#Why is the Salesforce (CRM) CEO Selling Stock?
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Why is the Salesforce (CRM) CEO Selling Stock?
Frighteningly, Salesforce’s (CRM) co-founder and co-CEO, Marc Benioff, is selling large blocks of the company’s stock almost each day. Benioff has been selling 15,000 shares of Salesforce (CRM) each day since July, Bloomberg claims. Hence, I calculate Benioff made around $3.858 million a day selling stock. If Salesforce’s share price matched the $257.21 Mr. Market paid for it on 14 December…
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#How Much Cash Does Salesforce (CRM) Generate?#Is Salesforce (CRM) making money?#Salesforce (CRM)#What Value Does Salesforce (CRM) Offer?#Why is the Salesforce (CRM) CEO Selling Stock?
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Your MarTech Tool Stack Isn’t Complete in 2018 Without These 13 Apps
Think your marketing technology (MarTech) stack is king? Pull yourself out of 2017.
Your customers are dropping out of your funnel. Engagement is down. The CEO is on you to get results… today.
Where can you find more efficient ways to get the job done?
A better MarTech stack.
If you aren’t using a diverse set of tools, you’re likely falling behind.
Marketing departments around the world are scrambling to find the best ways to identify and engage their customers.
Are you wondering why your team can’t find more customers? Or better satisfy your existing profit centers?
It’s because your MarTech stack needs a facelift. An upgrade to help you better serve customer needs and enable easy onboarding.
Like a valley girl without botox, a business in 2018 without a proper stack is showing its true age.
But with over 5,000 MarTech options available, finding the right tools for the job can be daunting.
Luckily, I’ve got your back.
Get your MarTech stack ready for the future with the hottest apps on the block.
1. Salesforce
Managing customer relations is key to growing your business.
It’s 5x less expensive to keep an existing customer than to sell to a new one.
But upselling and reselling to existing customers presents a big challenge.
Just because someone bought from you once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again or stick around forever.
You need to manage and nurture the customer relationship.
When it comes to that, Salesforce continues to steal the CRM “best in show” — and with good reason.
It recently topped Fortune’s list of 100 best companies to work for in 2018 and has been able to retain consistent growth behind its experienced leadership.
What’s their secret to being the biggest SaaS shark in the ocean?
It’s one of the most customizable CRMs out there and has been battle-tested for nearly two decades.
It has integrations for just about every use case with it’s AppExchange being second to none.
With AppExchange, you can find, locate and utilize different applications like you would plugins on WordPress.
Businesses of all sizes use it and love it.
Whether you are a mom-and-pop shop getting started or a large enterprise org, Salesforce has seen your use case before and has a solution.
Dashboards are full of comprehensive data that you can use to build customers from small lifetime values to high lifetime values.
Salesforce is king when it comes to customer relationship management.
2. Hootsuite
When it comes to social media, today’s consumer is everywhere.
In fact, the average consumer has seven different social media accounts spread across multiple platforms.
While that presents an opportunity in the form of reaching new customers with multi-channel strategies, it also creates an internal nightmare when it comes to managing it.
Posting, liking, commenting and engaging on seven platforms? That’s a full-time job.
But not when you take advantage of platforms like Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a necessity for managing your social media presence.
While Facebook Advertising is primarily about “speaking” to your customers, Hootsuite should be used to “listen” and engage.
Of course, finding a way to listen to multiple channels at the same time is difficult. Hootsuite solves the problem by managing all your social channels in one place.
By using a unique dashboard to monitor unlimited streams from all the social media channels your team uses, you can schedule, optimize and interact with consumers in just minutes on any platform.
With integrated analytics dashboards, pulling up reports for your marketing and sales teams is easy.
Connecting to diverse content systems beyond social, you can pull up free stock images to aid your social campaigns:
The platform is decked to the fullest, helping you manage social media with one tool in a sector that normally requires multiple.
3. Google AdWords
Reaching new customers is key to scaling your business.
And there’s possibly no better place to do that than advertising with AdWords.
Despite Facebook’s massive growth, Google AdWords is still the most widely used advertising platform in the world.
In fact, getting certified in AdWords is seen as a necessity for most entry-level digital marketing professionals.
While most people are interested in Facebook, here’s why you should keep AdWords in your toolbox:
AdWords packs a punch in the form of intent.
If cleanliness is next to godliness, then intent is next to customer acquisition.
On platforms like Facebook, people aren’t there to see ads or find products. They are engaging with friends, family, and funny videos.
But on AdWords, people are actively searching via keywords to find solutions to their problems:
They want help ASAP. So you can virtually skip the typical funnel process and get down to selling.
On top of intent, AdWords packs reach. Google handles over 40,000 searches every second.
Not to mention over 3.5 billion each day and 1.2 trillion each year.
With AdWords, you can also advertise on YouTube, a platform with 1.5 billion monthly active users who watch more than an hour of content daily.
In terms of support, you have access to dedicated account managers that will help run and optimize your campaigns.
The dashboard is extremely easy to use, too.
With diverse demographic targeting and custom audiences, you can reach users with Facebook-like specificity.
AdWords is the bread-and-butter of PPC advertising and will continue to dominate with its massive user base.
Add it to your stack and get your piece of the pie today.
4. Optimizely
Running tests is critical to finding success. Whether in product creation, marketing development or sales.
Test and test again.
But when most A/B tests fail, you often can’t rely on your own, basic marketing tests to provide statistically significant data.
Let Optimizely take your experiments by the horns to stay ahead of the competition.
Test against your assumptions to build better campaigns that capture more users and increase retention.
People will think you became a guru overnight.
There are a number of ways you can impress your team with Optimizely.
Use Optimizely X, and you can experiment across “every device, every channel, and every customer touchpoint.”
With unlimited users, you can easily collaborate with anyone to build dashboards that will make your executive team happy.
Show the world your technical prowess by empowering developers to support your optimization marketing tech.
Optimizely powers optimization and testing for some of the largest companies on the planet for a reason:
It simplifies testing and provides accurate, effective results.
5. Crazy Egg
Every marketer thinks they understand their customers. Their pain points, wants and needs.
But when it comes to driving sales, do you know how the user experienced your site? What they loved or hated?
Unless you are using a heat mapping tool like Crazy Egg, you likely don’t.
Crazy Egg is known as a heatmapping tool that provides an X-ray of how visitors are interacting with your site.
They were one of the first in the space, and remain the top player for a few main reasons.
With Crazy Egg, you can see which part of your pages users click on the most, where they are spending the most time (on a per-page basis), and what areas are being completely ignored.
They offer four different views, but Heatmap and Scrollmap are where it’s at.
Heatmap allows you to see where users are clicking and Scrollmap allows you to see where users are spending the most time (especially helpful for those of you producing long-form content).
Crazy Egg allows you to A/B test different variations of pages so you can continue to make iterations.
Getting insights on how your users interact with you is invaluable for optimization. Quit your slacking and start using heatmaps.
Speaking of slacking…
6. Slack
Collaborating and communicating across teams and departments shouldn’t be a boring, tedious or annoying process.
And, it shouldn’t be an afterthought, either.
According to HubSpot, the more aligned your sales and marketing team is, the better overall growth you’ll achieve.
And that’s where Slack comes into play.
With Slack, all of your team communication exists in one place. You can message individuals directly, create a group, and create Slack channels to keep conversations topical and organized.
Plus, they have integrations with EVERYTHING. GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, Heroku and countless other MarTech tools. The list doesn’t end.
Slack is where work gets done, and team communication stays fluid.
7. Marketo
Latest data shows that 91% of companies using marketing automation find it to be an integral piece of their marketing strategy.
The fact of the matter is, with so many channels and platforms available to marketers today, automation is necessary to thrive.
And Marketo is a powerhouse of automation designed for marketers by marketers.
If you’re in B2B and want to get an idea of how your prospects are interacting with all your marketing channels, Marketo is the wingman you’ve always wanted.
Built on the same core platform as Salesforce, Marketo is a necessity for any team running multiple channels for customer acquisition.
With an easy-to-use modular system featuring marketing automation, consumer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, and marketing management, you can customize everything for your specific business needs.
Marketo is designed for scaling businesses.
The platform allows you to clone entire programs such as landing pages and email marketing, so you don’t have to create new ones as your grow.
Using advanced reporting to pull detailed customer analytics and then compare across channels, Marketo can integrate with just about any other MarTech tool you use.
Marketo is built for the power-user. For the marketing team that attacks multiple channels and needs heavy equipment to get the job done.
8. AdRoll
AdRoll arrived on the MarTech scene as a retargeting platform but has since transitioned into a full-funnel DSP (demand-side platform).
What does this mean? AdRoll allows you to attract new customers to your site, convert site visitors at scale, and continue to maintain a relationship with your existing customers.
Programmatic marketing has gotten some flack recently, but the numbers don’t lie:
There is a reason AdRoll has over 30,000 customers (well, there’s at least 30,000 reasons).
And what AdRoll is working on in the future is even more interesting.
AdRoll plans to focus more on incrementality utilizing big data and machine learning to get a complete sense of which ads are actually causing customers to make a purchase.
They are building out an account-based marketing solution and are poised to become a market leader in the space.
Take their access to over 300 ad networks and exchanges, add an advanced bidding tool, and layer in very specific customer data from Bombora.
That’s a recipe for potential success and more money in your company war chest.
Their account management is second to none. For mid-market companies, you will not get the same level of customer service from Google or Facebook.
Want a platform to help grow and nurture customers? Look no further.
9. Sprinklr
CXM, or customer experience management, is the audience engagement need for your MarTech stack in 2018.
Have you heard the maxim, “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care”?
With CXM, that core idea rings true. Engaging with your audience is an absolute must-have for creating a dialogue about your brand.
Sprinklr makes this easier than ever to put into practice.
Their CXM platform gives you complete control over the customer experience.
Pull over 25 social channels into a unified platform. Reach and listen to all your customers in one place.
Add context to data pulled from other platforms, like your Salesforce CRM.
Schedule your campaigns and monitor results with ease.
Leverage Sprinklr’s app marketplace to make the most of your CXM data.
With diverse integrations, you’ll be able to connect Sprinklr to any other tool in your stack.
10. MailChimp
When it comes to email marketing, there are countless platforms available.
But starting out with your first platform can make or break your success.
Some cost a fortune, and others are meant for top-level companies.
Thankfully, MailChimp exists, allowing any company of any size to start an email marketing campaign in just minutes.
With powerful analytics dashboards, you get clear data on your campaigns without vanity metrics:
Using a drag-and-drop email building system, you can get campaigns established fast with the look and appeal of a high-tech, high-cost platform:
The fact is, email still reigns supreme in 2018.
Email is still one of the most influential information sources for B2B audiences.
On the B2C side of things, welcome emails generate 320% more revenue than general promotional messages.
If you aren’t capitalizing on the opportunities to maximize revenue from your email marketing… well, then what are you doing?
MailChimp makes it easier than ever to build automated campaigns for drip funnels and promotional marketing, with templates that make the process a breeze for you and your team.
You can quickly split your audiences into lists for optimal campaign performance.
As with most MarTech tools, it integrates with just about every app on the planet.
My personal favorite tactic is using Gleam to build a competition, then leveraging automation in MailChimp to convert those participants into customers.
All that’s left to do is sit back and watch yourself win.
11. Wrike
Keeping everyone on the same page is just as vital as getting your MarTech stack working overtime.
Ensuring that every team is interconnected, working together and sharing information isn’t easy.
Especially when teams are hard at work.
And that’s where Wrike comes into play.
Wrike has an advantage as one of the leading productivity management platforms in the world.
When your MarTech needs to stay on track, count on Wrike to keep all your campaign tasks organized.
Wrike helps you to test workflows before launching them into campaigns and manage communications across members of your team.
In addition to a robust free trial and extensive documentation to get you started, Wrike boasts a library of integrations — including some of the market-leading MarTech tools.
Wrike is perfect for businesses that get work done and need to share that work across various departments and teams.
Integrate it into your marketing stack for streamlined communications and efficiency.
12. Zapier
Say you need to connect your Kissmetrics campaigns to reports to Crazy Egg, and then email those reports to your supervisor at 4:00 PM on the dot?
Diverse, detailed and seriously precise marketing automation like that is hard to come by.
And that’s why Zapier is dominating the competition.
Connecting anything to well, anything, is as easy as selecting a few dropdowns. Choose the apps you want to connect, create a hook, and voila — instant MarTech magic.
Zapier is the Muhammad Ali of automation. Using easy, customizable triggers and actions, you can connect any app in your stack to run highly specific tasks.
Once you’ve set it up, you simply let it run in the background, automating most of your daily tasks that kill your time.
13. SERPs
SEO has changed dramatically in the past ten years. In fact, Google makes updates to their algorithm nearly 600 times each year.
That’s more than once a day.
Staying up-to-date with SEO is crucial, and there is perhaps no better way to know who is outranking you on specific keywords than SERPs.
SERPs is the one-stop shop for competitive SEO insights. Your SEO is never good enough in today’s algorithm-shifting world.
Until you hit #1 ranking for every targeted keyword, there is always opportunity to improve.
SERPs helps you go above and beyond plain old research to deliver actionable insights about your competition.
When researching their Google ranking index or keyword research database, you can gather insights on which keywords competitors are targeting, campaign costs against those keywords, and SEO rankings for specific landing pages or blog content.
Stop doing keyword research with sub-par platforms or directly on Google.
Integrate SERPs to get the benefit of keyword research and competitor research in one.
Bringing it all together
Building a MarTech stack is a complex problem.
You have over 5,000 options to choose from with a very specific budget and a list of requirements.
Want to hear some good news? You’ve already done the hard work. Finding the right resources is half the battle.
The other half of the battle is getting your knowledge to align with actions.
You are the glue holding your MarTech stack together. Without your decisions, there is no marketing ROI for you and your team.
You still need to bring everything together to ensure your team can make the most of this powerful MarTech tool stack.
First, ask yourself these two key questions.
What are my immediate goals?
Your initial answers to this question led you here, so it may be time to really look into what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
In my first marketing role at a SaaS company, we spent about $10,000 on LinkedIn Ads that only converted 0.1% of users who clicked through.
In some companies, this is a campaign that can put you out on the street.
You know what our team did instead of stressing about the results? We doubled down with a clearer objective.
Our initial goal was too broad. “Convert 1% of user click-throughs” only works if you’re offering real value and understand why your content is valuable.
We were trying to sell ourselves without telling a story, and our prospective customers could see right through it. So what did our new goal become?
“Convert 1% of user click-throughs and increase total ad clicks by 5,000.” Then we were prioritizing context as well as optimization.
Bringing this back around to the finish line, your goals are the hidden driver for your MarTech stack.
Understand your why and be clear about how each MarTech tool guides you toward success.
Where are you going to achieve a greater ROI?
The trick is actually more simple than it may seem.
You’ll generate ROI when you test assumptions and land in the right place at the right time.
With measurable and actionable results, you tell a more informed story about your customers.
A better story leads to better experiments. Before you know it, your marketing machine does all the heavy lifting for you.
For example, your life is easier when you put the majority of the load on your MarTech stack.
With Kissmetrics, for instance, it’s easy to analyze, segment, and connect your marketing automation in a single platform.
Your MarTech tool stack is the key to achieving successful ROI in your marketing efforts. Without it, you’re Captain Ahab in the ocean minus a paddle and spear.
Conclusion
Marketing stacks are key to streamlining your marketing campaigns in the modern world.
With so many options to choose from, it can often be overwhelming.
For your average mid-market company, a combination of Kissmetrics (below) + Crazy Egg + HubSpot + Google + Facebook may be all you need.
Even startups can benefit from this stack.
Enterprises can combine these tools and more to achieve even more growth.
With the addition of Sprinklr and other CXM tools, every channel becomes a potential revenue stream.
You’ve shown an appetite for winning in the marketing game by getting this far.
Go forth, build your MarTech tool stack, and show the world what you can do.
What completes your MarTech tool stack?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2GUzZvV via http://ift.tt/1oIgpXs
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Your MarTech Tool Stack Isn’t Complete in 2018 Without These 13 Apps
Think your marketing technology (MarTech) stack is king? Pull yourself out of 2017.
Your customers are dropping out of your funnel. Engagement is down. The CEO is on you to get results… today.
Where can you find more efficient ways to get the job done?
A better MarTech stack.
If you aren’t using a diverse set of tools, you’re likely falling behind.
Marketing departments around the world are scrambling to find the best ways to identify and engage their customers.
Are you wondering why your team can’t find more customers? Or better satisfy your existing profit centers?
It’s because your MarTech stack needs a facelift. An upgrade to help you better serve customer needs and enable easy onboarding.
Like a valley girl without botox, a business in 2018 without a proper stack is showing its true age.
But with over 5,000 MarTech options available, finding the right tools for the job can be daunting.
Luckily, I’ve got your back.
Get your MarTech stack ready for the future with the hottest apps on the block.
1. Salesforce
Managing customer relations is key to growing your business.
It’s 5x less expensive to keep an existing customer than to sell to a new one.
But upselling and reselling to existing customers presents a big challenge.
Just because someone bought from you once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again or stick around forever.
You need to manage and nurture the customer relationship.
When it comes to that, Salesforce continues to steal the CRM “best in show” — and with good reason.
It recently topped Fortune’s list of 100 best companies to work for in 2018 and has been able to retain consistent growth behind its experienced leadership.
What’s their secret to being the biggest SaaS shark in the ocean?
It’s one of the most customizable CRMs out there and has been battle-tested for nearly two decades.
It has integrations for just about every use case with it’s AppExchange being second to none.
With AppExchange, you can find, locate and utilize different applications like you would plugins on WordPress.
Businesses of all sizes use it and love it.
Whether you are a mom-and-pop shop getting started or a large enterprise org, Salesforce has seen your use case before and has a solution.
Dashboards are full of comprehensive data that you can use to build customers from small lifetime values to high lifetime values.
Salesforce is king when it comes to customer relationship management.
2. Hootsuite
When it comes to social media, today’s consumer is everywhere.
In fact, the average consumer has seven different social media accounts spread across multiple platforms.
While that presents an opportunity in the form of reaching new customers with multi-channel strategies, it also creates an internal nightmare when it comes to managing it.
Posting, liking, commenting and engaging on seven platforms? That’s a full-time job.
But not when you take advantage of platforms like Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a necessity for managing your social media presence.
While Facebook Advertising is primarily about “speaking” to your customers, Hootsuite should be used to “listen” and engage.
Of course, finding a way to listen to multiple channels at the same time is difficult. Hootsuite solves the problem by managing all your social channels in one place.
By using a unique dashboard to monitor unlimited streams from all the social media channels your team uses, you can schedule, optimize and interact with consumers in just minutes on any platform.
With integrated analytics dashboards, pulling up reports for your marketing and sales teams is easy.
Connecting to diverse content systems beyond social, you can pull up free stock images to aid your social campaigns:
The platform is decked to the fullest, helping you manage social media with one tool in a sector that normally requires multiple.
