The best tools for your marketing tech stack (plus pricing)
There are 8,000 marketing tools and counting. In this post, we break down the key areas of martech, how they can help you grow, and how much they cost. If you’re short on time, you can browse the curated (and frequently updated) list here.
Here’s a dirty little secret:
Nobody cares about your product.
At least, that’s how it’s going to feel in the beginning when you launch your product.
Running a successful startup is a function of two things: product and marketing strategy.
If you’re reading (or listening) to this, you’ve likely already built your MVP and now want to tell the whole world about it. But if you’re a developer or from a highly technical background, you might be struggling with the marketing aspect of things.
For example, what channels and formats should you focus on for your digital marketing strategy? Which marketing tools should you use?
We’ll cover how to build a broader marketing strategy in another article. Today, I want to focus specifically on the different tools you'll need to get the word out quickly.
This is known as your “marketing technology stack” (or martech stack) and it plays a big role in the success of any serious marketing effort.
We’ll break it down into the following sections:
Publishing and distribution
Content creation
Advertising and promotion
Marketing analytics
Customer relationship management
Let’s dive in.
What is a marketing tech stack and how does it help you?
Our curated marketing tech stack list
Your martech stack is a collection of tools you use to reach, attract, convert, and retain customers.
The ideal martech stack covers all aspects of the customer journey, from when they find out about your product to when they buy and tell all their friends about it.
The modern marketing technology landscape has grown rapidly since Scott Brinker started tracking it in 2011.
It has grown from a mere 150 tools to over 8,000 tools as of writing, with more emerging technologies on the way.
Of course, nobody needs 8,000 different tools for their marketing program to succeed (unless you're a tech-obsessed B2B marketer).
The truth is that the marketing technology landscape caters to differently-sized teams - from the bootstrapped marketing team to the well-funded enterprise marketing department.
Here at FMP, we focus on helping early-stage founders go to market so that's our focus for today.
But what should you keep in mind when building your marketing stack?
A few important questions that every B2C or B2B marketer should ask themselves include:
Where in my marketing funnel does this tool benefit me? Each marketing tool should have a defined role in helping to attract, engage, convert, or track your customers.
Can I get this functionality as part of another tool? The marketing technology landscape has seen new entrants niche down on ever more specific aspects of marketing. For example, we first had bundled software that helped you manage your social media and report on engagement, reach, and performance. Then, we had software that just focused on digital marketing analytics, or just focused on content creation. However, if you can get a tool that does it all in one, go for that one instead.
How much will it cost me? A monthly subscription for a digital marketing tool can be as low as the price of a few cups of coffee - but multiply that across 20 different tools and it starts to add up. This goes back to point #2: if you can get it bundled, do so.
Will this tool play nicely with all my other tools? Integration becomes more and more important as you build out your digital marketing program. So for instance, if you use a specific content platform for your website, make sure you can easily integrate an email marketing tool later on.
The above questions will guide you as you set about adding new tools to your stack. Let’s now look at the first part of any founder’s marketing stack: publishing and distribution.
Section #1: Publishing and distribution
The first step in your marketing effort is to set up a publishing and distribution infrastructure.
Putting this in place ensures you’ve got a home for your product online as well as a way to distribute new content you create.
You’ll need the following items:
A website
Social media channels
An email marketing tool
A landing page builder
Let’s look at each separately.
Website
Your website is a one-stop-shop for your product on the web.
With a website, you can provide information on who you are, what you offer, how it benefits your customers, and how much it will cost them.
It’s also where you’ll host your blog, resources, vacancies, and contact details.
Lastly, your website links out to your social media channels where customers can connect and engage with you.
In short, it's the ultimate lead generation tool in your toolkit.
What are the best website creation tools?
You can create a website in one of three ways:
Code it from scratch
Use templates
Drag and drop
Coding a website from scratch means wading into HTML, CSS, PHP, and Javascript code to hack together something functional.
This is the hard way (and beyond the scope of this piece), but it gives you complete control over your site.
The next, slightly easier way to customize your website is from a template. This method is faster to set up and still lets you customize the final output. There’s usually little to no code involved.
Tools that are great for this include:
Wix
Weebly
Shopify
Webflow
WordPress
Forestry (a headless CMS), and
Squarespace (which FMP runs on!)
After you've created your website, it's time to set up on social.
Which social media platforms are best for startups?
Social media is where you can connect and engage with your buyers and prospects.
Studies show that 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level or vice-president level executives use social media to make purchasing decisions. Furthermore, 97% of buyers start their research on social media before buying a product.
This means you absolutely cannot afford to be absent from social media. It's an essential element of your lead generation strategy.
Now, depending on the type of product you’re selling, you have a few options when it comes to which social media platform(s) to call home:
Facebook is the world's largest social media network with over 2.7 billion* monthly active users. It's great for marketers who want to reach the widest possible audience.
