“Everything changes, and nothing stands still.”  -Heraclitus

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We’ve all been forced to deal with a lot of changes in the last few months, and there are certainly more to come. But as we’ve hastily adapted to new ways of working, this may actually be a good time to consider voluntary changes to improve work going forward. 

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Customers and markets seem to be changing faster than ever; you may find that changing up the marketing tools in your stack will help you keep up.Of course, marketing tools and solutions are also changing rapidly. As of January 2020, there were over 7,000 MarTech solutions on the market, each with its own strengths and weaknesses.

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Understanding how to use the best marketing tools to your advantage will not only make your life easier but it’ll help you provide better services to your clients resulting in higher retention.

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Evaluating all the options on your own can be daunting, so here's a  guide to some of the solutions our customers like best, based on where they choose to route data.

List of Marketing Tools for Martech Stacks

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Our library of cloud destinations is well-stocked with a variety of online marketing tools. Some are narrowly focused, but most are multi-tools, supporting a variety of marketing functions, from data storage and management, through marketing analytics, to advertising management.

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This guide divides the tools into three main categories: data and analytics tools, audience analytics and user behavior, and advertising management and placement. The multi-tools, naturally, do not fit neatly into categories. This guide lists the key features of each tool; you can find more detailed descriptions in our library. 

Data and Analytics Tools List

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Effective marketing starts with data, lots and lots of data, which needs to be organized, stored and analyzed to give you the insights you need to create a compelling marketing campaign and deliver effective advertising to the right audience. A big part of learning how to build a martech stack is doing the things that no one else wants to do. Managing data in an efficient and effective way gives you the best chance to generate new leads, build new business, and get results for your clients.

Data Storage and Management

This category includes data warehouses, data streaming services, tag managers and event logging solutions. 

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• Amazon Kinesis - real-time data streaming.
• Amazon Redshift - Postgres-style cloud database service.
• Google BigQuery - Postgres-style database cloud database service.
• Keen - collect and send event data; build analytics features into your tools and products; programmatically provision role-based data access for your users and customers; customizable APIs charting library; third-party integrations.
• Google Tag Manager - manage all deployed tags,  add and update tags for conversion tracking, site analytics and remarketing, control triggers and customize your infrastructure; supports all Google and third-party tags, built in security and error-checking.
• S3 Event Logs - scalable web-based cloud storage; storage management and administration, guaranteed data security, easy data imports and exports, object tagging.
• Webhooks - custom real-time event response.

Of course, these represent a wide variety of use cases. From simple tag management, which involves no real data collection at all, to data warehousing which can be used for incredibly advanced analysis and data science.

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If you're ready to move beyond tag management and start storing data, consider the difference between data lakes and data warehouses to help make your decision. 

Audience Analytics and User Behavior

This next bucket of solutions analyze user interaction on your website and mobile applications, and provide the insight you need to segment and target audiences through behavior analysis, customer intelligenx, market research and surveys. Remember what we said about managing data? Once you have all that data, you need to know what to do with it. There are many types of marketing tools within the marketing tech stack to help you translate the data into actions you need to take within your business.

• Amplitude -  behavioral data analytics, real-time cross-platform analytics, user activity dashboard, custom event funnels; easy integration with Amazon Redshift.
• KiSSmetrics - behavioral analytics, segmentation, email campaign automation, customer intelligence, website analytics.
• Lucky Orange - chat with customers; observe and record user mouse movements, scroll depth, and clicks; generate heatmaps and  create polls.
• Lytics - customer data platform to build user profiles, build cross-channel campaigns,  and predict behaviors with built-in machine learning.
• MixPanel - product analytics, user drop-off and churn risk funnel reports, A/B testing, JSQL, automated insights.
• Netmining - audience identification and targeting based on behavioral analytics.
• Resonate - customer intelligence tool, market research, advanced analytics, and digital media activation; DMP integrations; email marketing subscription service.
• Woopra - real-time tracking of  customers’ web and mobile activity, forms, emails, and support tickets.

Marketing Analytics

• Adobe Analytics - web analytics, channel and marketing analytics, attribution, predictive analytics
• Clicky - web analytics in real-time
• Google Analytics - real-time site information; comprehensive view into user acquisition, audience demographics, and conversion goals; supports audience targeting; seamless integration with Google AdWords and all DoubleClick products.
• Heap Analytics - mobile and web analytics; web and mobile tag creation, event visualizers, funnel data, and retention stats.
• VWO - web and mobile optimization via A/B testing

Marketing Content and Customer Experience

Campaign Management

• Acquisio - optimize performance across digital marketing campaigns; track the efficiency of SEM/PPC campaigns; A/B testing tools, ad-building tools, analytics dashboard
• HubSpot - inbound marketing and sales platform; marketing automation and CRM; landing page builder, SEO tools, lead management; social media engagement monitoring and ad tracking;
• Sailthru - purchase tracking, content personalization and email management

Customer Relationship Management

• Drift - conversational marketing and sales platform with live chat  and customer messaging.
• Intercom - customer messaging platform with chat, email, and in-app messages targeted to user behavior.