3. Google AdWords
Reaching new customers is key to scaling your business.
And there’s possibly no better place to do that than advertising with AdWords.
Despite Facebook’s massive growth, Google AdWords is still the most widely used advertising platform in the world.
In fact, getting certified in AdWords is seen as a necessity for most entry-level digital marketing professionals.
While most people are interested in Facebook, here’s why you should keep AdWords in your toolbox:
AdWords packs a punch in the form of intent.
If cleanliness is next to godliness, then intent is next to customer acquisition.
On platforms like Facebook, people aren’t there to see ads or find products. They are engaging with friends, family, and funny videos.
But on AdWords, people are actively searching via keywords to find solutions to their problems:
They want help ASAP. So you can virtually skip the typical funnel process and get down to selling.
On top of intent, AdWords packs reach. Google handles over 40,000 searches every second.
Not to mention over 3.5 billion each day and 1.2 trillion each year.
With AdWords, you can also advertise on YouTube, a platform with 1.5 billion monthly active users who watch more than an hour of content daily.
In terms of support, you have access to dedicated account managers that will help run and optimize your campaigns.
The dashboard is extremely easy to use, too.
With diverse demographic targeting and custom audiences, you can reach users with Facebook-like specificity.
AdWords is the bread-and-butter of PPC advertising and will continue to dominate with its massive user base.
Add it to your stack and get your piece of the pie today.
4. Optimizely
Running tests is critical to finding success. Whether in product creation, marketing development or sales.
Test and test again.
But when most A/B tests fail, you often can’t rely on your own, basic marketing tests to provide statistically significant data.
Let Optimizely take your experiments by the horns to stay ahead of the competition.
Test against your assumptions to build better campaigns that capture more users and increase retention.
People will think you became a guru overnight.
There are a number of ways you can impress your team with Optimizely.
Use Optimizely X, and you can experiment across “every device, every channel, and every customer touchpoint.”
With unlimited users, you can easily collaborate with anyone to build dashboards that will make your executive team happy.
Show the world your technical prowess by empowering developers to support your optimization marketing tech.
Optimizely powers optimization and testing for some of the largest companies on the planet for a reason:
It simplifies testing and provides accurate, effective results.
5. Crazy Egg
Every marketer thinks they understand their customers. Their pain points, wants and needs.
But when it comes to driving sales, do you know how the user experienced your site? What they loved or hated?
Unless you are using a heat mapping tool like Crazy Egg, you likely don’t.
Crazy Egg is known as a heatmapping tool that provides an X-ray of how visitors are interacting with your site.
They were one of the first in the space, and remain the top player for a few main reasons.
With Crazy Egg, you can see which part of your pages users click on the most, where they are spending the most time (on a per-page basis), and what areas are being completely ignored.
They offer four different views, but Heatmap and Scrollmap are where it’s at.
Heatmap allows you to see where users are clicking and Scrollmap allows you to see where users are spending the most time (especially helpful for those of you producing long-form content).
Crazy Egg allows you to A/B test different variations of pages so you can continue to make iterations.
Getting insights on how your users interact with you is invaluable for optimization. Quit your slacking and start using heatmaps.
Speaking of slacking…
6. Slack
Collaborating and communicating across teams and departments shouldn’t be a boring, tedious or annoying process.
And, it shouldn’t be an afterthought, either.
According to HubSpot, the more aligned your sales and marketing team is, the better overall growth you’ll achieve.
And that’s where Slack comes into play.
With Slack, all of your team communication exists in one place. You can message individuals directly, create a group, and create Slack channels to keep conversations topical and organized.
Plus, they have integrations with EVERYTHING. GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, Heroku and countless other MarTech tools. The list doesn’t end.
Slack is where work gets done, and team communication stays fluid.
7. Marketo
Latest data shows that 91% of companies using marketing automation find it to be an integral piece of their marketing strategy.
The fact of the matter is, with so many channels and platforms available to marketers today, automation is necessary to thrive.
And Marketo is a powerhouse of automation designed for marketers by marketers.
If you’re in B2B and want to get an idea of how your prospects are interacting with all your marketing channels, Marketo is the wingman you’ve always wanted.
Built on the same core platform as Salesforce, Marketo is a necessity for any team running multiple channels for customer acquisition.
With an easy-to-use modular system featuring marketing automation, consumer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, and marketing management, you can customize everything for your specific business needs.
Marketo is designed for scaling businesses.
The platform allows you to clone entire programs such as landing pages and email marketing, so you don’t have to create new ones as your grow.
Using advanced reporting to pull detailed customer analytics and then compare across channels, Marketo can integrate with just about any other MarTech tool you use.
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Your MarTech Tool Stack Isn’t Complete in 2018 Without These 13 Apps
Think your marketing technology (MarTech) stack is king? Pull yourself out of 2017.
Your customers are dropping out of your funnel. Engagement is down. The CEO is on you to get results… today.
Where can you find more efficient ways to get the job done?
A better MarTech stack.
If you aren’t using a diverse set of tools, you’re likely falling behind.
Marketing departments around the world are scrambling to find the best ways to identify and engage their customers.
Are you wondering why your team can’t find more customers? Or better satisfy your existing profit centers?
It’s because your MarTech stack needs a facelift. An upgrade to help you better serve customer needs and enable easy onboarding.
Like a valley girl without botox, a business in 2018 without a proper stack is showing its true age.
But with over 5,000 MarTech options available, finding the right tools for the job can be daunting.
Luckily, I’ve got your back.
Get your MarTech stack ready for the future with the hottest apps on the block.
1. Salesforce
Managing customer relations is key to growing your business.
It’s 5x less expensive to keep an existing customer than to sell to a new one.
But upselling and reselling to existing customers presents a big challenge.
Just because someone bought from you once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again or stick around forever.
You need to manage and nurture the customer relationship.
When it comes to that, Salesforce continues to steal the CRM “best in show” — and with good reason.
It recently topped Fortune’s list of 100 best companies to work for in 2018 and has been able to retain consistent growth behind its experienced leadership.
What’s their secret to being the biggest SaaS shark in the ocean?
It’s one of the most customizable CRMs out there and has been battle-tested for nearly two decades.
It has integrations for just about every use case with it’s AppExchange being second to none.
With AppExchange, you can find, locate and utilize different applications like you would plugins on WordPress.
Businesses of all sizes use it and love it.
Whether you are a mom-and-pop shop getting started or a large enterprise org, Salesforce has seen your use case before and has a solution.
Dashboards are full of comprehensive data that you can use to build customers from small lifetime values to high lifetime values.
Salesforce is king when it comes to customer relationship management.
2. Hootsuite
When it comes to social media, today’s consumer is everywhere.
In fact, the average consumer has seven different social media accounts spread across multiple platforms.
While that presents an opportunity in the form of reaching new customers with multi-channel strategies, it also creates an internal nightmare when it comes to managing it.
Posting, liking, commenting and engaging on seven platforms? That’s a full-time job.
But not when you take advantage of platforms like Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a necessity for managing your social media presence.
While Facebook Advertising is primarily about “speaking” to your customers, Hootsuite should be used to “listen” and engage.
Of course, finding a way to listen to multiple channels at the same time is difficult. Hootsuite solves the problem by managing all your social channels in one place.
By using a unique dashboard to monitor unlimited streams from all the social media channels your team uses, you can schedule, optimize and interact with consumers in just minutes on any platform.
With integrated analytics dashboards, pulling up reports for your marketing and sales teams is easy.
Connecting to diverse content systems beyond social, you can pull up free stock images to aid your social campaigns:
The platform is decked to the fullest, helping you manage social media with one tool in a sector that normally requires multiple.
3. Google AdWords
Reaching new customers is key to scaling your business.
And there’s possibly no better place to do that than advertising with AdWords.
Despite Facebook’s massive growth, Google AdWords is still the most widely used advertising platform in the world.
In fact, getting certified in AdWords is seen as a necessity for most entry-level digital marketing professionals.
While most people are interested in Facebook, here’s why you should keep AdWords in your toolbox:
AdWords packs a punch in the form of intent.
If cleanliness is next to godliness, then intent is next to customer acquisition.
On platforms like Facebook, people aren’t there to see ads or find products. They are engaging with friends, family, and funny videos.
But on AdWords, people are actively searching via keywords to find solutions to their problems:
They want help ASAP. So you can virtually skip the typical funnel process and get down to selling.
On top of intent, AdWords packs reach. Google handles over 40,000 searches every second.
Not to mention over 3.5 billion each day and 1.2 trillion each year.
With AdWords, you can also advertise on YouTube, a platform with 1.5 billion monthly active users who watch more than an hour of content daily.
In terms of support, you have access to dedicated account managers that will help run and optimize your campaigns.
The dashboard is extremely easy to use, too.
With diverse demographic targeting and custom audiences, you can reach users with Facebook-like specificity.
AdWords is the bread-and-butter of PPC advertising and will continue to dominate with its massive user base.
Add it to your stack and get your piece of the pie today.
4. Optimizely
Running tests is critical to finding success. Whether in product creation, marketing development or sales.
Test and test again.
But when most A/B tests fail, you often can’t rely on your own, basic marketing tests to provide statistically significant data.
Let Optimizely take your experiments by the horns to stay ahead of the competition.
Test against your assumptions to build better campaigns that capture more users and increase retention.
People will think you became a guru overnight.
There are a number of ways you can impress your team with Optimizely.
Use Optimizely X, and you can experiment across “every device, every channel, and every customer touchpoint.”
With unlimited users, you can easily collaborate with anyone to build dashboards that will make your executive team happy.
Show the world your technical prowess by empowering developers to support your optimization marketing tech.
Optimizely powers optimization and testing for some of the largest companies on the planet for a reason:
It simplifies testing and provides accurate, effective results.
5. Crazy Egg
Every marketer thinks they understand their customers. Their pain points, wants and needs.
But when it comes to driving sales, do you know how the user experienced your site? What they loved or hated?
Unless you are using a heat mapping tool like Crazy Egg, you likely don’t.
Crazy Egg is known as a heatmapping tool that provides an X-ray of how visitors are interacting with your site.
They were one of the first in the space, and remain the top player for a few main reasons.
With Crazy Egg, you can see which part of your pages users click on the most, where they are spending the most time (on a per-page basis), and what areas are being completely ignored.
They offer four different views, but Heatmap and Scrollmap are where it’s at.
Heatmap allows you to see where users are clicking and Scrollmap allows you to see where users are spending the most time (especially helpful for those of you producing long-form content).
Crazy Egg allows you to A/B test different variations of pages so you can continue to make iterations.
Getting insights on how your users interact with you is invaluable for optimization. Quit your slacking and start using heatmaps.
Speaking of slacking…
6. Slack
Collaborating and communicating across teams and departments shouldn’t be a boring, tedious or annoying process.
And, it shouldn’t be an afterthought, either.
According to HubSpot, the more aligned your sales and marketing team is, the better overall growth you’ll achieve.
And that’s where Slack comes into play.
With Slack, all of your team communication exists in one place. You can message individuals directly, create a group, and create Slack channels to keep conversations topical and organized.
Plus, they have integrations with EVERYTHING. GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, Heroku and countless other MarTech tools. The list doesn’t end.
Slack is where work gets done, and team communication stays fluid.
7. Marketo
Latest data shows that 91% of companies using marketing automation find it to be an integral piece of their marketing strategy.
The fact of the matter is, with so many channels and platforms available to marketers today, automation is necessary to thrive.
And Marketo is a powerhouse of automation designed for marketers by marketers.
If you’re in B2B and want to get an idea of how your prospects are interacting with all your marketing channels, Marketo is the wingman you’ve always wanted.
Built on the same core platform as Salesforce, Marketo is a necessity for any team running multiple channels for customer acquisition.
With an easy-to-use modular system featuring marketing automation, consumer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, and marketing management, you can customize everything for your specific business needs.
Marketo is designed for scaling businesses.
The platform allows you to clone entire programs such as landing pages and email marketing, so you don’t have to create new ones as your grow.
Using advanced reporting to pull detailed customer analytics and then compare across channels, Marketo can integrate with just about any other MarTech tool you use.
Marketo is built for the power-user. For the marketing team that attacks multiple channels and needs heavy equipment to get the job done.
8. AdRoll
AdRoll arrived on the MarTech scene as a retargeting platform but has since transitioned into a full-funnel DSP (demand-side platform).
What does this mean? AdRoll allows you to attract new customers to your site, convert site visitors at scale, and continue to maintain a relationship with your existing customers.
Programmatic marketing has gotten some flack recently, but the numbers don’t lie:
There is a reason AdRoll has over 30,000 customers (well, there’s at least 30,000 reasons).
And what AdRoll is working on in the future is even more interesting.
AdRoll plans to focus more on incrementality utilizing big data and machine learning to get a complete sense of which ads are actually causing customers to make a purchase.
They are building out an account-based marketing solution and are poised to become a market leader in the space.
Take their access to over 300 ad networks and exchanges, add an advanced bidding tool, and layer in very specific customer data from Bombora.
That’s a recipe for potential success and more money in your company war chest.
Their account management is second to none. For mid-market companies, you will not get the same level of customer service from Google or Facebook.
Want a platform to help grow and nurture customers? Look no further.
9. Sprinklr
CXM, or customer experience management, is the audience engagement need for your MarTech stack in 2018.
Have you heard the maxim, “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care”?
With CXM, that core idea rings true. Engaging with your audience is an absolute must-have for creating a dialogue about your brand.
Sprinklr makes this easier than ever to put into practice.
Their CXM platform gives you complete control over the customer experience.
Pull over 25 social channels into a unified platform. Reach and listen to all your customers in one place.
Add context to data pulled from other platforms, like your Salesforce CRM.
Schedule your campaigns and monitor results with ease.
Leverage Sprinklr’s app marketplace to make the most of your CXM data.
With diverse integrations, you’ll be able to connect Sprinklr to any other tool in your stack.
10. MailChimp
When it comes to email marketing, there are countless platforms available.
But starting out with your first platform can make or break your success.
Some cost a fortune, and others are meant for top-level companies.
Thankfully, MailChimp exists, allowing any company of any size to start an email marketing campaign in just minutes.
With powerful analytics dashboards, you get clear data on your campaigns without vanity metrics:
Using a drag-and-drop email building system, you can get campaigns established fast with the look and appeal of a high-tech, high-cost platform:
The fact is, email still reigns supreme in 2018.
Email is still one of the most influential information sources for B2B audiences.
On the B2C side of things, welcome emails generate 320% more revenue than general promotional messages.
If you aren’t capitalizing on the opportunities to maximize revenue from your email marketing… well, then what are you doing?
MailChimp makes it easier than ever to build automated campaigns for drip funnels and promotional marketing, with templates that make the process a breeze for you and your team.
You can quickly split your audiences into lists for optimal campaign performance.
As with most MarTech tools, it integrates with just about every app on the planet.
My personal favorite tactic is using Gleam to build a competition, then leveraging automation in MailChimp to convert those participants into customers.
All that’s left to do is sit back and watch yourself win.
11. Wrike
Keeping everyone on the same page is just as vital as getting your MarTech stack working overtime.
Ensuring that every team is interconnected, working together and sharing information isn’t easy.
Especially when teams are hard at work.
And that’s where Wrike comes into play.
Wrike has an advantage as one of the leading productivity management platforms in the world.
When your MarTech needs to stay on track, count on Wrike to keep all your campaign tasks organized.
Wrike helps you to test workflows before launching them into campaigns and manage communications across members of your team.
In addition to a robust free trial and extensive documentation to get you started, Wrike boasts a library of integrations — including some of the market-leading MarTech tools.
Wrike is perfect for businesses that get work done and need to share that work across various departments and teams.
Integrate it into your marketing stack for streamlined communications and efficiency.
12. Zapier
Say you need to connect your Kissmetrics campaigns to reports to Crazy Egg, and then email those reports to your supervisor at 4:00 PM on the dot?
Diverse, detailed and seriously precise marketing automation like that is hard to come by.
And that’s why Zapier is dominating the competition.
Connecting anything to well, anything, is as easy as selecting a few dropdowns. Choose the apps you want to connect, create a hook, and voila — instant MarTech magic.
Zapier is the Muhammad Ali of automation. Using easy, customizable triggers and actions, you can connect any app in your stack to run highly specific tasks.
Once you’ve set it up, you simply let it run in the background, automating most of your daily tasks that kill your time.
13. SERPs
SEO has changed dramatically in the past ten years. In fact, Google makes updates to their algorithm nearly 600 times each year.
That’s more than once a day.
Staying up-to-date with SEO is crucial, and there is perhaps no better way to know who is outranking you on specific keywords than SERPs.
SERPs is the one-stop shop for competitive SEO insights. Your SEO is never good enough in today’s algorithm-shifting world.
Until you hit #1 ranking for every targeted keyword, there is always opportunity to improve.
SERPs helps you go above and beyond plain old research to deliver actionable insights about your competition.
When researching their Google ranking index or keyword research database, you can gather insights on which keywords competitors are targeting, campaign costs against those keywords, and SEO rankings for specific landing pages or blog content.
Stop doing keyword research with sub-par platforms or directly on Google.
Integrate SERPs to get the benefit of keyword research and competitor research in one.
Bringing it all together
Building a MarTech stack is a complex problem.
You have over 5,000 options to choose from with a very specific budget and a list of requirements.
Want to hear some good news? You’ve already done the hard work. Finding the right resources is half the battle.
The other half of the battle is getting your knowledge to align with actions.
You are the glue holding your MarTech stack together. Without your decisions, there is no marketing ROI for you and your team.
You still need to bring everything together to ensure your team can make the most of this powerful MarTech tool stack.
First, ask yourself these two key questions.
What are my immediate goals?
Your initial answers to this question led you here, so it may be time to really look into what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
In my first marketing role at a SaaS company, we spent about $10,000 on LinkedIn Ads that only converted 0.1% of users who clicked through.
In some companies, this is a campaign that can put you out on the street.
You know what our team did instead of stressing about the results? We doubled down with a clearer objective.
Our initial goal was too broad. “Convert 1% of user click-throughs” only works if you’re offering real value and understand why your content is valuable.
We were trying to sell ourselves without telling a story, and our prospective customers could see right through it. So what did our new goal become?
“Convert 1% of user click-throughs and increase total ad clicks by 5,000.” Then we were prioritizing context as well as optimization.
Bringing this back around to the finish line, your goals are the hidden driver for your MarTech stack.
Understand your why and be clear about how each MarTech tool guides you toward success.
Where are you going to achieve a greater ROI?
The trick is actually more simple than it may seem.
You’ll generate ROI when you test assumptions and land in the right place at the right time.
With measurable and actionable results, you tell a more informed story about your customers.
A better story leads to better experiments. Before you know it, your marketing machine does all the heavy lifting for you.
For example, your life is easier when you put the majority of the load on your MarTech stack.