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform and has over 353 million* monthly active users.
LinkedIn is a professional networking platform with 722 million monthly active users. It's the best platform for any B2B marketer looking for early traction.
Instagram is the world's largest photo-sharing site with over 1.1 billion* monthly active users. If you've got a B2C or D2C product, Instagram is the best place to start.
YouTube is the world's largest video-sharing site with over 2 billion* monthly active users and a robust analytics dashboard to track the performance of your videos.
TikTok is a newer site with 689 million* monthly active users as of writing. It's perfect for D2C brands and uses its algorithm to expose more users to different types of content.
These platforms are all free to use and most of them allow you to place ads for a fee.
* Secondary data sources: Datareportal
What's the best email marketing tool for startups?
Let's start by debunking a common myth: Email isn’t dead.
In fact, email marketing delivers an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent and marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
This means that a marketing automation platform can drive significant conversions for you when used right.
A few email marketing platforms to check out include Mailchimp, SendFox, Lemlist, ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, and GetResponse. If you’re using Squarespace or Shopify, you get email marketing capabilities built-in.
You can also get an email marketing platform bundled as part of your CRM software (which we discuss later in this article). Doing so saves you cash and improves the integration across your tech stack.
Which landing page builder is best for my business?
If you're not keen on building a full website just yet, you can opt for a single landing page to collect contact information and payments.
The best landing page builders are intuitive, provide templates, and track all traffic to your landing page.
You can try out tools like Unbounce, Swipe Pages, Leadpages, Instapage, and Carrd. You can even use Notion to build your landing page.
(See this list from Zapier for more landing page builders.)
Now that you have your publishing platforms set up, let’s move on to creating content for them.
Section #2: Content creation
Content is king.
In fact, content marketing (a subset of inbound marketing) can generate 54% more leads while costing you up to 62% less compared to traditional forms of marketing.
Creating content is how you tell the world about your product and show how it can help your customers to solve their pain points.
Content marketing spans many channels like email, social, web, and online events. It can take the form of text, images, videos, animations, and even audio.
The basics of content marketing boil down to the following:
Content ideation and SEO
Content creation
Content publishing
But which content marketing tool should you use? Let’s look at a few options.
Content ideation and SEO
For content ideation, start with some keyword analysis to know which phrases to rank for in search results.
This ensures you’re creating content that people are actually searching for and which is optimized for the customer journey. You can use Ahrefs, SEMrush, Moz or Ubersuggest to accomplish this.
To kickstart your content creation process, try out different tools like Copy.ai, nichesss, Copysmith, or ShortlyAI to get blog headlines, social media post ideas, and even ad copy. And once your assets are live, head over to Wynter to test your copy with relevant, real-life people from your target audience.
For longer-form pieces like blog articles, it helps to know where the content gaps are in existing search results.
A content marketing tool like MarketMuse, Frase, or Postpace can help you spot these gaps and build insightful content pieces around them.
Content creation
As you write your content, you’ll need to ensure that the copy, grammar, and flow are all pristine. Use a writing tool like Grammarly, ProWritingAid, or the Hemingway App to check through your copy and make edits.
When you’re done writing your content, you might need to design some graphics for the blog, email newsletter, or social media posts. You want a tool that can whip up graphics quickly and easily.
Canva is a popular content creation tool that’s cheap, fast, and good - the ultimate trifecta. Check out alternatives like Desygner and Crello as well.
If you need infographics and charts, consider using Piktochart, Infogr.am, or Venngage.
Finally, it’s time to publish your content.
Content publishing
First, post your content to your owned channels. This can be your website, social media accounts, and email list.
For your website, you can publish directly to your CMS (whether WordPress, Webflow, or another tool). Software like WordPigeon easily lets you publish directly to WordPress from Google Docs.
If you’re looking to host webinars, Zoom and Airmeet are all great options to use.
For social media, you can automate much of your publishing with content schedulers like Publer, Buffer, Metricool, and Hootsuite.
Video content can be published straight to YouTube and Loom, both of which let you host and share videos on the web (for free).
For email newsletters, there are plenty of tools on the market that let you automate and track your email campaigns. Top tools include Substack, Mailchimp, SendFox, and ConvertKit.
The above tools are meant to help you kickstart any content marketing effort. But while publishing on your own channels is a great starting point, you’ll need to invest in PR and paid ads for maximum reach. Let’s look at that next.
Section #3: Advertising and promotion
Paid advertising is a powerful way to expose your product to new audiences. The amount of reach you can enjoy is limited only by your budget and creativity.
Let’s start with some quick wins you can gain when promoting your content and product online.
Post to social media groups on Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, and Discord, depending on the product you’re selling. These online communities tend to have targeted audiences that might find your product relevant to them. All of these platforms are free to join, but there might be an initial application process involved.
Check HARO for any queries related to your industry or product. This can be a way to garner free press directed at a targeted audience in a specific location.