Marketing Automation

• Braze - mobile marketing automation, email automation with predictive analytics
• Customer.io - automated email marketing based on customer behavioral data; user segmentation, email templates and personalization options.
• Retention Science - marketing automation suite, predictive analytics, campaign development, website personalization, subscription software, and automated email campaigns.

Optimization and A/B Testing

• Bloom Reach - digital experience platform that accelerates customer engagement, conversion, and long-term brand success. Identify users' needs and create optimal digital experiences in real time.
• Facebook App Events - mobile app and web page event tracking and analytics, ad performance measurement, audience segmentation. 
• Hotjar - web and mobile behavioral analytics, heatmap, session recording, surveys, usability testing.
• Kenshoo pixel - detailed conversion data and attribution insights to manage and boost co-op advertising.
• Optimizely - A/B testing and experimentation, content optimization, multivariate experiments for web and mobile apps, performance and statistical significance dashboard.
• Pinterest Tag - user action tracking, ad management, conversion optimization, audience targeting.

Advertising Tools and Resources

Having the right advertising tools is a crucial component when learning how to build a martech stack. These tools will not only help you put together your advertisements but they’ll also help with managing and organizing them. Best of all, many advertising tools can help you schedule and place your ads too. The less time you have to spend in front of the computer the better. Converting all that advertising data into actionable insights is crucial. Many of these tools help translate the data into steps you can take to improve your business and your results.

Advertising Management

• Attribution - multi-touch attribution models to spread spending credit across ad platforms, social channels, and content marketing; cross-platform performance tracking.
• DoubleClick Floodlight - ad tracking and reporting.
• Facebook Pixel - manage all of your ads from one platform,  target your ads to lookalike audiences; optimize cross-platform ads for custom conversions; see when users view content, search for a product, interact with their wishlist, or add payment info.

Advertisement Placement

• Criteo - Google Shopping ad creation, optimization, and placement; creation and placement of native ads on retail sites; retarget dynamic ads across Facebook and Instagram.
• Google AdWords - Google AdWords is a pay-per-clickGoogle Search ad platform.
• Kenshoo - web and mobile advertising; automate and optimize marketing; Facebook Marketing Partner with native API solutions for ads across many platforms.
• Microsoft Advertising - pay-per-click search engine tool that can access Bing and Yahoo! Enables ad targeting, call-to-action prompts.
• OutBrain - content discovery and recommendation platform; content syndication. 
• Rubicon - allows publishers to perform transactions with top brands around the globe. Unified platform, dynamic campaigns, brand protection, and a global marketplace for buying or selling ads.
• Taboola - content discovery, recommendation,  creation and syndication.
• Twitter Ads - targeted ad campaigns based on web visits, followers, engagement and awareness
• Pebble Post - Uses online data to target consumers with printed mail and solutions for remarketing, acquisition, prospecting, and brand awareness.

Other

• Google Firebase - app development and monitoring; build, monitor and improve ads based on app performance feedback.
• Slack - send Identify and Track events to your slack workspace .

Let MetaRouter Connect Your Data to Its Destination

MetaRouter is a dead simple customer data infrastructure that collects customer data from all your devices and routes it to all your destinations. 

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We have simplified analytics integration to these destinations, making it easy for you to change your stack without consuming developer resources. There is no need to set up JavaScript libraries on every page of your site for each new tool, or install API libraries or  SDKs, or make major changes to your code. Once you have set up event tracking in your MetaRouter UI, you will be able to route and send data to any of our cloud destinations, without writing custom code for each one. 

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We may not be free to roam the world as we once we did right now, but MetaRouter can take your data to new destinations. We make it easy for you to stay flexible and keep your marketing stack agile. The whole goal of our product is to make it easy for you to not just understand but actually try out different combinations of tools to find the stack that works best for you—with the click of a button. 

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We’re always developing new integrations on customers’ requests, so if you don’t see a tool you really want in our library, contact us at support@metarouter.io and we’ll get you connected. 

Photo by Iva Rajović on Unsplash