With Kissmetrics, for instance, it’s easy to analyze, segment, and connect your marketing automation in a single platform.
Your MarTech tool stack is the key to achieving successful ROI in your marketing efforts. Without it, you’re Captain Ahab in the ocean minus a paddle and spear.
Conclusion
Marketing stacks are key to streamlining your marketing campaigns in the modern world.
With so many options to choose from, it can often be overwhelming.
For your average mid-market company, a combination of Kissmetrics (below) + Crazy Egg + HubSpot + Google + Facebook may be all you need.
Even startups can benefit from this stack.
Enterprises can combine these tools and more to achieve even more growth.
With the addition of Sprinklr and other CXM tools, every channel becomes a potential revenue stream.
You’ve shown an appetite for winning in the marketing game by getting this far.
Go forth, build your MarTech tool stack, and show the world what you can do.
What completes your MarTech tool stack?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
from Online Marketing Tips https://blog.kissmetrics.com/martech-tool-stack/
0 notes
Text
Your MarTech Tool Stack Isn’t Complete in 2018 Without These 13 Apps
Think your marketing technology (MarTech) stack is king? Pull yourself out of 2017.
Your customers are dropping out of your funnel. Engagement is down. The CEO is on you to get results… today.
Where can you find more efficient ways to get the job done?
A better MarTech stack.
If you aren’t using a diverse set of tools, you’re likely falling behind.
Marketing departments around the world are scrambling to find the best ways to identify and engage their customers.
Are you wondering why your team can’t find more customers? Or better satisfy your existing profit centers?
It’s because your MarTech stack needs a facelift. An upgrade to help you better serve customer needs and enable easy onboarding.
Like a valley girl without botox, a business in 2018 without a proper stack is showing its true age.
But with over 5,000 MarTech options available, finding the right tools for the job can be daunting.
Luckily, I’ve got your back.
Get your MarTech stack ready for the future with the hottest apps on the block.
1. Salesforce
Managing customer relations is key to growing your business.
It’s 5x less expensive to keep an existing customer than to sell to a new one.
But upselling and reselling to existing customers presents a big challenge.
Just because someone bought from you once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again or stick around forever.
You need to manage and nurture the customer relationship.
When it comes to that, Salesforce continues to steal the CRM “best in show” — and with good reason.
It recently topped Fortune’s list of 100 best companies to work for in 2018 and has been able to retain consistent growth behind its experienced leadership.
What’s their secret to being the biggest SaaS shark in the ocean?
It’s one of the most customizable CRMs out there and has been battle-tested for nearly two decades.
It has integrations for just about every use case with it’s AppExchange being second to none.
With AppExchange, you can find, locate and utilize different applications like you would plugins on WordPress.
Businesses of all sizes use it and love it.
Whether you are a mom-and-pop shop getting started or a large enterprise org, Salesforce has seen your use case before and has a solution.
Dashboards are full of comprehensive data that you can use to build customers from small lifetime values to high lifetime values.
Salesforce is king when it comes to customer relationship management.
2. Hootsuite
When it comes to social media, today’s consumer is everywhere.
In fact, the average consumer has seven different social media accounts spread across multiple platforms.
While that presents an opportunity in the form of reaching new customers with multi-channel strategies, it also creates an internal nightmare when it comes to managing it.
Posting, liking, commenting and engaging on seven platforms? That’s a full-time job.
But not when you take advantage of platforms like Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a necessity for managing your social media presence.
While Facebook Advertising is primarily about “speaking” to your customers, Hootsuite should be used to “listen” and engage.
Of course, finding a way to listen to multiple channels at the same time is difficult. Hootsuite solves the problem by managing all your social channels in one place.
By using a unique dashboard to monitor unlimited streams from all the social media channels your team uses, you can schedule, optimize and interact with consumers in just minutes on any platform.
With integrated analytics dashboards, pulling up reports for your marketing and sales teams is easy.
Connecting to diverse content systems beyond social, you can pull up free stock images to aid your social campaigns:
The platform is decked to the fullest, helping you manage social media with one tool in a sector that normally requires multiple.
3. Google AdWords
Reaching new customers is key to scaling your business.
And there’s possibly no better place to do that than advertising with AdWords.
Despite Facebook’s massive growth, Google AdWords is still the most widely used advertising platform in the world.
In fact, getting certified in AdWords is seen as a necessity for most entry-level digital marketing professionals.
While most people are interested in Facebook, here’s why you should keep AdWords in your toolbox:
AdWords packs a punch in the form of intent.
If cleanliness is next to godliness, then intent is next to customer acquisition.
On platforms like Facebook, people aren’t there to see ads or find products. They are engaging with friends, family, and funny videos.
But on AdWords, people are actively searching via keywords to find solutions to their problems:
They want help ASAP. So you can virtually skip the typical funnel process and get down to selling.
On top of intent, AdWords packs reach. Google handles over 40,000 searches every second.
Not to mention over 3.5 billion each day and 1.2 trillion each year.
With AdWords, you can also advertise on YouTube, a platform with 1.5 billion monthly active users who watch more than an hour of content daily.
In terms of support, you have access to dedicated account managers that will help run and optimize your campaigns.
The dashboard is extremely easy to use, too.
With diverse demographic targeting and custom audiences, you can reach users with Facebook-like specificity.
AdWords is the bread-and-butter of PPC advertising and will continue to dominate with its massive user base.
Add it to your stack and get your piece of the pie today.
4. Optimizely
Running tests is critical to finding success. Whether in product creation, marketing development or sales.
Test and test again.
But when most A/B tests fail, you often can’t rely on your own, basic marketing tests to provide statistically significant data.
Let Optimizely take your experiments by the horns to stay ahead of the competition.
Test against your assumptions to build better campaigns that capture more users and increase retention.
People will think you became a guru overnight.
There are a number of ways you can impress your team with Optimizely.
Use Optimizely X, and you can experiment across “every device, every channel, and every customer touchpoint.”
With unlimited users, you can easily collaborate with anyone to build dashboards that will make your executive team happy.
Show the world your technical prowess by empowering developers to support your optimization marketing tech.
Optimizely powers optimization and testing for some of the largest companies on the planet for a reason:
It simplifies testing and provides accurate, effective results.
5. Crazy Egg
Every marketer thinks they understand their customers. Their pain points, wants and needs.
But when it comes to driving sales, do you know how the user experienced your site? What they loved or hated?
Unless you are using a heat mapping tool like Crazy Egg, you likely don’t.
Crazy Egg is known as a heatmapping tool that provides an X-ray of how visitors are interacting with your site.
They were one of the first in the space, and remain the top player for a few main reasons.
With Crazy Egg, you can see which part of your pages users click on the most, where they are spending the most time (on a per-page basis), and what areas are being completely ignored.
They offer four different views, but Heatmap and Scrollmap are where it’s at.
Heatmap allows you to see where users are clicking and Scrollmap allows you to see where users are spending the most time (especially helpful for those of you producing long-form content).
Crazy Egg allows you to A/B test different variations of pages so you can continue to make iterations.
Getting insights on how your users interact with you is invaluable for optimization. Quit your slacking and start using heatmaps.
Speaking of slacking…
6. Slack
Collaborating and communicating across teams and departments shouldn’t be a boring, tedious or annoying process.
And, it shouldn’t be an afterthought, either.
According to HubSpot, the more aligned your sales and marketing team is, the better overall growth you’ll achieve.
And that’s where Slack comes into play.
With Slack, all of your team communication exists in one place. You can message individuals directly, create a group, and create Slack channels to keep conversations topical and organized.
Plus, they have integrations with EVERYTHING. GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, Heroku and countless other MarTech tools. The list doesn’t end.
Slack is where work gets done, and team communication stays fluid.
7. Marketo
Latest data shows that 91% of companies using marketing automation find it to be an integral piece of their marketing strategy.
The fact of the matter is, with so many channels and platforms available to marketers today, automation is necessary to thrive.
And Marketo is a powerhouse of automation designed for marketers by marketers.
If you’re in B2B and want to get an idea of how your prospects are interacting with all your marketing channels, Marketo is the wingman you’ve always wanted.
Built on the same core platform as Salesforce, Marketo is a necessity for any team running multiple channels for customer acquisition.
With an easy-to-use modular system featuring marketing automation, consumer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, and marketing management, you can customize everything for your specific business needs.
Marketo is designed for scaling businesses.
The platform allows you to clone entire programs such as landing pages and email marketing, so you don’t have to create new ones as your grow.
Using advanced reporting to pull detailed customer analytics and then compare across channels, Marketo can integrate with just about any other MarTech tool you use.
Marketo is built for the power-user. For the marketing team that attacks multiple channels and needs heavy equipment to get the job done.
8. AdRoll
AdRoll arrived on the MarTech scene as a retargeting platform but has since transitioned into a full-funnel DSP (demand-side platform).
What does this mean? AdRoll allows you to attract new customers to your site, convert site visitors at scale, and continue to maintain a relationship with your existing customers.
Programmatic marketing has gotten some flack recently, but the numbers don’t lie:
There is a reason AdRoll has over 30,000 customers (well, there’s at least 30,000 reasons).
And what AdRoll is working on in the future is even more interesting.
AdRoll plans to focus more on incrementality utilizing big data and machine learning to get a complete sense of which ads are actually causing customers to make a purchase.
They are building out an account-based marketing solution and are poised to become a market leader in the space.
Take their access to over 300 ad networks and exchanges, add an advanced bidding tool, and layer in very specific customer data from Bombora.
That’s a recipe for potential success and more money in your company war chest.
Their account management is second to none. For mid-market companies, you will not get the same level of customer service from Google or Facebook.
Want a platform to help grow and nurture customers? Look no further.
9. Sprinklr
CXM, or customer experience management, is the audience engagement need for your MarTech stack in 2018.
Have you heard the maxim, “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care”?
With CXM, that core idea rings true. Engaging with your audience is an absolute must-have for creating a dialogue about your brand.
Sprinklr makes this easier than ever to put into practice.
Their CXM platform gives you complete control over the customer experience.
Pull over 25 social channels into a unified platform. Reach and listen to all your customers in one place.
Add context to data pulled from other platforms, like your Salesforce CRM.
Schedule your campaigns and monitor results with ease.
Leverage Sprinklr’s app marketplace to make the most of your CXM data.
With diverse integrations, you’ll be able to connect Sprinklr to any other tool in your stack.
10. MailChimp
When it comes to email marketing, there are countless platforms available.
But starting out with your first platform can make or break your success.
Some cost a fortune, and others are meant for top-level companies.
Thankfully, MailChimp exists, allowing any company of any size to start an email marketing campaign in just minutes.
With powerful analytics dashboards, you get clear data on your campaigns without vanity metrics:
Using a drag-and-drop email building system, you can get campaigns established fast with the look and appeal of a high-tech, high-cost platform:
The fact is, email still reigns supreme in 2018.
Email is still one of the most influential information sources for B2B audiences.
On the B2C side of things, welcome emails generate 320% more revenue than general promotional messages.
If you aren’t capitalizing on the opportunities to maximize revenue from your email marketing… well, then what are you doing?
MailChimp makes it easier than ever to build automated campaigns for drip funnels and promotional marketing, with templates that make the process a breeze for you and your team.
You can quickly split your audiences into lists for optimal campaign performance.
As with most MarTech tools, it integrates with just about every app on the planet.
My personal favorite tactic is using Gleam to build a competition, then leveraging automation in MailChimp to convert those participants into customers.
All that’s left to do is sit back and watch yourself win.
11. Wrike
Keeping everyone on the same page is just as vital as getting your MarTech stack working overtime.
Ensuring that every team is interconnected, working together and sharing information isn’t easy.
Especially when teams are hard at work.
And that’s where Wrike comes into play.
Wrike has an advantage as one of the leading productivity management platforms in the world.
When your MarTech needs to stay on track, count on Wrike to keep all your campaign tasks organized.
Wrike helps you to test workflows before launching them into campaigns and manage communications across members of your team.
In addition to a robust free trial and extensive documentation to get you started, Wrike boasts a library of integrations — including some of the market-leading MarTech tools.
Wrike is perfect for businesses that get work done and need to share that work across various departments and teams.
Integrate it into your marketing stack for streamlined communications and efficiency.
12. Zapier
Say you need to connect your Kissmetrics campaigns to reports to Crazy Egg, and then email those reports to your supervisor at 4:00 PM on the dot?
Diverse, detailed and seriously precise marketing automation like that is hard to come by.
And that’s why Zapier is dominating the competition.
Connecting anything to well, anything, is as easy as selecting a few dropdowns. Choose the apps you want to connect, create a hook, and voila — instant MarTech magic.
Zapier is the Muhammad Ali of automation. Using easy, customizable triggers and actions, you can connect any app in your stack to run highly specific tasks.
Once you’ve set it up, you simply let it run in the background, automating most of your daily tasks that kill your time.
13. SERPs
SEO has changed dramatically in the past ten years. In fact, Google makes updates to their algorithm nearly 600 times each year.
That’s more than once a day.
Staying up-to-date with SEO is crucial, and there is perhaps no better way to know who is outranking you on specific keywords than SERPs.
SERPs is the one-stop shop for competitive SEO insights. Your SEO is never good enough in today’s algorithm-shifting world.
Until you hit #1 ranking for every targeted keyword, there is always opportunity to improve.
SERPs helps you go above and beyond plain old research to deliver actionable insights about your competition.
When researching their Google ranking index or keyword research database, you can gather insights on which keywords competitors are targeting, campaign costs against those keywords, and SEO rankings for specific landing pages or blog content.
Stop doing keyword research with sub-par platforms or directly on Google.
Integrate SERPs to get the benefit of keyword research and competitor research in one.
Bringing it all together
Building a MarTech stack is a complex problem.
You have over 5,000 options to choose from with a very specific budget and a list of requirements.
Want to hear some good news? You’ve already done the hard work. Finding the right resources is half the battle.
The other half of the battle is getting your knowledge to align with actions.
You are the glue holding your MarTech stack together. Without your decisions, there is no marketing ROI for you and your team.
You still need to bring everything together to ensure your team can make the most of this powerful MarTech tool stack.
First, ask yourself these two key questions.
What are my immediate goals?
Your initial answers to this question led you here, so it may be time to really look into what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
In my first marketing role at a SaaS company, we spent about $10,000 on LinkedIn Ads that only converted 0.1% of users who clicked through.
In some companies, this is a campaign that can put you out on the street.
You know what our team did instead of stressing about the results? We doubled down with a clearer objective.
Our initial goal was too broad. “Convert 1% of user click-throughs” only works if you’re offering real value and understand why your content is valuable.
We were trying to sell ourselves without telling a story, and our prospective customers could see right through it. So what did our new goal become?
“Convert 1% of user click-throughs and increase total ad clicks by 5,000.” Then we were prioritizing context as well as optimization.
Bringing this back around to the finish line, your goals are the hidden driver for your MarTech stack.
Understand your why and be clear about how each MarTech tool guides you toward success.
Where are you going to achieve a greater ROI?
The trick is actually more simple than it may seem.
You’ll generate ROI when you test assumptions and land in the right place at the right time.
With measurable and actionable results, you tell a more informed story about your customers.
A better story leads to better experiments. Before you know it, your marketing machine does all the heavy lifting for you.
For example, your life is easier when you put the majority of the load on your MarTech stack.
With Kissmetrics, for instance, it’s easy to analyze, segment, and connect your marketing automation in a single platform.
Your MarTech tool stack is the key to achieving successful ROI in your marketing efforts. Without it, you’re Captain Ahab in the ocean minus a paddle and spear.
Conclusion
Marketing stacks are key to streamlining your marketing campaigns in the modern world.
With so many options to choose from, it can often be overwhelming.
For your average mid-market company, a combination of Kissmetrics (below) + Crazy Egg + HubSpot + Google + Facebook may be all you need.
Even startups can benefit from this stack.
Enterprises can combine these tools and more to achieve even more growth.
With the addition of Sprinklr and other CXM tools, every channel becomes a potential revenue stream.
You’ve shown an appetite for winning in the marketing game by getting this far.
Go forth, build your MarTech tool stack, and show the world what you can do.
What completes your MarTech tool stack?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
from The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog https://blog.kissmetrics.com/martech-tool-stack/
0 notes
Text
Google’s New CEO; Kodiak’s Rally Is Unbearable; Tesla Stock $1
Google’s New CEO; Kodiak’s Rally Is Unbearable; Tesla Stock $1:
Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride
Hold on to your hats, ’cause we’re going on quite a ride over the next week.
Yesterday, President Trump appeared to punt the U.S.-China trade deal until after the 2020 elections. Today, however, we’re getting a different story. (And if you’re not used to this back-and-forth by now, you’re not paying attention.)
Bright and early this morning, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. and China are moving even closer to a “phase-one” trade deal. Where is Bloomberg getting its information?
Why, the infamous “people familiar with the talks,” of course!
According to these people, the two sides need only agree on issues including Chinese agricultural purchases and which tariffs to roll back. The “people who shall not be named” also said that the markets were making too big a deal out of Trump’s off-the-cuff comments about stalling until 2020.
What’s more, a phase-one U.S.-China trade deal is expected to be reached before tariffs rise on December 15. That’s in less than 11 days.
The Takeaway:
Aside from the obvious “we’ve heard all this before,” there are three very important points to take away from the Bloomberg report:
S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s office hasn’t responded to the report. So, no official confirmation from the U.S. side.
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce hasn’t responded to the report. So, no official confirmation from the Chinese side.
President Trump hasn’t directly commented on the potential deal.
Great Stuff regulars will remember back on November 5, when I asked: “Who’s winning the U.S.-China trade war?”
At the time, I posited that China had the upper hand due to the reported promise of massive tariff rollbacks. Media reports at the time indicated that at least $112 billion in tariffs were on the table to pass a phase-one deal.
Just three days later, President Trump put the kibosh on the tariff rollback — essentially taking the whole deal off the table.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.
President Trump has the last and final word in these trade negotiations. A deal will happen if he wants one — his own words, paraphrased, not mine.
So, call me pessimistic … call me a bear … call me whatever you’d like. I’ll be playing it safe and holding my enthusiasm until a deal is actually signed and we can read the details.
In the meantime, there’s nothing that says we can’t profit off the continuation of the Great Stuff Trade War Cycle chart. I just updated it this morning:
I’ll add one more thing here. If you are trading this cycle, remember that we have just 11 days until the December 15 deadline for tariff increases. We could go through this cycle rather rapidly if U.S. representatives, China or Trump decide to get chatty.
Be warned: Trading the chart might not be for the faint of heart over the next week.
The Good: Turn the Page
It’s the end of an era at Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG).
Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping down from their positions at Alphabet. Taking their place at the head of the world’s most popular search engine is Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Pichai will now head both Google and its parent company, Alphabet.
Despite the high-profile announcement, Pichai and Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat have essentially run Alphabet for some time now. Pichai actually testified in front of Congress in 2016 … not Page or Brin.
