uh you know what are some quick examples of some of these analytics softwares that are out there well Google analytics is of course one that everybody probably already uses and knows about there's also super metrics Tableau is one that we've heard of and looker is the one that we've heard of again we use a lot of HubSpot Google analytics things like that kind of the more com
mon ones but there are other ones out there that probably have a lot more dig deeper into the numbers and things like that if you really need that kind of help with your analytics in one little piece of advice I think as well for marketers out there who are thinking about finding a separate platform to build a dashboard and then integrating all these tools Dana had mentioned there's typically a cost associated with that so just something to keep in mind is that if you decide let's say you decide
to move forward with a platform like Google data Studio where you're going to house all this data I would highly recommend you do some research on what plugins or Integrations are needed to pull in all of your other platforms because there are plugins required for some things like pulling HubSpot data into Google data Studio or pulling obviously the Google analytics data pulls directly but other platforms and social platforms and things like that there can be a cost associated with additional p
lugins so it can add up I guess is what I'm what I'm saying there that's a great point and I think we've talked about four different technologies that we commonly get asphalt like we said there's there's up to 15 000 different marketing technology options out there and I think as you're looking to build out your marketing technology stack there are absolutely some things to consider as you dive into it and you know the number one I would say have a plan on how the tech will be used because the s
trategy is really important don't just go by marketing automation or an ABM platform or any of the other options out there because it seems like everybody else is buying it and someone told you that's what you need if you don't have a plan going into it we've seen organizations that have purchased things and then didn't know how to use them and had to figure out once they already had the money there what they were going to do with it and from the perspective you know here at growth mode when we
see that we cringe because the reality is like you're paying for that platform and if you don't get it up and running within a short period of time you're now paying for it to sit there and six months nine months 12 months down the road you still don't have it up and running that's a lot of wasted money that could have been spent on programs that will actually drive results for your organization and that's just such a shame and not what as a marketing team you want to see happen and on that same
note we have had clients who have invested in a automation program or something and then only use it for one thing and don't even realize all of the different things that they could be doing with it and that again is kind of a waste of money because you know if you're just sending emails with it and you could be doing these you know all of these broad different marketing things you should be doing them so make sure you know what you're buying and all of the different things that it can do and I
think on that same no some another thing to consider is just the fact that implementation and the use of these tools it requires a lot of time and money so if you don't have that time or a resource internally to put as you know a champion of that platform or somebody who's going to help your team understand and utilize those tools the technology is really only going to be as good as you make it so I think it's something to consider as well well because a lot of times it's like marketing automat
ion there's Automation in the name that doesn't mean that there's no work to get it built out or to use it yes you the intention is to automate some of those marketing tasks but you still need to have someone managing and obviously continuing to fuel that platform and fuel your campaigns so it will only be as good as you make it yeah that's a great point and I think you know that leads me to the next thought which is walk before you run because you don't need everything right away and quite fran
kly too many Technologies may be over engineering your stack and setting you up for failure we've run into companies where we're talking to them and it's a one-person marketing department and they're like we have Marketo we have demand base we have XYZ where they've got like six technology tools and it's like okay how are you using it and they're like well you know we're trying to figure that out and it's like holy smokes you spent a lot of money to build out a beautiful Tech stack that you are
using five percent of it you are sending out basic email campaigns you didn't even need the Enterprise level of Marketo that you purchased that is something you know that I think people with really good intentions do because they want a really good marketing technology stack but again you don't need to over engineer it and then tell you get to a point where you can truly to Erica's Point invest the time in building it out and using it right it's a total waste of money I mean I think to that same
point the more the more you over engineer the tech stack the harder it's going to be to actually accomplish your goals because you're going to run into issues Where Oh I thought that data was integrating correctly or I thought this was and it's gonna become somebody's nightmare so I think that it's um that's really good advice Christina the other thing and kind of on that same note is that Integrations are really important and we have these conversations with clients all of the time when it com
es to the technology but keep in mind when we talk more text stack there's also so many ways to integrate what we would consider more just your Tech stack in general so integrating things like mere Outlook or your email your calendar your anything you know your teams your messenger slack things like that there are so many other ways to put Integrations in place to create additional efficiencies between your sales and marketing teams that it's really important to just remember the fact that Integ
rations are important and the more disjointed if you have all these Technologies in place the more disjointed your systems are the more challenges you're going to have with data and specifically marketing Automation and let's say your your marketing automation is in one platform in your sales CRM is somewhere cells without integrating the two of those things you're completely losing a whole aspect of transparency between marketing and sales and that alignment to the marketing activity and the en
gagement that's going on and the data we're collecting on all of these prospects back to sales if you're not integrating that data back and forth and vice versa when sales is putting information in regarding a prospect or client that marketing should know about in order to nurture or engage with that Prospect and none of that is communicated back and forth that's just one very easy example to kind of pick out I think is the importance of Integrations I think technology on the marketing front can
be a beautiful thing if you're able to build it out and integrate it and make it all work and truly optimize it it can also be a very frustrating thing for marketers and if you've tried to integrate systems and pull together disparate data you know what I'm talking about and so I think the key takeaway as you're thinking about building out a marketing technology stack for your HR technology company and how that fits into building out a demand generation engine in general is that a strong strate
gy should always come before building out a complex marketing technology stack for your organization but once you've got that down I think it definitely makes sense to look at how the technology can help enhance and streamline your marketing programs and if it isn't enhancing and it isn't streamlining and you don't have the ability to make the time investment in making that happen you're probably not ready for those Technologies and you know get that strategy there and then let's have that conve
rsation thanks for joining us on the demand gen fix a podcast for HR Tech marketers brought to you by growth Cloud marketing we sure hope you enjoyed it don't forget to subscribe for more perspectives on demand generation and B2B marketing strategies plus give us a like tell your friends what's see you next time
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