Reach out to influencers in your industry and ask them to check out and share your content with their networks. Tools like Ninja Outreach, BuzzStream, and Outreach Plus help you find and engage relevant personalities in your niche.
Beyond these free platforms, you’ll have to pay for increased reach and traffic. Here are some tools and platforms that can help with that:
Google AdWords: AdWords allows you to create campaigns that target a specific demographic over a certain period, for a predefined budget. The tool allows you to show your ad alongside specific keywords in search engine results pages (also known as SERPs). You can also allow or disallow your ad to show up next to certain keywords or on specific webpages. Your campaign reach is limited only by your budget.
Facebook and Instagram ads: Facebook is a social media juggernaut that boasts a highly granular ad delivery system. By letting advertisers show ads to people with specific interests, demographics, and shared traits in the form of “lookalike audiences,” this means it’s faster, easier, and cheaper to reach 10,000 people on Facebook and Instagram than to reach those same people offline.
Twitter ads: Twitter ads put your brand in front of over 300m+ people on the popular microblogging platform. You’ll need a stellar campaign to cut through the noise and drive traffic to your website or landing page. See this guide for more information.
LinkedIn ads: Built primarily for the B2B space, LinkedIn ads work well if you’re trying to expose your brand or product to a business audience. Keep in mind that the cost of advertising on LinkedIn can be quite high for a startup, so pace your advertising budget accordingly.
PR platforms like PR Newswire, PR Fire, JustReachOut, and more: There are many PR platforms that help distribute your content to the right audience of consumers, bloggers, and journalists. Expect to pay anywhere from $50 and up per industry distribution, per piece.
(See this list for more content promotion and distribution tools.)
Boosting your content is a good step towards driving awareness and conversions, but how do you know what’s working?
That's where analytics comes in.
The following steps outline easy ways to track all your marketing efforts across the web.
Section #4: Marketing analytics
You can’t measure what you don’t track.
At FMP, we encourage founders to set up tools that let them see how well their marketing activities are working, what their audience is responding to, and where they might need to make changes.
This section outlines some of the best tools to get you started with marketing analytics, in no particular order:
Website analytics tool: As soon as you set up your website, you need to start measuring how much traffic you’re getting in real-time. Google Analytics lets you see the locations, demographics, devices, and other attributes of your website visitors. Similarly, the Google Search Console lets you know which keywords you’re ranking for. If you’re not ranking for your desired keywords, it might be time to work on your SEO strategy. Lastly, a tool like Hotjar (free; then $39/mo) lets you track what users are doing on your website so you can optimize the right elements for increased conversions.
Social media analytics tool: You can track the performance of your ad campaigns natively on any social media platform that allows advertising.
Email analytics tool: Depending on the email marketing tool you use, most of them come with built-in analytics that tells you how many people opened your email and which links they clicked within those emails. You can find this feature in Mailchimp, Substack, ActiveCampaign, GetResponse, and ConvertKit.
Section #5: Customer relationship management
With your marketing process underway, you need a way to store and manage all that customer data you're collecting.
A customer relationship management tool (CRM) lets you store, track, and engage with your customers from one dashboard.
It helps you save time by following up on new sales opportunities and flagging new issues that need to be addressed.
The best CRM software has 3 key attributes: it scales with your business, it's affordable, and it integrates well with your existing tech stack.
And if you're using a fully-fledged marketing automation tool, you can manage your lead generation, email marketing campaigns, social media campaigns, and customer support - all from one dashboard.
Examples of CRM software include Nutshell, Intercom, Hubspot, and Salesforce — all of which come with email marketing capabilities built-in. You can also use Airtable, and if you join the FMP community you get a free, pre-built Airtable CRM template.
(Learn how to pick the right CRM tool for your business in this article.)
What martech stack does FMP use?
Great question! Our martech stack will change as we grow, but right now we use the following key tools:
GoDaddy for our website domain name
Squarespace for the website
Google Analytics for website analytics
Intercom for our CRM and email marketing
Buffer for social media management
Figma and Canva for designs and graphics
Beamer to share important news and updates
Notion for project management
Airtable for our records, roadmap, and lists like this
Miro for visual collaboration
Wrap up
The marketing tech stack list—curated and updated frequently:
Your marketing tech stack determines how well you can reach your audience.
The best tech stack addresses each step of your customer journey from awareness to purchase across different channels.
There are plenty of platforms to help you with publishing and distribution, content creation, advertising and promotion, marketing analytics, and customer relationship management.
We’ve provided just a few different tools in this article - but a quick online search should turn up plenty more to choose from.
We’ll leave you with a small hint:
Look for lifetime deals.
A lifetime deal (LTD) lets you pay once and use the software forever. It’s a fantastic way to save money in the long run.
You can find lifetime deals on sites like AppSumo, StackSocial, and Pitchground. You can thank us later.