So, what does this mean for investors? Pretty much nothing. Honestly, Pichai unofficially took the reins of Alphabet nearly two years ago. It should still be business as usual.
However, analysts are speculating that we may finally see YouTube revenue figures. Alphabet wasn’t required to disclose these figures before because Page — the company’s appointed decision-maker — didn’t see them. Seems like an odd loophole in reporting requirements, but it is what it is.
Pichai, however, does see these reports. So, investors might finally get a peek at YouTube’s revenue.
Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.
The Bad: Weak in the Force
For all intents and purposes, Salesforce.com Inc.’s (NYSE: CRM) earnings report was spot-on.
The company beat both top- and bottom-line expectations, with earnings up 32% and revenue soaring 33% year over year. Subscription revenue spiked 32%, and even billings were above the consensus estimate of $3.89 billion.
Guidance is where things started to go wrong … if you can call it that. Forecasts for the 2020 fiscal year were above Wall Street’s projections, but Salesforce put 2021 revenue projections below the consensus estimate. How far below? About $500 million.
If you’re thinking that this isn’t a “bad” quarterly report at all, you’re not alone. Analysts from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, RBC Capital Markets and Wedbush Securities all came out to defend Salesforce’s quarterly report.
That’s quite a star-studded cast. And it might explain why CRM is down more than 3% after what was a solid financial performance. Essentially, there’s too much optimism on CRM right now. So much so that a $500 million miss on revenue guidance two years from now is enough to prompt investors to sell.
That’s bad. It’s a sign that CRM might need a profit-taking correction to wash out the weak hands before the shares can turn higher once again.
The Ugly: The Un-Bear-able Rise
In the past three trading sessions, shares of Kodiak Sciences Inc. (Nasdaq: KOD) have surged an astonishing 100%.
Part of the reason is the increased bullish hype in the biotech sector, driven by merger and acquisition speculation.
But the big reason is that Kodiak just sold a 4.5% royalty right on potential global net sales of its experimental drug for eye disease, KSI-301. New York investment firm Baker Bros. Advisors shelled out $225 million for the rights.
Investors are excited because now Kodiak has the cash to fund operations through the next couple of years, at least. But Kodiak doesn’t get all that cash up front. It’ll need to pay $100 million just to close the transaction, and it’ll need to reach 50% enrollment in two late-stage clinical studies of KSI-301 in treating retinal vein occlusion, or blocked blood flow in the eye.
By now, you’re probably wondering why this is “ugly.” Well, the $225 million apparently wasn’t enough for Kodiak. Or, it saw the massive run-up in its shares and decided to take advantage of the situation.
Today, the company announced it was pricing a public offering of six million common shares at $46 per share — 55% above last Friday’s closing price.
This is clearly a smart business move, but my mind can’t get past the convenience of the offering or the KOD share dilution.
Once again, I think there is just too much optimism floating around out there. This is definitely a “buyer beware” situation.
Just when I thought I’d seen everything.
Hollywood is actually making WeWork: The Movie. I kid you not. They’ve even gotten Charles Randolph, the writer for The Big Short, to do the script.
This brings up two points. First, Hollywood really is out of good ideas. Second, who wants this movie? I’m not going to see it. If you’ve followed Great Stuff through the WeDebacle, you already watched this live.
Then again, given the media reports of former CEO Adam Neumann’s pot smoking and parties … this could be a fun ride. Look, I even made a poster for it:
(Side note: Did anyone actually see The Disaster Artist? I thought not.)
Great STUF: Buy Into Tesla for $1!
Did that heading get your attention?
I thought it might. You’re probably thinking: “There’s no way I can buy into Tesla for $1. It’s more than $300 per share, you fool!”
First, there’s no need for name-calling. I’m rubber and you’re glue, after all.
Second, yes, there is a way. And none other than Banyan Hill expert Paul Mampilly himself has the answer!
Paul found the quickest and easiest way to buy into some of the most exciting and explosive stocks on the market. Paul likes to call these his STUF stocks — a handy little acronym for the key stocks that represent the heart of Bold Profits: innovation, future, new-world ideas and tech that changes the way we live.
This is truly great STUF … if you catch my drift.
I know you’re dying to know more, so read Paul’s latest article now! Here, I’ll even give you the link: “Easiest Way to Buy STUF Stocks (Ex: Buy Into Tesla for $1).”
Now, what’s better than a Paul article explaining how to buy into Tesla for $1? A video of Paul explaining how to buy into Tesla for $1!
[embedded content]
But wait! There’s more…
Paul has a free report on all of his STUF stocks, and you can get it right here! (Did I mention it was free? Of course I did.)
You’re still here? OK. You want more Paul. It’s understandable.
The only way to truly satisfy your craving for STUF stocks (and Paul Mampilly) is to check out his newsletter, Profits Unlimited.
Click here to find out how to start your STUF collection now!
(I feel like there are too many exclamation points down here. Are there too many? Nah. Just the right amount.)
Until next time, good trading!
Regards,
Joseph Hargett
Great Stuff Managing Editor, Banyan Hill Publishing
0 notes
Link
Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride
Hold on to your hats, ’cause we’re going on quite a ride over the next week.
Yesterday, President Trump appeared to punt the U.S.-China trade deal until after the 2020 elections. Today, however, we’re getting a different story. (And if you’re not used to this back-and-forth by now, you’re not paying attention.)
Bright and early this morning, Bloomberg reported that the U.S. and China are moving even closer to a “phase-one” trade deal. Where is Bloomberg getting its information?
Why, the infamous “people familiar with the talks,” of course!
According to these people, the two sides need only agree on issues including Chinese agricultural purchases and which tariffs to roll back. The “people who shall not be named” also said that the markets were making too big a deal out of Trump’s off-the-cuff comments about stalling until 2020.
What’s more, a phase-one U.S.-China trade deal is expected to be reached before tariffs rise on December 15. That’s in less than 11 days.
The Takeaway:
Aside from the obvious “we’ve heard all this before,” there are three very important points to take away from the Bloomberg report:
S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer’s office hasn’t responded to the report. So, no official confirmation from the U.S. side.
The Chinese Ministry of Commerce hasn’t responded to the report. So, no official confirmation from the Chinese side.
President Trump hasn’t directly commented on the potential deal.
Great Stuff regulars will remember back on November 5, when I asked: “Who’s winning the U.S.-China trade war?”
At the time, I posited that China had the upper hand due to the reported promise of massive tariff rollbacks. Media reports at the time indicated that at least $112 billion in tariffs were on the table to pass a phase-one deal.
Just three days later, President Trump put the kibosh on the tariff rollback — essentially taking the whole deal off the table.
I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.
President Trump has the last and final word in these trade negotiations. A deal will happen if he wants one — his own words, paraphrased, not mine.
So, call me pessimistic … call me a bear … call me whatever you’d like. I’ll be playing it safe and holding my enthusiasm until a deal is actually signed and we can read the details.
In the meantime, there’s nothing that says we can’t profit off the continuation of the Great Stuff Trade War Cycle chart. I just updated it this morning:
I’ll add one more thing here. If you are trading this cycle, remember that we have just 11 days until the December 15 deadline for tariff increases. We could go through this cycle rather rapidly if U.S. representatives, China or Trump decide to get chatty.
Be warned: Trading the chart might not be for the faint of heart over the next week.
The Good: Turn the Page
It’s the end of an era at Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG).
Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are stepping down from their positions at Alphabet. Taking their place at the head of the world’s most popular search engine is Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Pichai will now head both Google and its parent company, Alphabet.
Despite the high-profile announcement, Pichai and Chief Financial Officer Ruth Porat have essentially run Alphabet for some time now. Pichai actually testified in front of Congress in 2016 … not Page or Brin.
So, what does this mean for investors? Pretty much nothing. Honestly, Pichai unofficially took the reins of Alphabet nearly two years ago. It should still be business as usual.
However, analysts are speculating that we may finally see YouTube revenue figures. Alphabet wasn’t required to disclose these figures before because Page — the company’s appointed decision-maker — didn’t see them. Seems like an odd loophole in reporting requirements, but it is what it is.
Pichai, however, does see these reports. So, investors might finally get a peek at YouTube’s revenue.
Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen.
The Bad: Weak in the Force
For all intents and purposes, Salesforce.com Inc.’s (NYSE: CRM) earnings report was spot-on.
The company beat both top- and bottom-line expectations, with earnings up 32% and revenue soaring 33% year over year. Subscription revenue spiked 32%, and even billings were above the consensus estimate of $3.89 billion.
Guidance is where things started to go wrong … if you can call it that. Forecasts for the 2020 fiscal year were above Wall Street’s projections, but Salesforce put 2021 revenue projections below the consensus estimate. How far below? About $500 million.
If you’re thinking that this isn’t a “bad” quarterly report at all, you’re not alone. Analysts from Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, RBC Capital Markets and Wedbush Securities all came out to defend Salesforce’s quarterly report.
That’s quite a star-studded cast. And it might explain why CRM is down more than 3% after what was a solid financial performance. Essentially, there’s too much optimism on CRM right now. So much so that a $500 million miss on revenue guidance two years from now is enough to prompt investors to sell.
That’s bad. It’s a sign that CRM might need a profit-taking correction to wash out the weak hands before the shares can turn higher once again.
The Ugly: The Un-Bear-able Rise
In the past three trading sessions, shares of Kodiak Sciences Inc. (Nasdaq: KOD) have surged an astonishing 100%.
Part of the reason is the increased bullish hype in the biotech sector, driven by merger and acquisition speculation.
But the big reason is that Kodiak just sold a 4.5% royalty right on potential global net sales of its experimental drug for eye disease, KSI-301. New York investment firm Baker Bros. Advisors shelled out $225 million for the rights.
Investors are excited because now Kodiak has the cash to fund operations through the next couple of years, at least. But Kodiak doesn’t get all that cash up front. It’ll need to pay $100 million just to close the transaction, and it’ll need to reach 50% enrollment in two late-stage clinical studies of KSI-301 in treating retinal vein occlusion, or blocked blood flow in the eye.
By now, you’re probably wondering why this is “ugly.” Well, the $225 million apparently wasn’t enough for Kodiak. Or, it saw the massive run-up in its shares and decided to take advantage of the situation.
Today, the company announced it was pricing a public offering of six million common shares at $46 per share — 55% above last Friday’s closing price.
This is clearly a smart business move, but my mind can’t get past the convenience of the offering or the KOD share dilution.
Once again, I think there is just too much optimism floating around out there. This is definitely a “buyer beware” situation.
Just when I thought I’d seen everything.
Hollywood is actually making WeWork: The Movie. I kid you not. They’ve even gotten Charles Randolph, the writer for The Big Short, to do the script.
This brings up two points. First, Hollywood really is out of good ideas. Second, who wants this movie? I’m not going to see it. If you’ve followed Great Stuff through the WeDebacle, you already watched this live.
Then again, given the media reports of former CEO Adam Neumann’s pot smoking and parties … this could be a fun ride. Look, I even made a poster for it:
(Side note: Did anyone actually see The Disaster Artist? I thought not.)
Great STUF: Buy Into Tesla for $1!
Did that heading get your attention?
I thought it might. You’re probably thinking: “There’s no way I can buy into Tesla for $1. It’s more than $300 per share, you fool!”
First, there’s no need for name-calling. I’m rubber and you’re glue, after all.
Second, yes, there is a way. And none other than Banyan Hill expert Paul Mampilly himself has the answer!
Paul found the quickest and easiest way to buy into some of the most exciting and explosive stocks on the market. Paul likes to call these his STUF stocks — a handy little acronym for the key stocks that represent the heart of Bold Profits: innovation, future, new-world ideas and tech that changes the way we live.
This is truly great STUF … if you catch my drift.
I know you’re dying to know more, so read Paul’s latest article now! Here, I’ll even give you the link: “Easiest Way to Buy STUF Stocks (Ex: Buy Into Tesla for $1).”
Now, what’s better than a Paul article explaining how to buy into Tesla for $1? A video of Paul explaining how to buy into Tesla for $1!
[embedded content]
But wait! There’s more…
Paul has a free report on all of his STUF stocks, and you can get it right here! (Did I mention it was free? Of course I did.)
You’re still here? OK. You want more Paul. It’s understandable.
The only way to truly satisfy your craving for STUF stocks (and Paul Mampilly) is to check out his newsletter, Profits Unlimited.
Click here to find out how to start your STUF collection now!
(I feel like there are too many exclamation points down here. Are there too many? Nah. Just the right amount.)
Until next time, good trading!
Regards,
Joseph Hargett
Great Stuff Managing Editor, Banyan Hill Publishing
0 notes
Text
China’s wobbly giants | Fortune
In China, publication of the Fortune Global 500 has become a major media event. Companies advancing even a place or two rush out press releases. Those making the list for first time bask in the achievement; this year’s most notable Chinese debutant, smartphone maker Xiaomi, celebrated by doling out $24 million in stock to its 20,000 employees.
The 2019 list gives Chinese firms something special to crow about: the number of Chinese firms rose to a record 129, including 10 from Taiwan, overtaking the 121 firms from the United States. As Geoff Colvin observed in an overview of this year’s tally, this is the first time since the creation of the Global 500 in 1990—”and arguably…the first time since World War II”—that a nation other than the U.S. has topped the ranks of global big business. Geoff’s essay bears an apt title: “It’s China’s World.”
In Chinese, the Global 500 is known as the wubai qiang (五百强), which literally means “500 strong.” And yet, as astute Fortune readers know, the ranking is based strictly on revenue—and is thus a measure of size, not strength. The two can be very different things.
On this year’s list, China’s private firms accounted for some of the most spectacular gains. Xiaomi, which went public only last year, may be the youngest firm to ever crack the Global 500. Chinese property developer Country Garden made this year’s biggest leap, rising 176 places to No. 177. Tech giants Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, which debuted on the Global 500 only last year, climbed 118 places to No. 182 and 92 places to No. 237 respectively. Online retailer JD.com jumped 42 places to No. 139.
Even so, the most striking characteristic of China’s presence on the Global 500 remains the overwhelming—and growing—dominance of state-owned firms. A calculation by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post found that, if firms from Hong Kong and Taiwan are excluded, state-owned enterprises account for 80% of the revenue generated by Chinese companies on the 2019 list, up from 76% last year.
Derek Scissors, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, argues the prevalence of state-owned behemoths among Chinese firms “reveals more weakness than strength, unless you believe that being permanently sheltered from competition constitutes strength.” Scissors questions whether firms like Ping An Insurance Group (No. 29) and Huawei Technologies (No. 61) are truly private; doubts the veracity of financial results reported by China’s state-owned firms; and wonders why the most profitable Chinese firms on the list are state-owned banks given high levels of non-performing loans in China’s economy. The vast revenue of Chinese firms on the Fortune 500, he concludes, “primarily represents waste.”
Former Financial Times China correspondent Richard McGregor offers a more nuanced (but no less skeptical) explanation for the ascendance of China’s state-owned giants in his new book Xi Jinping: The Backlash. For China watchers, the entire book is a must-read, but an excerpt, published this week in The Guardian, summarizes Richard’s account of how and why Xi sought to bolster state-owned enterprises and throw privatization of China’s economy into reverse.
I’m contemplating the distinction between size and strength because I write today from Tokyo, where eons ago I covered the collapse of Japan’s “bubble economy” for the Wall Street Journal. The unmistakable lesson of that era: propping up big, unprofitable companies preserves stability and government control—at the expense of growth and innovation.
More China news below.
Clay Chandler – [email protected] – @ClayChandler
Economy and Trade
Trade talks. Trade war negotiators are due to meet in Shanghai next week. A statement from the White House said talks will begin on July 30, with the regular crowd of Robert Lighthizer, Steven Mnuchin and Liu He. Caixin
Trade balks. China’s exports for the first half of 2019 rose just 0.1%, with exports to the U.S. retreating 8.1% – but Chinese imports of U.S. goods dropped a steeper 30%, with imports sliding 4.3% overall. South China Morning Post
A developing issue. President Trump delivered an ultimatum to the WTO, calling on the organization to terminate a provision that allows countries to self-determine whether they are a “developing” economy. Close to two-thirds of the WTO’s 164 members claim “developing” status, but Trump’s outrage is directed specifically at China. Trump’s administration said if progress on the provision isn’t made in 90 days, the U.S. would decide for itself which countries to treat as “developing” economies. New York Times
Digging out the farmers. The Trump Administration is preparing a $16 billion relief package for U.S. farmers hurt by the trade war. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said the grant shows that President Trump recognizes farmers are “fighting the fight” against China. Trump previously said China is “letting [the U.S.] down” by not buying more agriculture products, with soybean shipments hitting a 16-year low. Guardian
Innovation and Tech
A new bourse on the Bund. China’s new tech stock exchange, the Nasdaq-style STAR board in Shanghai, had a tumultuous debut this week when 25 companies launched on the bourse Monday. And launch they did – the average share price shot up 140% on the first day. Shares in Anji Microelectronics Tech, a semi-conductor maker, rocketed 400%. But what goes up comes down, and 9% was wiped off the board’s accumulative market cap on Tuesday as investors retreated. Fortune
A new satellite in the sky. Sticking with stars a moment – iSpace became China’s first private company to launch a satellite into orbit on Thursday. The start-up is just three years old and beat out two competitors in the field, which launched failed attempts to boost rockets into orbit earlier this year. Quartz
New clouds on the horizon. Alibaba has become the exclusive provider of Salesforce cloud services in greater China through a partnership with the U.S. company that secures Salesforce as Alibaba’s exclusive customer relationship management (CRM) suite offering. Beijing requires foreign tech companies to partner with local companies to process Chinese data, so a partnership was Salesforce’s only way in. Financial Times
A new beat for Bytedance. TikTok, the viral short-video app, has reportedly bought London-based AI start-up Jukedeck, which develops A.I. that can scan videos and automatically compose music to fit the setting. TikTok hasn’t confirmed the purchase but all the Jukedeck tema have changed their LinkedIn profiles to indicate they’re working at Bytedance, TikTok’s parent. Bytedance is reportedly planning to launch a Spotify-like music streaming service this year too. TechCrunch
In Case You Missed It
China Needs New Places to Sell Its Mountain of Stuff NYT
How to Choose Between the U.S. and China? It’s Not That Easy The Atlantic
Li Peng, Ex-Chinese Premier and Tiananmen Hard-Liner, Dies at 90 WSJ
Politics and Policy
Hong Kong gets aggressive. Tension has ramped up in Hong Kong, again. A spokesperson for China’s Defense Ministry reminded Hong Kong authorities that they can request assistance from the People’s Liberation Army days after protestors marched on Hong Kong’s Beijing liaison office and defaced the seal of the People’s Republic of China. Meanwhile, thugs – likely members of Triad gangs – armed with sticks ambushed protestors returning home to one of Hong Kong’s far-flung districts, Yuen Long. The police were criticized for their slow response and protestors occupied the arrivals hall at Hong Kong International Airport on Friday. South China Morning Post
China gets defensive. Beijing issued a white paper on defense for the first time since 2015 in which it accuses the U.S. of undermining “global strategic security.” The white paper criticized the U.S. for, amongst other things, deploying its THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea – a three-year-old dispute that still rankles – and for selling weapons to Taiwan more recently. Taiwan was also accused of “pursuing a path of separatism,” as were actors in Tibet and Xinjiang. South China Morning Post
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by Eamon Barrett. Find previous editions here, and sign up for other Fortune newsletters here.
Credit: Source link
The post China’s wobbly giants | Fortune appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.
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China’s wobbly giants | Fortune
In China, publication of the Fortune Global 500 has become a major media event. Companies advancing even a place or two rush out press releases. Those making the list for first time bask in the achievement; this year’s most notable Chinese debutant, smartphone maker Xiaomi, celebrated by doling out $24 million in stock to its 20,000 employees.
The 2019 list gives Chinese firms something special to crow about: the number of Chinese firms rose to a record 129, including 10 from Taiwan, overtaking the 121 firms from the United States. As Geoff Colvin observed in an overview of this year’s tally, this is the first time since the creation of the Global 500 in 1990—”and arguably…the first time since World War II”—that a nation other than the U.S. has topped the ranks of global big business. Geoff’s essay bears an apt title: “It’s China’s World.”
In Chinese, the Global 500 is known as the wubai qiang (五百强), which literally means “500 strong.” And yet, as astute Fortune readers know, the ranking is based strictly on revenue—and is thus a measure of size, not strength. The two can be very different things.
On this year’s list, China’s private firms accounted for some of the most spectacular gains. Xiaomi, which went public only last year, may be the youngest firm to ever crack the Global 500. Chinese property developer Country Garden made this year’s biggest leap, rising 176 places to No. 177. Tech giants Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, which debuted on the Global 500 only last year, climbed 118 places to No. 182 and 92 places to No. 237 respectively. Online retailer JD.com jumped 42 places to No. 139.
Even so, the most striking characteristic of China’s presence on the Global 500 remains the overwhelming—and growing—dominance of state-owned firms. A calculation by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post found that, if firms from Hong Kong and Taiwan are excluded, state-owned enterprises account for 80% of the revenue generated by Chinese companies on the 2019 list, up from 76% last year.
Derek Scissors, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, argues the prevalence of state-owned behemoths among Chinese firms “reveals more weakness than strength, unless you believe that being permanently sheltered from competition constitutes strength.” Scissors questions whether firms like Ping An Insurance Group (No. 29) and Huawei Technologies (No. 61) are truly private; doubts the veracity of financial results reported by China’s state-owned firms; and wonders why the most profitable Chinese firms on the list are state-owned banks given high levels of non-performing loans in China’s economy. The vast revenue of Chinese firms on the Fortune 500, he concludes, “primarily represents waste.”
Former Financial Times China correspondent Richard McGregor offers a more nuanced (but no less skeptical) explanation for the ascendance of China’s state-owned giants in his new book Xi Jinping: The Backlash. For China watchers, the entire book is a must-read, but an excerpt, published this week in The Guardian, summarizes Richard’s account of how and why Xi sought to bolster state-owned enterprises and throw privatization of China’s economy into reverse.
I’m contemplating the distinction between size and strength because I write today from Tokyo, where eons ago I covered the collapse of Japan’s “bubble economy” for the Wall Street Journal. The unmistakable lesson of that era: propping up big, unprofitable companies preserves stability and government control—at the expense of growth and innovation.
More China news below.
Clay Chandler – [email protected] – @ClayChandler
Economy and Trade
Trade talks. Trade war negotiators are due to meet in Shanghai next week. A statement from the White House said talks will begin on July 30, with the regular crowd of Robert Lighthizer, Steven Mnuchin and Liu He. Caixin
Trade balks. China’s exports for the first half of 2019 rose just 0.1%, with exports to the U.S. retreating 8.1% – but Chinese imports of U.S. goods dropped a steeper 30%, with imports sliding 4.3% overall. South China Morning Post
A developing issue. President Trump delivered an ultimatum to the WTO, calling on the organization to terminate a provision that allows countries to self-determine whether they are a “developing” economy. Close to two-thirds of the WTO’s 164 members claim “developing” status, but Trump’s outrage is directed specifically at China. Trump’s administration said if progress on the provision isn’t made in 90 days, the U.S. would decide for itself which countries to treat as “developing” economies. New York Times
Digging out the farmers. The Trump Administration is preparing a $16 billion relief package for U.S. farmers hurt by the trade war. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said the grant shows that President Trump recognizes farmers are “fighting the fight” against China. Trump previously said China is “letting [the U.S.] down” by not buying more agriculture products, with soybean shipments hitting a 16-year low. Guardian
Innovation and Tech
A new bourse on the Bund. China’s new tech stock exchange, the Nasdaq-style STAR board in Shanghai, had a tumultuous debut this week when 25 companies launched on the bourse Monday. And launch they did – the average share price shot up 140% on the first day. Shares in Anji Microelectronics Tech, a semi-conductor maker, rocketed 400%. But what goes up comes down, and 9% was wiped off the board’s accumulative market cap on Tuesday as investors retreated. Fortune
A new satellite in the sky. Sticking with stars a moment – iSpace became China’s first private company to launch a satellite into orbit on Thursday. The start-up is just three years old and beat out two competitors in the field, which launched failed attempts to boost rockets into orbit earlier this year. Quartz
New clouds on the horizon. Alibaba has become the exclusive provider of Salesforce cloud services in greater China through a partnership with the U.S. company that secures Salesforce as Alibaba’s exclusive customer relationship management (CRM) suite offering. Beijing requires foreign tech companies to partner with local companies to process Chinese data, so a partnership was Salesforce’s only way in. Financial Times
A new beat for Bytedance. TikTok, the viral short-video app, has reportedly bought London-based AI start-up Jukedeck, which develops A.I. that can scan videos and automatically compose music to fit the setting. TikTok hasn’t confirmed the purchase but all the Jukedeck tema have changed their LinkedIn profiles to indicate they’re working at Bytedance, TikTok’s parent. Bytedance is reportedly planning to launch a Spotify-like music streaming service this year too. TechCrunch
In Case You Missed It
China Needs New Places to Sell Its Mountain of Stuff NYT
How to Choose Between the U.S. and China? It’s Not That Easy The Atlantic
Li Peng, Ex-Chinese Premier and Tiananmen Hard-Liner, Dies at 90 WSJ
Politics and Policy
Hong Kong gets aggressive. Tension has ramped up in Hong Kong, again. A spokesperson for China’s Defense Ministry reminded Hong Kong authorities that they can request assistance from the People’s Liberation Army days after protestors marched on Hong Kong’s Beijing liaison office and defaced the seal of the People’s Republic of China. Meanwhile, thugs – likely members of Triad gangs – armed with sticks ambushed protestors returning home to one of Hong Kong’s far-flung districts, Yuen Long. The police were criticized for their slow response and protestors occupied the arrivals hall at Hong Kong International Airport on Friday. South China Morning Post
China gets defensive. Beijing issued a white paper on defense for the first time since 2015 in which it accuses the U.S. of undermining “global strategic security.” The white paper criticized the U.S. for, amongst other things, deploying its THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea – a three-year-old dispute that still rankles – and for selling weapons to Taiwan more recently. Taiwan was also accused of “pursuing a path of separatism,” as were actors in Tibet and Xinjiang. South China Morning Post
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by Eamon Barrett. Find previous editions here, and sign up for other Fortune newsletters here.
Credit: Source link
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China’s wobbly giants | Fortune
In China, publication of the Fortune Global 500 has become a major media event. Companies advancing even a place or two rush out press releases. Those making the list for first time bask in the achievement; this year’s most notable Chinese debutant, smartphone maker Xiaomi, celebrated by doling out $24 million in stock to its 20,000 employees.
The 2019 list gives Chinese firms something special to crow about: the number of Chinese firms rose to a record 129, including 10 from Taiwan, overtaking the 121 firms from the United States. As Geoff Colvin observed in an overview of this year’s tally, this is the first time since the creation of the Global 500 in 1990—”and arguably…the first time since World War II”—that a nation other than the U.S. has topped the ranks of global big business. Geoff’s essay bears an apt title: “It’s China’s World.”
In Chinese, the Global 500 is known as the wubai qiang (五百强), which literally means “500 strong.” And yet, as astute Fortune readers know, the ranking is based strictly on revenue—and is thus a measure of size, not strength. The two can be very different things.
On this year’s list, China’s private firms accounted for some of the most spectacular gains. Xiaomi, which went public only last year, may be the youngest firm to ever crack the Global 500. Chinese property developer Country Garden made this year’s biggest leap, rising 176 places to No. 177. Tech giants Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, which debuted on the Global 500 only last year, climbed 118 places to No. 182 and 92 places to No. 237 respectively. Online retailer JD.com jumped 42 places to No. 139.
Even so, the most striking characteristic of China’s presence on the Global 500 remains the overwhelming—and growing—dominance of state-owned firms. A calculation by Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post found that, if firms from Hong Kong and Taiwan are excluded, state-owned enterprises account for 80% of the revenue generated by Chinese companies on the 2019 list, up from 76% last year.
Derek Scissors, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, argues the prevalence of state-owned behemoths among Chinese firms “reveals more weakness than strength, unless you believe that being permanently sheltered from competition constitutes strength.” Scissors questions whether firms like Ping An Insurance Group (No. 29) and Huawei Technologies (No. 61) are truly private; doubts the veracity of financial results reported by China’s state-owned firms; and wonders why the most profitable Chinese firms on the list are state-owned banks given high levels of non-performing loans in China’s economy. The vast revenue of Chinese firms on the Fortune 500, he concludes, “primarily represents waste.”
Former Financial Times China correspondent Richard McGregor offers a more nuanced (but no less skeptical) explanation for the ascendance of China’s state-owned giants in his new book Xi Jinping: The Backlash. For China watchers, the entire book is a must-read, but an excerpt, published this week in The Guardian, summarizes Richard’s account of how and why Xi sought to bolster state-owned enterprises and throw privatization of China’s economy into reverse.
I’m contemplating the distinction between size and strength because I write today from Tokyo, where eons ago I covered the collapse of Japan’s “bubble economy” for the Wall Street Journal. The unmistakable lesson of that era: propping up big, unprofitable companies preserves stability and government control—at the expense of growth and innovation.
More China news below.
Clay Chandler – [email protected] – @ClayChandler
Economy and Trade
Trade talks. Trade war negotiators are due to meet in Shanghai next week. A statement from the White House said talks will begin on July 30, with the regular crowd of Robert Lighthizer, Steven Mnuchin and Liu He. Caixin
Trade balks. China’s exports for the first half of 2019 rose just 0.1%, with exports to the U.S. retreating 8.1% – but Chinese imports of U.S. goods dropped a steeper 30%, with imports sliding 4.3% overall. South China Morning Post
A developing issue. President Trump delivered an ultimatum to the WTO, calling on the organization to terminate a provision that allows countries to self-determine whether they are a “developing” economy. Close to two-thirds of the WTO’s 164 members claim “developing” status, but Trump’s outrage is directed specifically at China. Trump’s administration said if progress on the provision isn’t made in 90 days, the U.S. would decide for itself which countries to treat as “developing” economies. New York Times
Digging out the farmers. The Trump Administration is preparing a $16 billion relief package for U.S. farmers hurt by the trade war. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue said the grant shows that President Trump recognizes farmers are “fighting the fight” against China. Trump previously said China is “letting [the U.S.] down” by not buying more agriculture products, with soybean shipments hitting a 16-year low. Guardian
Innovation and Tech
A new bourse on the Bund. China’s new tech stock exchange, the Nasdaq-style STAR board in Shanghai, had a tumultuous debut this week when 25 companies launched on the bourse Monday. And launch they did – the average share price shot up 140% on the first day. Shares in Anji Microelectronics Tech, a semi-conductor maker, rocketed 400%. But what goes up comes down, and 9% was wiped off the board’s accumulative market cap on Tuesday as investors retreated. Fortune
A new satellite in the sky. Sticking with stars a moment – iSpace became China’s first private company to launch a satellite into orbit on Thursday. The start-up is just three years old and beat out two competitors in the field, which launched failed attempts to boost rockets into orbit earlier this year. Quartz
New clouds on the horizon. Alibaba has become the exclusive provider of Salesforce cloud services in greater China through a partnership with the U.S. company that secures Salesforce as Alibaba’s exclusive customer relationship management (CRM) suite offering. Beijing requires foreign tech companies to partner with local companies to process Chinese data, so a partnership was Salesforce’s only way in. Financial Times
A new beat for Bytedance. TikTok, the viral short-video app, has reportedly bought London-based AI start-up Jukedeck, which develops A.I. that can scan videos and automatically compose music to fit the setting. TikTok hasn’t confirmed the purchase but all the Jukedeck tema have changed their LinkedIn profiles to indicate they’re working at Bytedance, TikTok’s parent. Bytedance is reportedly planning to launch a Spotify-like music streaming service this year too. TechCrunch
In Case You Missed It
China Needs New Places to Sell Its Mountain of Stuff NYT
How to Choose Between the U.S. and China? It’s Not That Easy The Atlantic
Li Peng, Ex-Chinese Premier and Tiananmen Hard-Liner, Dies at 90 WSJ
Politics and Policy
Hong Kong gets aggressive. Tension has ramped up in Hong Kong, again. A spokesperson for China’s Defense Ministry reminded Hong Kong authorities that they can request assistance from the People’s Liberation Army days after protestors marched on Hong Kong’s Beijing liaison office and defaced the seal of the People’s Republic of China. Meanwhile, thugs – likely members of Triad gangs – armed with sticks ambushed protestors returning home to one of Hong Kong’s far-flung districts, Yuen Long. The police were criticized for their slow response and protestors occupied the arrivals hall at Hong Kong International Airport on Friday. South China Morning Post
China gets defensive. Beijing issued a white paper on defense for the first time since 2015 in which it accuses the U.S. of undermining “global strategic security.” The white paper criticized the U.S. for, amongst other things, deploying its THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea – a three-year-old dispute that still rankles – and for selling weapons to Taiwan more recently. Taiwan was also accused of “pursuing a path of separatism,” as were actors in Tibet and Xinjiang. South China Morning Post
This edition of CEO Daily was edited by Eamon Barrett. Find previous editions here, and sign up for other Fortune newsletters here.
Credit: Source link
The post China’s wobbly giants | Fortune appeared first on WeeklyReviewer.
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Welcome New Investors to the $FUSZ – Updated 8/29/2018
Welcome New Investors to the $FUSZ – Updated 8/29/2018 | nFusz.com | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | SEC Filings | Recent nFUSZ Product & Demo Videos: | notifiCRM Demo | notifiCRM Overview | All notifiCRM Commercials | Marketo Training Video | Oracle NetTrivia | notifiMED | notifiEDU | notifiD nFUSZ Blogs and Vlogs: nFusz Vlogs *************************************** Updates and Interviews *************************************** Latest Shareholder Updates: S.H.A.C. nFUSZ CEO Rory Cutaia presenting at LD Micro Conference nFUSZ CEO Rory Cutaia interview at LD Micro Conference nFUSZ CEO Rory Cutaia Marketo Nation Interview Dennis McMurraynFusz – 600% increase in conversion rates Podcast: Video Marketing Blueprint: Get More Leads with Interactive Video NotifiCRM Weekly Webinar: See the new NotifiCRM 2.0 Interview: Uptick Newswire – 2/23/2018 *************************************** Company/Stock Related *************************************** Q: What is the AS, OS & Float? A: FUSZ Security Details As of 8/14/2018: Authorized Shares: 200,000,000 Outstanding Shares: Total: 153,698,043 Restricted: 75,631,636 07/20/2018 Unrestricted: 77,274,179 07/20/2018 Float: 60,350,545 05/15/2018 Q: How much of the company is held by insiders and private investors? A: Over 60% of the company is owned by insiders or private investors. The CEO and family own 31.5% of the company when adding in the common shares, warrants, options, etc. Q: Has the CEO or insiders sold or plan on selling? A: Rory: “NONE of the nFusz insiders have sold a single share. None of us has even had the legends removed from our shares and in fact, many of us, including myself, have yet to have our certificates printed. This stock is gold to us and we’re not parting with it at anywhere near these prices…” Q: When is the company thinking of uplisting? A: Plan is to uplist ASAP. nFuszed engaged Donohoe Advisory 5/21/2008 for uplisting to a national exchange. S1 was filed 8/14/2018. New board memember announced 8/28/2018. Q: Why is the company interested in uplisting ASAP? A: nFusz CEO: “We are position us because I want to uplist to NASDAQ or NYSE as soon as we possibly can. I want to bring in large institution investors, brokerage houses, pension funds. They can’t invest in OTC stocks. They can and they’ll want to invest in us.” Q: Has the company decided which exchange? A: NASDAQ. When they uplist, they will also do a public offerring for $20M and purchase Sound Concepts which is a leader in MLM. Q: Does the CEO have any prior experience in technology or startups? A: nFusz CEO Rory Cutaia : “I started my career at a prominent law firm, representing some of the top entrepreneurs the world has ever produced. I consider myself a recovering lawyer,” said nFusz Rory J. Cutaia. “I left the legal profession to become an entrepreneur myself, and founded a company called Telx, which created the defacto standard for the telecom industry, called co-location. I sold that company for $200M, our investors received more than eighteen times their invested capital, I made a lot of millionaires in the company, distributed stock to all the employees and even the receptionist was able to purchase a home and change her life. Telx is a great company, in fact it was recently sold again, about a year ago, for almost $2 billion,” said Mr. Cutaia. *************************************** nFusz Technology & Innovation *************************************** Q: Is the code proprietary? A: nFusz CEO: “our source is proprietary and protected by copyright” Q: Couldn’t another company replicate the software? A: nFusz CEO: “I believe it’s now more than 10 million lines of code and it would be exceedingly difficult for anyone to duplicate” Q: What other applications could nFusz technology be applied? A: LinkedIn, Real Estate, Armed Forces Recruitment, Dating Websites (e.g. Match.com), Insurance Brokers, etc. The list goes on and on. They just annouced they will be building a notifiLive app for facebook users to add interactivity. Q: I could see how this walk about technology would be more engaging then a LinkedIn profile. How would that work? A: Here’s a video on NotifiID Q: There are a lot of videos on YouTube. Could people buy a NotifiCRM subscription to create more engaging videos and post them there? A: Actually that’s how it works. The videos you simply and quickly create are stored on YouTube. They have over a billion of user (almost a 1/3 of the internet) in 88 countries in 78 languates watching over a billion hours of videos everyday. *************************************** Recent Deals & Launches *************************************** Q: Have there been any recent deals announced by nFusz? A: There were two major deals announced in Q1 2018. A partnership with Oracle and Marketo which are the two largest Sales Lead Management Software Companies in the world. Q: Have these deals been PR’d yet? A: These deals have been announced in a form 8-K. Q: What is the revenue split with Oracle and Marketo A: 90% to nFusz and 10% to Oracle. 80% to nFusz and 20% to Marketo Q: Why is there less revenue with the Marketo deal? A: It’s actually much more lucrative. $5K per quarter per customer with 80%/20% split. Q: Are there any other large partnerships coming? A: From the S1 filed 8/14/2018″ “We intend to enter into partnership agreements with large cloud services providers, who bundle our application with such providers’ other applications offered to their existing and prospective global customer base in order to drive more data storage and bandwidth utilization fees from such customers. We are currently finalizing contract negotiations with two such cloud services providers for similar partnership relationships.” Q: What is CRM Lead Management Software? A: Customer relationship management (CRM) lead management applications facilitate marketing and sales operations through a variety of steps. Initially, lead management applications manage the process of acquiring unqualified contacts from a variety of sources, including: web session data, web registration pages, direct mail campaigns, email marketing campaigns, multichannel campaigns, database marketing, social media, etc. It then deduplicates and augment inbound lead information to form a more complete lead profile. The applications score the leads, send them through a nurturing workflow, and qualify and prioritize the selling opportunities delivered to sales channels. The fundamental goal of lead management applications is to deliver higher-value qualified opportunities to the sales team at exactly the right time. A CRM lead management application can be delivered as a stand-alone technology, part of a broader CRM offering, or a part of a sales force automation (SFA) offering, or part of a marketing suite. Q: Who are some of the largest CRM Lead Management software companies? A: Oracle and Marketo are the top two leaders according to Gartner and Forrester. nFusz has formally released a form 8-K on their partnership with the #1 & #2 CRM Lead Management software companies but it has not been joint press released yet. Here’s more information on the leaders in CRM Lead Management Software: Research from Forrester: June 27, 2017 – Oracle, Salesforce and Microsoft The Forrester Wave: Sales Force Automation Solutions November 18, 2016 – Oracle & Marketo #1 The Forrester Wave: Lead-To-Revenue Management Platform Vendors Research from Gartner: Aug. 22, 2017 – Oracle & Marketo #1 Magic Quadrant for CRM Lead Management Feb. 17, 2017 – Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle , Marketo: Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle , Marketo Have Best Marketing Hubs, Gartner Says Apr. 20, 2017 – SAS, Adobe, Oracle , IBM, Salesforce, Marketo , SAP: Gartner Names 7 Multichannel Campaign Management Leaders Dec. 15, 2017 – 4 Insights From Gartner Hype Cycle for CRM Sales, 2017 notifiCRM = 10 years ahead of it’s time (yellow triangle). The future is here. \ http://dlvr.it/QhSbsR
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Salesforce.com(NYSE: CRM) CEO Marc Benioff often talks about having a beginner's mind -- trying to view the world like it's a new place you've never experienced before. That thinking is leading the company toward developing a blockchain and cryptocurrency solution that Benioff hopes will be ready for the company's Dreamforce 2018 software conference this September. For investors, that means Salesforce could be the latest way to take advantage of the cryptocurrency boom ... without having to buy any bitcoin.
Cryptocurrencies are virtual currencies, and there are lots of them -- more than 1,500 as of this writing. In some ways, they are no different than any other form of currency, like the dollar or the euro. People agree they are worth something and they can be exchanged for things of value.
Where cryptocurrencies differ is that they're completely digital and decentralized -- not controlled by a central bank or backed by a government. Instead, the currency exists in a type of public ledger called a blockchain, and that ledger can only be altered if certain conditions are met. Alterations are made using cryptography, the science of encoding data to keep it safe from theft or other manipulation. Here's a more in-depth description from my Foolish colleague Adam Levy.
Cryptocurrencies and the blockchain technology making them possible have garnered lots of interest and it's not surprising Salesforce is looking to create a product for this market. And Salesforce has had great success starting and quickly growing new business segments over the years, so the thought of Salesforce becoming a major player in blockchain technology and cryptocurrency isn't far-fetched.
What remains to be seen is what the product or solution will look like. It could be as simple as integrating a payment processing system for cryptocurrencies into its current Commerce Cloud division. Or it could be a little more cutting edge, like a smart contracts system for crowdfunding or business development.
What's for sure, though, is that it's happening. Benioff said in a recent interview that a random conversation he had at a bar in Davos, Switzerland, after an economic conference early this year got him thinking about how to integrate blockchain technology and cryptocurrency into his company. Never one to shy away from ambition, Salesforce quickly began work on the as-yet mysterious service.
When thinking about new investment trends like cryptocurrency, I often think back to an early investing lesson I was taught: the gold miner vs. the pick-and-shovel company. It is said that the most consistent winners in the gold rush days were those selling the equipment to mine the gold, not the miners themselves.
Salesforce could become a pick-and-shovel play on cryptocurrency, much as it has done in other areas of software and technology over the years (like cloud computing and artificial intelligence, to name just two). Rather than entering the trend itself, oftentimes the most consistent way to win is by buying the enabler of the trend.
Details are slim at this point, but the Dreamforce conference is just around the corner. If a Salesforce "solution" for cryptocurrency and blockchain technology is ready for launch by then, investors could be in early on a new way to play the virtual-money rush.
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Your MarTech Tool Stack Isn’t Complete in 2018 Without These 13 Apps
Think your marketing technology (MarTech) stack is king? Pull yourself out of 2017.
Your customers are dropping out of your funnel. Engagement is down. The CEO is on you to get results… today.
Where can you find more efficient ways to get the job done?
A better MarTech stack.
If you aren’t using a diverse set of tools, you’re likely falling behind.
Marketing departments around the world are scrambling to find the best ways to identify and engage their customers.
Are you wondering why your team can’t find more customers? Or better satisfy your existing profit centers?
It’s because your MarTech stack needs a facelift. An upgrade to help you better serve customer needs and enable easy onboarding.
Like a valley girl without botox, a business in 2018 without a proper stack is showing its true age.
But with over 5,000 MarTech options available, finding the right tools for the job can be daunting.
Luckily, I’ve got your back.
Get your MarTech stack ready for the future with the hottest apps on the block.
1. Salesforce
Managing customer relations is key to growing your business.
It’s 5x less expensive to keep an existing customer than to sell to a new one.
But upselling and reselling to existing customers presents a big challenge.
Just because someone bought from you once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again or stick around forever.
You need to manage and nurture the customer relationship.
When it comes to that, Salesforce continues to steal the CRM “best in show” — and with good reason.
It recently topped Fortune’s list of 100 best companies to work for in 2018 and has been able to retain consistent growth behind its experienced leadership.
What’s their secret to being the biggest SaaS shark in the ocean?
It’s one of the most customizable CRMs out there and has been battle-tested for nearly two decades.
It has integrations for just about every use case with it’s AppExchange being second to none.
With AppExchange, you can find, locate and utilize different applications like you would plugins on WordPress.
Businesses of all sizes use it and love it.
Whether you are a mom-and-pop shop getting started or a large enterprise org, Salesforce has seen your use case before and has a solution.
Dashboards are full of comprehensive data that you can use to build customers from small lifetime values to high lifetime values.
Salesforce is king when it comes to customer relationship management.
2. Hootsuite
When it comes to social media, today’s consumer is everywhere.
In fact, the average consumer has seven different social media accounts spread across multiple platforms.
While that presents an opportunity in the form of reaching new customers with multi-channel strategies, it also creates an internal nightmare when it comes to managing it.
Posting, liking, commenting and engaging on seven platforms? That’s a full-time job.
But not when you take advantage of platforms like Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a necessity for managing your social media presence.
While Facebook Advertising is primarily about “speaking” to your customers, Hootsuite should be used to “listen” and engage.
Of course, finding a way to listen to multiple channels at the same time is difficult. Hootsuite solves the problem by managing all your social channels in one place.
By using a unique dashboard to monitor unlimited streams from all the social media channels your team uses, you can schedule, optimize and interact with consumers in just minutes on any platform.
With integrated analytics dashboards, pulling up reports for your marketing and sales teams is easy.
Connecting to diverse content systems beyond social, you can pull up free stock images to aid your social campaigns:
The platform is decked to the fullest, helping you manage social media with one tool in a sector that normally requires multiple.
3. Google AdWords
Reaching new customers is key to scaling your business.
And there’s possibly no better place to do that than advertising with AdWords.
Despite Facebook’s massive growth, Google AdWords is still the most widely used advertising platform in the world.
In fact, getting certified in AdWords is seen as a necessity for most entry-level digital marketing professionals.
While most people are interested in Facebook, here’s why you should keep AdWords in your toolbox:
AdWords packs a punch in the form of intent.
If cleanliness is next to godliness, then intent is next to customer acquisition.
On platforms like Facebook, people aren’t there to see ads or find products. They are engaging with friends, family, and funny videos.
But on AdWords, people are actively searching via keywords to find solutions to their problems:
They want help ASAP. So you can virtually skip the typical funnel process and get down to selling.
On top of intent, AdWords packs reach. Google handles over 40,000 searches every second.
Not to mention over 3.5 billion each day and 1.2 trillion each year.
With AdWords, you can also advertise on YouTube, a platform with 1.5 billion monthly active users who watch more than an hour of content daily.
In terms of support, you have access to dedicated account managers that will help run and optimize your campaigns.
The dashboard is extremely easy to use, too.
With diverse demographic targeting and custom audiences, you can reach users with Facebook-like specificity.
AdWords is the bread-and-butter of PPC advertising and will continue to dominate with its massive user base.
Add it to your stack and get your piece of the pie today.
4. Optimizely
Running tests is critical to finding success. Whether in product creation, marketing development or sales.
Test and test again.
But when most A/B tests fail, you often can’t rely on your own, basic marketing tests to provide statistically significant data.
Let Optimizely take your experiments by the horns to stay ahead of the competition.
Test against your assumptions to build better campaigns that capture more users and increase retention.
People will think you became a guru overnight.
There are a number of ways you can impress your team with Optimizely.
Use Optimizely X, and you can experiment across “every device, every channel, and every customer touchpoint.”
With unlimited users, you can easily collaborate with anyone to build dashboards that will make your executive team happy.
Show the world your technical prowess by empowering developers to support your optimization marketing tech.
Optimizely powers optimization and testing for some of the largest companies on the planet for a reason:
It simplifies testing and provides accurate, effective results.
5. Crazy Egg
Every marketer thinks they understand their customers. Their pain points, wants and needs.
But when it comes to driving sales, do you know how the user experienced your site? What they loved or hated?
Unless you are using a heat mapping tool like Crazy Egg, you likely don’t.
Crazy Egg is known as a heatmapping tool that provides an X-ray of how visitors are interacting with your site.
They were one of the first in the space, and remain the top player for a few main reasons.
With Crazy Egg, you can see which part of your pages users click on the most, where they are spending the most time (on a per-page basis), and what areas are being completely ignored.
They offer four different views, but Heatmap and Scrollmap are where it’s at.
Heatmap allows you to see where users are clicking and Scrollmap allows you to see where users are spending the most time (especially helpful for those of you producing long-form content).
Crazy Egg allows you to A/B test different variations of pages so you can continue to make iterations.
Getting insights on how your users interact with you is invaluable for optimization. Quit your slacking and start using heatmaps.
Speaking of slacking…
6. Slack
Collaborating and communicating across teams and departments shouldn’t be a boring, tedious or annoying process.
And, it shouldn’t be an afterthought, either.
According to HubSpot, the more aligned your sales and marketing team is, the better overall growth you’ll achieve.
And that’s where Slack comes into play.
With Slack, all of your team communication exists in one place. You can message individuals directly, create a group, and create Slack channels to keep conversations topical and organized.
Plus, they have integrations with EVERYTHING. GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, Heroku and countless other MarTech tools. The list doesn’t end.
Slack is where work gets done, and team communication stays fluid.
7. Marketo
Latest data shows that 91% of companies using marketing automation find it to be an integral piece of their marketing strategy.
The fact of the matter is, with so many channels and platforms available to marketers today, automation is necessary to thrive.
And Marketo is a powerhouse of automation designed for marketers by marketers.
If you’re in B2B and want to get an idea of how your prospects are interacting with all your marketing channels, Marketo is the wingman you’ve always wanted.
Built on the same core platform as Salesforce, Marketo is a necessity for any team running multiple channels for customer acquisition.
With an easy-to-use modular system featuring marketing automation, consumer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, and marketing management, you can customize everything for your specific business needs.
Marketo is designed for scaling businesses.
The platform allows you to clone entire programs such as landing pages and email marketing, so you don’t have to create new ones as your grow.
Using advanced reporting to pull detailed customer analytics and then compare across channels, Marketo can integrate with just about any other MarTech tool you use.
Marketo is built for the power-user. For the marketing team that attacks multiple channels and needs heavy equipment to get the job done.
8. AdRoll
AdRoll arrived on the MarTech scene as a retargeting platform but has since transitioned into a full-funnel DSP (demand-side platform).
What does this mean? AdRoll allows you to attract new customers to your site, convert site visitors at scale, and continue to maintain a relationship with your existing customers.
Programmatic marketing has gotten some flack recently, but the numbers don’t lie:
There is a reason AdRoll has over 30,000 customers (well, there’s at least 30,000 reasons).
And what AdRoll is working on in the future is even more interesting.
AdRoll plans to focus more on incrementality utilizing big data and machine learning to get a complete sense of which ads are actually causing customers to make a purchase.
They are building out an account-based marketing solution and are poised to become a market leader in the space.
Take their access to over 300 ad networks and exchanges, add an advanced bidding tool, and layer in very specific customer data from Bombora.
That’s a recipe for potential success and more money in your company war chest.
Their account management is second to none. For mid-market companies, you will not get the same level of customer service from Google or Facebook.
Want a platform to help grow and nurture customers? Look no further.
9. Sprinklr
CXM, or customer experience management, is the audience engagement need for your MarTech stack in 2018.
Have you heard the maxim, “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care”?
With CXM, that core idea rings true. Engaging with your audience is an absolute must-have for creating a dialogue about your brand.
Sprinklr makes this easier than ever to put into practice.
Their CXM platform gives you complete control over the customer experience.
Pull over 25 social channels into a unified platform. Reach and listen to all your customers in one place.
Add context to data pulled from other platforms, like your Salesforce CRM.
Schedule your campaigns and monitor results with ease.
Leverage Sprinklr’s app marketplace to make the most of your CXM data.
With diverse integrations, you’ll be able to connect Sprinklr to any other tool in your stack.
10. MailChimp
When it comes to email marketing, there are countless platforms available.
But starting out with your first platform can make or break your success.
Some cost a fortune, and others are meant for top-level companies.
Thankfully, MailChimp exists, allowing any company of any size to start an email marketing campaign in just minutes.
With powerful analytics dashboards, you get clear data on your campaigns without vanity metrics:
Using a drag-and-drop email building system, you can get campaigns established fast with the look and appeal of a high-tech, high-cost platform:
The fact is, email still reigns supreme in 2018.
Email is still one of the most influential information sources for B2B audiences.
On the B2C side of things, welcome emails generate 320% more revenue than general promotional messages.
If you aren’t capitalizing on the opportunities to maximize revenue from your email marketing… well, then what are you doing?
MailChimp makes it easier than ever to build automated campaigns for drip funnels and promotional marketing, with templates that make the process a breeze for you and your team.
You can quickly split your audiences into lists for optimal campaign performance.
As with most MarTech tools, it integrates with just about every app on the planet.
My personal favorite tactic is using Gleam to build a competition, then leveraging automation in MailChimp to convert those participants into customers.
All that’s left to do is sit back and watch yourself win.
11. Wrike
Keeping everyone on the same page is just as vital as getting your MarTech stack working overtime.
Ensuring that every team is interconnected, working together and sharing information isn’t easy.
Especially when teams are hard at work.
And that’s where Wrike comes into play.
Wrike has an advantage as one of the leading productivity management platforms in the world.
When your MarTech needs to stay on track, count on Wrike to keep all your campaign tasks organized.
Wrike helps you to test workflows before launching them into campaigns and manage communications across members of your team.
In addition to a robust free trial and extensive documentation to get you started, Wrike boasts a library of integrations — including some of the market-leading MarTech tools.
Wrike is perfect for businesses that get work done and need to share that work across various departments and teams.
Integrate it into your marketing stack for streamlined communications and efficiency.
12. Zapier
Say you need to connect your Kissmetrics campaigns to reports to Crazy Egg, and then email those reports to your supervisor at 4:00 PM on the dot?
Diverse, detailed and seriously precise marketing automation like that is hard to come by.
And that’s why Zapier is dominating the competition.
Connecting anything to well, anything, is as easy as selecting a few dropdowns. Choose the apps you want to connect, create a hook, and voila — instant MarTech magic.
Zapier is the Muhammad Ali of automation. Using easy, customizable triggers and actions, you can connect any app in your stack to run highly specific tasks.
Once you’ve set it up, you simply let it run in the background, automating most of your daily tasks that kill your time.
13. SERPs
SEO has changed dramatically in the past ten years. In fact, Google makes updates to their algorithm nearly 600 times each year.
That’s more than once a day.
Staying up-to-date with SEO is crucial, and there is perhaps no better way to know who is outranking you on specific keywords than SERPs.
SERPs is the one-stop shop for competitive SEO insights. Your SEO is never good enough in today’s algorithm-shifting world.
Until you hit #1 ranking for every targeted keyword, there is always opportunity to improve.
SERPs helps you go above and beyond plain old research to deliver actionable insights about your competition.
When researching their Google ranking index or keyword research database, you can gather insights on which keywords competitors are targeting, campaign costs against those keywords, and SEO rankings for specific landing pages or blog content.
Stop doing keyword research with sub-par platforms or directly on Google.
Integrate SERPs to get the benefit of keyword research and competitor research in one.
Bringing it all together
Building a MarTech stack is a complex problem.
You have over 5,000 options to choose from with a very specific budget and a list of requirements.
Want to hear some good news? You’ve already done the hard work. Finding the right resources is half the battle.
The other half of the battle is getting your knowledge to align with actions.
You are the glue holding your MarTech stack together. Without your decisions, there is no marketing ROI for you and your team.
You still need to bring everything together to ensure your team can make the most of this powerful MarTech tool stack.
First, ask yourself these two key questions.
What are my immediate goals?
Your initial answers to this question led you here, so it may be time to really look into what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
In my first marketing role at a SaaS company, we spent about $10,000 on LinkedIn Ads that only converted 0.1% of users who clicked through.
In some companies, this is a campaign that can put you out on the street.
You know what our team did instead of stressing about the results? We doubled down with a clearer objective.
Our initial goal was too broad. “Convert 1% of user click-throughs” only works if you’re offering real value and understand why your content is valuable.
We were trying to sell ourselves without telling a story, and our prospective customers could see right through it. So what did our new goal become?
“Convert 1% of user click-throughs and increase total ad clicks by 5,000.” Then we were prioritizing context as well as optimization.
Bringing this back around to the finish line, your goals are the hidden driver for your MarTech stack.
Understand your why and be clear about how each MarTech tool guides you toward success.
Where are you going to achieve a greater ROI?
The trick is actually more simple than it may seem.
You’ll generate ROI when you test assumptions and land in the right place at the right time.
With measurable and actionable results, you tell a more informed story about your customers.
A better story leads to better experiments. Before you know it, your marketing machine does all the heavy lifting for you.
For example, your life is easier when you put the majority of the load on your MarTech stack.
With Kissmetrics, for instance, it’s easy to analyze, segment, and connect your marketing automation in a single platform.
Your MarTech tool stack is the key to achieving successful ROI in your marketing efforts. Without it, you’re Captain Ahab in the ocean minus a paddle and spear.
Conclusion
Marketing stacks are key to streamlining your marketing campaigns in the modern world.
With so many options to choose from, it can often be overwhelming.
For your average mid-market company, a combination of Kissmetrics (below) + Crazy Egg + HubSpot + Google + Facebook may be all you need.
Even startups can benefit from this stack.
Enterprises can combine these tools and more to achieve even more growth.
With the addition of Sprinklr and other CXM tools, every channel becomes a potential revenue stream.
You’ve shown an appetite for winning in the marketing game by getting this far.
Go forth, build your MarTech tool stack, and show the world what you can do.
What completes your MarTech tool stack?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
0 notes
Text
Your MarTech Tool Stack Isn’t Complete in 2018 Without These 13 Apps
Think your marketing technology (MarTech) stack is king? Pull yourself out of 2017.
Your customers are dropping out of your funnel. Engagement is down. The CEO is on you to get results… today.
Where can you find more efficient ways to get the job done?
A better MarTech stack.
If you aren’t using a diverse set of tools, you’re likely falling behind.
Marketing departments around the world are scrambling to find the best ways to identify and engage their customers.
Are you wondering why your team can’t find more customers? Or better satisfy your existing profit centers?
It’s because your MarTech stack needs a facelift. An upgrade to help you better serve customer needs and enable easy onboarding.
Like a valley girl without botox, a business in 2018 without a proper stack is showing its true age.
But with over 5,000 MarTech options available, finding the right tools for the job can be daunting.
Luckily, I’ve got your back.
Get your MarTech stack ready for the future with the hottest apps on the block.
1. Salesforce
Managing customer relations is key to growing your business.
It’s 5x less expensive to keep an existing customer than to sell to a new one.
But upselling and reselling to existing customers presents a big challenge.
Just because someone bought from you once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again or stick around forever.
You need to manage and nurture the customer relationship.
When it comes to that, Salesforce continues to steal the CRM “best in show” — and with good reason.
It recently topped Fortune’s list of 100 best companies to work for in 2018 and has been able to retain consistent growth behind its experienced leadership.
What’s their secret to being the biggest SaaS shark in the ocean?
It’s one of the most customizable CRMs out there and has been battle-tested for nearly two decades.
It has integrations for just about every use case with it’s AppExchange being second to none.
With AppExchange, you can find, locate and utilize different applications like you would plugins on WordPress.
Businesses of all sizes use it and love it.
Whether you are a mom-and-pop shop getting started or a large enterprise org, Salesforce has seen your use case before and has a solution.
Dashboards are full of comprehensive data that you can use to build customers from small lifetime values to high lifetime values.
Salesforce is king when it comes to customer relationship management.
2. Hootsuite
When it comes to social media, today’s consumer is everywhere.
In fact, the average consumer has seven different social media accounts spread across multiple platforms.
While that presents an opportunity in the form of reaching new customers with multi-channel strategies, it also creates an internal nightmare when it comes to managing it.
Posting, liking, commenting and engaging on seven platforms? That’s a full-time job.
But not when you take advantage of platforms like Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a necessity for managing your social media presence.
While Facebook Advertising is primarily about “speaking” to your customers, Hootsuite should be used to “listen” and engage.
Of course, finding a way to listen to multiple channels at the same time is difficult. Hootsuite solves the problem by managing all your social channels in one place.
By using a unique dashboard to monitor unlimited streams from all the social media channels your team uses, you can schedule, optimize and interact with consumers in just minutes on any platform.
With integrated analytics dashboards, pulling up reports for your marketing and sales teams is easy.
Connecting to diverse content systems beyond social, you can pull up free stock images to aid your social campaigns:
The platform is decked to the fullest, helping you manage social media with one tool in a sector that normally requires multiple.
3. Google AdWords
Reaching new customers is key to scaling your business.
And there’s possibly no better place to do that than advertising with AdWords.
Despite Facebook’s massive growth, Google AdWords is still the most widely used advertising platform in the world.
In fact, getting certified in AdWords is seen as a necessity for most entry-level digital marketing professionals.
While most people are interested in Facebook, here’s why you should keep AdWords in your toolbox:
AdWords packs a punch in the form of intent.
If cleanliness is next to godliness, then intent is next to customer acquisition.
On platforms like Facebook, people aren’t there to see ads or find products. They are engaging with friends, family, and funny videos.
But on AdWords, people are actively searching via keywords to find solutions to their problems:
They want help ASAP. So you can virtually skip the typical funnel process and get down to selling.
On top of intent, AdWords packs reach. Google handles over 40,000 searches every second.
Not to mention over 3.5 billion each day and 1.2 trillion each year.
With AdWords, you can also advertise on YouTube, a platform with 1.5 billion monthly active users who watch more than an hour of content daily.
In terms of support, you have access to dedicated account managers that will help run and optimize your campaigns.
The dashboard is extremely easy to use, too.
With diverse demographic targeting and custom audiences, you can reach users with Facebook-like specificity.
AdWords is the bread-and-butter of PPC advertising and will continue to dominate with its massive user base.
Add it to your stack and get your piece of the pie today.
4. Optimizely
Running tests is critical to finding success. Whether in product creation, marketing development or sales.
Test and test again.
But when most A/B tests fail, you often can’t rely on your own, basic marketing tests to provide statistically significant data.
Let Optimizely take your experiments by the horns to stay ahead of the competition.
Test against your assumptions to build better campaigns that capture more users and increase retention.
People will think you became a guru overnight.
There are a number of ways you can impress your team with Optimizely.
Use Optimizely X, and you can experiment across “every device, every channel, and every customer touchpoint.”
With unlimited users, you can easily collaborate with anyone to build dashboards that will make your executive team happy.
Show the world your technical prowess by empowering developers to support your optimization marketing tech.
Optimizely powers optimization and testing for some of the largest companies on the planet for a reason:
It simplifies testing and provides accurate, effective results.
5. Crazy Egg
Every marketer thinks they understand their customers. Their pain points, wants and needs.
But when it comes to driving sales, do you know how the user experienced your site? What they loved or hated?
Unless you are using a heat mapping tool like Crazy Egg, you likely don’t.
Crazy Egg is known as a heatmapping tool that provides an X-ray of how visitors are interacting with your site.
They were one of the first in the space, and remain the top player for a few main reasons.
With Crazy Egg, you can see which part of your pages users click on the most, where they are spending the most time (on a per-page basis), and what areas are being completely ignored.
They offer four different views, but Heatmap and Scrollmap are where it’s at.
Heatmap allows you to see where users are clicking and Scrollmap allows you to see where users are spending the most time (especially helpful for those of you producing long-form content).
Crazy Egg allows you to A/B test different variations of pages so you can continue to make iterations.
Getting insights on how your users interact with you is invaluable for optimization. Quit your slacking and start using heatmaps.
Speaking of slacking…
6. Slack
Collaborating and communicating across teams and departments shouldn’t be a boring, tedious or annoying process.
And, it shouldn’t be an afterthought, either.
According to HubSpot, the more aligned your sales and marketing team is, the better overall growth you’ll achieve.
And that’s where Slack comes into play.
With Slack, all of your team communication exists in one place. You can message individuals directly, create a group, and create Slack channels to keep conversations topical and organized.
Plus, they have integrations with EVERYTHING. GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, Heroku and countless other MarTech tools. The list doesn’t end.
Slack is where work gets done, and team communication stays fluid.
7. Marketo
Latest data shows that 91% of companies using marketing automation find it to be an integral piece of their marketing strategy.
The fact of the matter is, with so many channels and platforms available to marketers today, automation is necessary to thrive.
And Marketo is a powerhouse of automation designed for marketers by marketers.
If you’re in B2B and want to get an idea of how your prospects are interacting with all your marketing channels, Marketo is the wingman you’ve always wanted.
Built on the same core platform as Salesforce, Marketo is a necessity for any team running multiple channels for customer acquisition.
With an easy-to-use modular system featuring marketing automation, consumer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, and marketing management, you can customize everything for your specific business needs.
Marketo is designed for scaling businesses.
The platform allows you to clone entire programs such as landing pages and email marketing, so you don’t have to create new ones as your grow.
Using advanced reporting to pull detailed customer analytics and then compare across channels, Marketo can integrate with just about any other MarTech tool you use.
Marketo is built for the power-user. For the marketing team that attacks multiple channels and needs heavy equipment to get the job done.
8. AdRoll
AdRoll arrived on the MarTech scene as a retargeting platform but has since transitioned into a full-funnel DSP (demand-side platform).
What does this mean? AdRoll allows you to attract new customers to your site, convert site visitors at scale, and continue to maintain a relationship with your existing customers.
Programmatic marketing has gotten some flack recently, but the numbers don’t lie:
There is a reason AdRoll has over 30,000 customers (well, there’s at least 30,000 reasons).
And what AdRoll is working on in the future is even more interesting.
AdRoll plans to focus more on incrementality utilizing big data and machine learning to get a complete sense of which ads are actually causing customers to make a purchase.
They are building out an account-based marketing solution and are poised to become a market leader in the space.
Take their access to over 300 ad networks and exchanges, add an advanced bidding tool, and layer in very specific customer data from Bombora.
That’s a recipe for potential success and more money in your company war chest.
Their account management is second to none. For mid-market companies, you will not get the same level of customer service from Google or Facebook.
Want a platform to help grow and nurture customers? Look no further.
9. Sprinklr
CXM, or customer experience management, is the audience engagement need for your MarTech stack in 2018.
Have you heard the maxim, “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care”?
With CXM, that core idea rings true. Engaging with your audience is an absolute must-have for creating a dialogue about your brand.
Sprinklr makes this easier than ever to put into practice.
Their CXM platform gives you complete control over the customer experience.
Pull over 25 social channels into a unified platform. Reach and listen to all your customers in one place.
Add context to data pulled from other platforms, like your Salesforce CRM.
Schedule your campaigns and monitor results with ease.
Leverage Sprinklr’s app marketplace to make the most of your CXM data.
With diverse integrations, you’ll be able to connect Sprinklr to any other tool in your stack.
10. MailChimp
When it comes to email marketing, there are countless platforms available.
But starting out with your first platform can make or break your success.
Some cost a fortune, and others are meant for top-level companies.
Thankfully, MailChimp exists, allowing any company of any size to start an email marketing campaign in just minutes.
With powerful analytics dashboards, you get clear data on your campaigns without vanity metrics:
Using a drag-and-drop email building system, you can get campaigns established fast with the look and appeal of a high-tech, high-cost platform:
The fact is, email still reigns supreme in 2018.
Email is still one of the most influential information sources for B2B audiences.
On the B2C side of things, welcome emails generate 320% more revenue than general promotional messages.
If you aren’t capitalizing on the opportunities to maximize revenue from your email marketing… well, then what are you doing?
MailChimp makes it easier than ever to build automated campaigns for drip funnels and promotional marketing, with templates that make the process a breeze for you and your team.
You can quickly split your audiences into lists for optimal campaign performance.
As with most MarTech tools, it integrates with just about every app on the planet.
My personal favorite tactic is using Gleam to build a competition, then leveraging automation in MailChimp to convert those participants into customers.
All that’s left to do is sit back and watch yourself win.
11. Wrike
Keeping everyone on the same page is just as vital as getting your MarTech stack working overtime.
Ensuring that every team is interconnected, working together and sharing information isn’t easy.
Especially when teams are hard at work.
And that’s where Wrike comes into play.
Wrike has an advantage as one of the leading productivity management platforms in the world.
When your MarTech needs to stay on track, count on Wrike to keep all your campaign tasks organized.
Wrike helps you to test workflows before launching them into campaigns and manage communications across members of your team.
In addition to a robust free trial and extensive documentation to get you started, Wrike boasts a library of integrations — including some of the market-leading MarTech tools.
Wrike is perfect for businesses that get work done and need to share that work across various departments and teams.
Integrate it into your marketing stack for streamlined communications and efficiency.
12. Zapier
Say you need to connect your Kissmetrics campaigns to reports to Crazy Egg, and then email those reports to your supervisor at 4:00 PM on the dot?
Diverse, detailed and seriously precise marketing automation like that is hard to come by.
And that’s why Zapier is dominating the competition.
Connecting anything to well, anything, is as easy as selecting a few dropdowns. Choose the apps you want to connect, create a hook, and voila — instant MarTech magic.
Zapier is the Muhammad Ali of automation. Using easy, customizable triggers and actions, you can connect any app in your stack to run highly specific tasks.
Once you’ve set it up, you simply let it run in the background, automating most of your daily tasks that kill your time.
13. SERPs
SEO has changed dramatically in the past ten years. In fact, Google makes updates to their algorithm nearly 600 times each year.
That’s more than once a day.
Staying up-to-date with SEO is crucial, and there is perhaps no better way to know who is outranking you on specific keywords than SERPs.
SERPs is the one-stop shop for competitive SEO insights. Your SEO is never good enough in today’s algorithm-shifting world.
Until you hit #1 ranking for every targeted keyword, there is always opportunity to improve.
SERPs helps you go above and beyond plain old research to deliver actionable insights about your competition.
When researching their Google ranking index or keyword research database, you can gather insights on which keywords competitors are targeting, campaign costs against those keywords, and SEO rankings for specific landing pages or blog content.
Stop doing keyword research with sub-par platforms or directly on Google.
Integrate SERPs to get the benefit of keyword research and competitor research in one.
Bringing it all together
Building a MarTech stack is a complex problem.
You have over 5,000 options to choose from with a very specific budget and a list of requirements.
Want to hear some good news? You’ve already done the hard work. Finding the right resources is half the battle.
The other half of the battle is getting your knowledge to align with actions.
You are the glue holding your MarTech stack together. Without your decisions, there is no marketing ROI for you and your team.
You still need to bring everything together to ensure your team can make the most of this powerful MarTech tool stack.
First, ask yourself these two key questions.
What are my immediate goals?
Your initial answers to this question led you here, so it may be time to really look into what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
In my first marketing role at a SaaS company, we spent about $10,000 on LinkedIn Ads that only converted 0.1% of users who clicked through.
In some companies, this is a campaign that can put you out on the street.
You know what our team did instead of stressing about the results? We doubled down with a clearer objective.
Our initial goal was too broad. “Convert 1% of user click-throughs” only works if you’re offering real value and understand why your content is valuable.
We were trying to sell ourselves without telling a story, and our prospective customers could see right through it. So what did our new goal become?
“Convert 1% of user click-throughs and increase total ad clicks by 5,000.” Then we were prioritizing context as well as optimization.
Bringing this back around to the finish line, your goals are the hidden driver for your MarTech stack.
Understand your why and be clear about how each MarTech tool guides you toward success.
Where are you going to achieve a greater ROI?
The trick is actually more simple than it may seem.
You’ll generate ROI when you test assumptions and land in the right place at the right time.
With measurable and actionable results, you tell a more informed story about your customers.
A better story leads to better experiments. Before you know it, your marketing machine does all the heavy lifting for you.
For example, your life is easier when you put the majority of the load on your MarTech stack.
With Kissmetrics, for instance, it’s easy to analyze, segment, and connect your marketing automation in a single platform.
Your MarTech tool stack is the key to achieving successful ROI in your marketing efforts. Without it, you’re Captain Ahab in the ocean minus a paddle and spear.
Conclusion
Marketing stacks are key to streamlining your marketing campaigns in the modern world.
With so many options to choose from, it can often be overwhelming.
For your average mid-market company, a combination of Kissmetrics (below) + Crazy Egg + HubSpot + Google + Facebook may be all you need.
Even startups can benefit from this stack.
Enterprises can combine these tools and more to achieve even more growth.
With the addition of Sprinklr and other CXM tools, every channel becomes a potential revenue stream.
You’ve shown an appetite for winning in the marketing game by getting this far.
Go forth, build your MarTech tool stack, and show the world what you can do.
What completes your MarTech tool stack?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
http://ift.tt/2oEuTNw from MarketingRSS http://ift.tt/2CTVpXC via Youtube
0 notes
Text
Your MarTech Tool Stack Isn’t Complete in 2018 Without These 13 Apps
Think your marketing technology (MarTech) stack is king? Pull yourself out of 2017.
Your customers are dropping out of your funnel. Engagement is down. The CEO is on you to get results… today.
Where can you find more efficient ways to get the job done?
A better MarTech stack.
If you aren’t using a diverse set of tools, you’re likely falling behind.
Marketing departments around the world are scrambling to find the best ways to identify and engage their customers.
Are you wondering why your team can’t find more customers? Or better satisfy your existing profit centers?
It’s because your MarTech stack needs a facelift. An upgrade to help you better serve customer needs and enable easy onboarding.
Like a valley girl without botox, a business in 2018 without a proper stack is showing its true age.
But with over 5,000 MarTech options available, finding the right tools for the job can be daunting.
Luckily, I’ve got your back.
Get your MarTech stack ready for the future with the hottest apps on the block.
1. Salesforce
Managing customer relations is key to growing your business.
It’s 5x less expensive to keep an existing customer than to sell to a new one.
But upselling and reselling to existing customers presents a big challenge.
Just because someone bought from you once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again or stick around forever.
You need to manage and nurture the customer relationship.
When it comes to that, Salesforce continues to steal the CRM “best in show” — and with good reason.
It recently topped Fortune’s list of 100 best companies to work for in 2018 and has been able to retain consistent growth behind its experienced leadership.
What’s their secret to being the biggest SaaS shark in the ocean?
It’s one of the most customizable CRMs out there and has been battle-tested for nearly two decades.
It has integrations for just about every use case with it’s AppExchange being second to none.
With AppExchange, you can find, locate and utilize different applications like you would plugins on WordPress.
Businesses of all sizes use it and love it.
Whether you are a mom-and-pop shop getting started or a large enterprise org, Salesforce has seen your use case before and has a solution.
Dashboards are full of comprehensive data that you can use to build customers from small lifetime values to high lifetime values.
Salesforce is king when it comes to customer relationship management.
2. Hootsuite
When it comes to social media, today’s consumer is everywhere.
In fact, the average consumer has seven different social media accounts spread across multiple platforms.
While that presents an opportunity in the form of reaching new customers with multi-channel strategies, it also creates an internal nightmare when it comes to managing it.
Posting, liking, commenting and engaging on seven platforms? That’s a full-time job.
But not when you take advantage of platforms like Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a necessity for managing your social media presence.
While Facebook Advertising is primarily about “speaking” to your customers, Hootsuite should be used to “listen” and engage.
Of course, finding a way to listen to multiple channels at the same time is difficult. Hootsuite solves the problem by managing all your social channels in one place.
By using a unique dashboard to monitor unlimited streams from all the social media channels your team uses, you can schedule, optimize and interact with consumers in just minutes on any platform.
With integrated analytics dashboards, pulling up reports for your marketing and sales teams is easy.
Connecting to diverse content systems beyond social, you can pull up free stock images to aid your social campaigns:
The platform is decked to the fullest, helping you manage social media with one tool in a sector that normally requires multiple.
3. Google AdWords
Reaching new customers is key to scaling your business.
And there’s possibly no better place to do that than advertising with AdWords.
Despite Facebook’s massive growth, Google AdWords is still the most widely used advertising platform in the world.
In fact, getting certified in AdWords is seen as a necessity for most entry-level digital marketing professionals.
While most people are interested in Facebook, here’s why you should keep AdWords in your toolbox:
AdWords packs a punch in the form of intent.
If cleanliness is next to godliness, then intent is next to customer acquisition.
On platforms like Facebook, people aren’t there to see ads or find products. They are engaging with friends, family, and funny videos.
But on AdWords, people are actively searching via keywords to find solutions to their problems:
They want help ASAP. So you can virtually skip the typical funnel process and get down to selling.
On top of intent, AdWords packs reach. Google handles over 40,000 searches every second.
Not to mention over 3.5 billion each day and 1.2 trillion each year.
With AdWords, you can also advertise on YouTube, a platform with 1.5 billion monthly active users who watch more than an hour of content daily.
In terms of support, you have access to dedicated account managers that will help run and optimize your campaigns.
The dashboard is extremely easy to use, too.
With diverse demographic targeting and custom audiences, you can reach users with Facebook-like specificity.
AdWords is the bread-and-butter of PPC advertising and will continue to dominate with its massive user base.
Add it to your stack and get your piece of the pie today.
4. Optimizely
Running tests is critical to finding success. Whether in product creation, marketing development or sales.
Test and test again.
But when most A/B tests fail, you often can’t rely on your own, basic marketing tests to provide statistically significant data.
Let Optimizely take your experiments by the horns to stay ahead of the competition.
Test against your assumptions to build better campaigns that capture more users and increase retention.
People will think you became a guru overnight.
There are a number of ways you can impress your team with Optimizely.
Use Optimizely X, and you can experiment across “every device, every channel, and every customer touchpoint.”
With unlimited users, you can easily collaborate with anyone to build dashboards that will make your executive team happy.
Show the world your technical prowess by empowering developers to support your optimization marketing tech.
Optimizely powers optimization and testing for some of the largest companies on the planet for a reason:
It simplifies testing and provides accurate, effective results.
5. Crazy Egg
Every marketer thinks they understand their customers. Their pain points, wants and needs.
But when it comes to driving sales, do you know how the user experienced your site? What they loved or hated?
Unless you are using a heat mapping tool like Crazy Egg, you likely don’t.
Crazy Egg is known as a heatmapping tool that provides an X-ray of how visitors are interacting with your site.
They were one of the first in the space, and remain the top player for a few main reasons.
With Crazy Egg, you can see which part of your pages users click on the most, where they are spending the most time (on a per-page basis), and what areas are being completely ignored.
They offer four different views, but Heatmap and Scrollmap are where it’s at.
Heatmap allows you to see where users are clicking and Scrollmap allows you to see where users are spending the most time (especially helpful for those of you producing long-form content).
Crazy Egg allows you to A/B test different variations of pages so you can continue to make iterations.
Getting insights on how your users interact with you is invaluable for optimization. Quit your slacking and start using heatmaps.
Speaking of slacking…
6. Slack
Collaborating and communicating across teams and departments shouldn’t be a boring, tedious or annoying process.
And, it shouldn’t be an afterthought, either.
According to HubSpot, the more aligned your sales and marketing team is, the better overall growth you’ll achieve.
And that’s where Slack comes into play.
With Slack, all of your team communication exists in one place. You can message individuals directly, create a group, and create Slack channels to keep conversations topical and organized.
Plus, they have integrations with EVERYTHING. GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, Heroku and countless other MarTech tools. The list doesn’t end.
Slack is where work gets done, and team communication stays fluid.
7. Marketo
Latest data shows that 91% of companies using marketing automation find it to be an integral piece of their marketing strategy.
The fact of the matter is, with so many channels and platforms available to marketers today, automation is necessary to thrive.
And Marketo is a powerhouse of automation designed for marketers by marketers.
If you’re in B2B and want to get an idea of how your prospects are interacting with all your marketing channels, Marketo is the wingman you’ve always wanted.
Built on the same core platform as Salesforce, Marketo is a necessity for any team running multiple channels for customer acquisition.
With an easy-to-use modular system featuring marketing automation, consumer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, and marketing management, you can customize everything for your specific business needs.
Marketo is designed for scaling businesses.
The platform allows you to clone entire programs such as landing pages and email marketing, so you don’t have to create new ones as your grow.
Using advanced reporting to pull detailed customer analytics and then compare across channels, Marketo can integrate with just about any other MarTech tool you use.
Marketo is built for the power-user. For the marketing team that attacks multiple channels and needs heavy equipment to get the job done.
8. AdRoll
AdRoll arrived on the MarTech scene as a retargeting platform but has since transitioned into a full-funnel DSP (demand-side platform).
What does this mean? AdRoll allows you to attract new customers to your site, convert site visitors at scale, and continue to maintain a relationship with your existing customers.
Programmatic marketing has gotten some flack recently, but the numbers don’t lie:
There is a reason AdRoll has over 30,000 customers (well, there’s at least 30,000 reasons).
And what AdRoll is working on in the future is even more interesting.
AdRoll plans to focus more on incrementality utilizing big data and machine learning to get a complete sense of which ads are actually causing customers to make a purchase.
They are building out an account-based marketing solution and are poised to become a market leader in the space.
Take their access to over 300 ad networks and exchanges, add an advanced bidding tool, and layer in very specific customer data from Bombora.
That’s a recipe for potential success and more money in your company war chest.
Their account management is second to none. For mid-market companies, you will not get the same level of customer service from Google or Facebook.
Want a platform to help grow and nurture customers? Look no further.
9. Sprinklr
CXM, or customer experience management, is the audience engagement need for your MarTech stack in 2018.
Have you heard the maxim, “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care”?
With CXM, that core idea rings true. Engaging with your audience is an absolute must-have for creating a dialogue about your brand.
Sprinklr makes this easier than ever to put into practice.
Their CXM platform gives you complete control over the customer experience.
Pull over 25 social channels into a unified platform. Reach and listen to all your customers in one place.
Add context to data pulled from other platforms, like your Salesforce CRM.
Schedule your campaigns and monitor results with ease.
Leverage Sprinklr’s app marketplace to make the most of your CXM data.
With diverse integrations, you’ll be able to connect Sprinklr to any other tool in your stack.
10. MailChimp
When it comes to email marketing, there are countless platforms available.
But starting out with your first platform can make or break your success.
Some cost a fortune, and others are meant for top-level companies.
Thankfully, MailChimp exists, allowing any company of any size to start an email marketing campaign in just minutes.
With powerful analytics dashboards, you get clear data on your campaigns without vanity metrics:
Using a drag-and-drop email building system, you can get campaigns established fast with the look and appeal of a high-tech, high-cost platform:
The fact is, email still reigns supreme in 2018.
Email is still one of the most influential information sources for B2B audiences.
On the B2C side of things, welcome emails generate 320% more revenue than general promotional messages.
If you aren’t capitalizing on the opportunities to maximize revenue from your email marketing… well, then what are you doing?
MailChimp makes it easier than ever to build automated campaigns for drip funnels and promotional marketing, with templates that make the process a breeze for you and your team.
You can quickly split your audiences into lists for optimal campaign performance.
As with most MarTech tools, it integrates with just about every app on the planet.
My personal favorite tactic is using Gleam to build a competition, then leveraging automation in MailChimp to convert those participants into customers.
All that’s left to do is sit back and watch yourself win.
11. Wrike
Keeping everyone on the same page is just as vital as getting your MarTech stack working overtime.
Ensuring that every team is interconnected, working together and sharing information isn’t easy.
Especially when teams are hard at work.
And that’s where Wrike comes into play.
Wrike has an advantage as one of the leading productivity management platforms in the world.
When your MarTech needs to stay on track, count on Wrike to keep all your campaign tasks organized.
Wrike helps you to test workflows before launching them into campaigns and manage communications across members of your team.
In addition to a robust free trial and extensive documentation to get you started, Wrike boasts a library of integrations — including some of the market-leading MarTech tools.
Wrike is perfect for businesses that get work done and need to share that work across various departments and teams.
Integrate it into your marketing stack for streamlined communications and efficiency.
12. Zapier
Say you need to connect your Kissmetrics campaigns to reports to Crazy Egg, and then email those reports to your supervisor at 4:00 PM on the dot?
Diverse, detailed and seriously precise marketing automation like that is hard to come by.
And that’s why Zapier is dominating the competition.
Connecting anything to well, anything, is as easy as selecting a few dropdowns. Choose the apps you want to connect, create a hook, and voila — instant MarTech magic.
Zapier is the Muhammad Ali of automation. Using easy, customizable triggers and actions, you can connect any app in your stack to run highly specific tasks.
Once you’ve set it up, you simply let it run in the background, automating most of your daily tasks that kill your time.
13. SERPs
SEO has changed dramatically in the past ten years. In fact, Google makes updates to their algorithm nearly 600 times each year.
That’s more than once a day.
Staying up-to-date with SEO is crucial, and there is perhaps no better way to know who is outranking you on specific keywords than SERPs.
SERPs is the one-stop shop for competitive SEO insights. Your SEO is never good enough in today’s algorithm-shifting world.
Until you hit #1 ranking for every targeted keyword, there is always opportunity to improve.
SERPs helps you go above and beyond plain old research to deliver actionable insights about your competition.
When researching their Google ranking index or keyword research database, you can gather insights on which keywords competitors are targeting, campaign costs against those keywords, and SEO rankings for specific landing pages or blog content.
Stop doing keyword research with sub-par platforms or directly on Google.
Integrate SERPs to get the benefit of keyword research and competitor research in one.
Bringing it all together
Building a MarTech stack is a complex problem.
You have over 5,000 options to choose from with a very specific budget and a list of requirements.
Want to hear some good news? You’ve already done the hard work. Finding the right resources is half the battle.
The other half of the battle is getting your knowledge to align with actions.
You are the glue holding your MarTech stack together. Without your decisions, there is no marketing ROI for you and your team.
You still need to bring everything together to ensure your team can make the most of this powerful MarTech tool stack.
First, ask yourself these two key questions.
What are my immediate goals?
Your initial answers to this question led you here, so it may be time to really look into what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
In my first marketing role at a SaaS company, we spent about $10,000 on LinkedIn Ads that only converted 0.1% of users who clicked through.
In some companies, this is a campaign that can put you out on the street.
You know what our team did instead of stressing about the results? We doubled down with a clearer objective.
Our initial goal was too broad. “Convert 1% of user click-throughs” only works if you’re offering real value and understand why your content is valuable.
We were trying to sell ourselves without telling a story, and our prospective customers could see right through it. So what did our new goal become?
“Convert 1% of user click-throughs and increase total ad clicks by 5,000.” Then we were prioritizing context as well as optimization.
Bringing this back around to the finish line, your goals are the hidden driver for your MarTech stack.
Understand your why and be clear about how each MarTech tool guides you toward success.
Where are you going to achieve a greater ROI?
The trick is actually more simple than it may seem.
You’ll generate ROI when you test assumptions and land in the right place at the right time.
With measurable and actionable results, you tell a more informed story about your customers.
A better story leads to better experiments. Before you know it, your marketing machine does all the heavy lifting for you.
For example, your life is easier when you put the majority of the load on your MarTech stack.
With Kissmetrics, for instance, it’s easy to analyze, segment, and connect your marketing automation in a single platform.
Your MarTech tool stack is the key to achieving successful ROI in your marketing efforts. Without it, you’re Captain Ahab in the ocean minus a paddle and spear.
Conclusion
Marketing stacks are key to streamlining your marketing campaigns in the modern world.
With so many options to choose from, it can often be overwhelming.
For your average mid-market company, a combination of Kissmetrics (below) + Crazy Egg + HubSpot + Google + Facebook may be all you need.
Even startups can benefit from this stack.
Enterprises can combine these tools and more to achieve even more growth.
With the addition of Sprinklr and other CXM tools, every channel becomes a potential revenue stream.
You’ve shown an appetite for winning in the marketing game by getting this far.
Go forth, build your MarTech tool stack, and show the world what you can do.
What completes your MarTech tool stack?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
from Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog http://ift.tt/2GUzZvV #Digital #Analytics #Website
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Text
Your MarTech Tool Stack Isn’t Complete in 2018 Without These 13 Apps
email marketing laws in usa
Think your marketing technology (MarTech) stack is king? Pull yourself out of 2017.
Your customers are dropping out of your funnel. Engagement is down. The CEO is on you to get results… today.
Where can you find more efficient ways to get the job done?
A better MarTech stack.
If you aren’t using a diverse set of tools, you’re likely falling behind.
Marketing departments around the world are scrambling to find the best ways to identify and engage their customers.
Are you wondering why your team can’t find more customers? Or better satisfy your existing profit centers?
It’s because your MarTech stack needs a facelift. An upgrade to help you better serve customer needs and enable easy onboarding.
Like a valley girl without botox, a business in 2018 without a proper stack is showing its true age.
But with over 5,000 MarTech options available, finding the right tools for the job can be daunting.
Luckily, I’ve got your back.
Get your MarTech stack ready for the future with the hottest apps on the block.
1. Salesforce
Managing customer relations is key to growing your business.
It’s 5x less expensive to keep an existing customer than to sell to a new one.
But upselling and reselling to existing customers presents a big challenge.
Just because someone bought from you once doesn’t mean they’ll do it again or stick around forever.
You need to manage and nurture the customer relationship.
When it comes to that, Salesforce continues to steal the CRM “best in show” — and with good reason.
It recently topped Fortune’s list of 100 best companies to work for in 2018 and has been able to retain consistent growth behind its experienced leadership.
What’s their secret to being the biggest SaaS shark in the ocean?
It’s one of the most customizable CRMs out there and has been battle-tested for nearly two decades.
It has integrations for just about every use case with it’s AppExchange being second to none.
With AppExchange, you can find, locate and utilize different applications like you would plugins on WordPress.
Businesses of all sizes use it and love it.
Whether you are a mom-and-pop shop getting started or a large enterprise org, Salesforce has seen your use case before and has a solution.
Dashboards are full of comprehensive data that you can use to build customers from small lifetime values to high lifetime values.
Salesforce is king when it comes to customer relationship management.
2. Hootsuite
When it comes to social media, today’s consumer is everywhere.
In fact, the average consumer has seven different social media accounts spread across multiple platforms.
While that presents an opportunity in the form of reaching new customers with multi-channel strategies, it also creates an internal nightmare when it comes to managing it.
Posting, liking, commenting and engaging on seven platforms? That’s a full-time job.
But not when you take advantage of platforms like Hootsuite.
Hootsuite is a necessity for managing your social media presence.
While Facebook Advertising is primarily about “speaking” to your customers, Hootsuite should be used to “listen” and engage.
Of course, finding a way to listen to multiple channels at the same time is difficult. Hootsuite solves the problem by managing all your social channels in one place.
By using a unique dashboard to monitor unlimited streams from all the social media channels your team uses, you can schedule, optimize and interact with consumers in just minutes on any platform.
With integrated analytics dashboards, pulling up reports for your marketing and sales teams is easy.
Connecting to diverse content systems beyond social, you can pull up free stock images to aid your social campaigns:
The platform is decked to the fullest, helping you manage social media with one tool in a sector that normally requires multiple.
3. Google AdWords
Reaching new customers is key to scaling your business.
And there’s possibly no better place to do that than advertising with AdWords.
Despite Facebook’s massive growth, Google AdWords is still the most widely used advertising platform in the world.
In fact, getting certified in AdWords is seen as a necessity for most entry-level digital marketing professionals.
While most people are interested in Facebook, here’s why you should keep AdWords in your toolbox:
AdWords packs a punch in the form of intent.
If cleanliness is next to godliness, then intent is next to customer acquisition.
On platforms like Facebook, people aren’t there to see ads or find products. They are engaging with friends, family, and funny videos.
But on AdWords, people are actively searching via keywords to find solutions to their problems:
They want help ASAP. So you can virtually skip the typical funnel process and get down to selling.
On top of intent, AdWords packs reach. Google handles over 40,000 searches every second.
Not to mention over 3.5 billion each day and 1.2 trillion each year.
With AdWords, you can also advertise on YouTube, a platform with 1.5 billion monthly active users who watch more than an hour of content daily.
In terms of support, you have access to dedicated account managers that will help run and optimize your campaigns.
The dashboard is extremely easy to use, too.
With diverse demographic targeting and custom audiences, you can reach users with Facebook-like specificity.
AdWords is the bread-and-butter of PPC advertising and will continue to dominate with its massive user base.
Add it to your stack and get your piece of the pie today.
4. Optimizely
Running tests is critical to finding success. Whether in product creation, marketing development or sales.
Test and test again.
But when most A/B tests fail, you often can’t rely on your own, basic marketing tests to provide statistically significant data.
Let Optimizely take your experiments by the horns to stay ahead of the competition.
Test against your assumptions to build better campaigns that capture more users and increase retention.
People will think you became a guru overnight.
There are a number of ways you can impress your team with Optimizely.
Use Optimizely X, and you can experiment across “every device, every channel, and every customer touchpoint.”
With unlimited users, you can easily collaborate with anyone to build dashboards that will make your executive team happy.
Show the world your technical prowess by empowering developers to support your optimization marketing tech.
Optimizely powers optimization and testing for some of the largest companies on the planet for a reason:
It simplifies testing and provides accurate, effective results.
5. Crazy Egg
Every marketer thinks they understand their customers. Their pain points, wants and needs.
But when it comes to driving sales, do you know how the user experienced your site? What they loved or hated?
Unless you are using a heat mapping tool like Crazy Egg, you likely don’t.
Crazy Egg is known as a heatmapping tool that provides an X-ray of how visitors are interacting with your site.
They were one of the first in the space, and remain the top player for a few main reasons.
With Crazy Egg, you can see which part of your pages users click on the most, where they are spending the most time (on a per-page basis), and what areas are being completely ignored.
They offer four different views, but Heatmap and Scrollmap are where it’s at.
Heatmap allows you to see where users are clicking and Scrollmap allows you to see where users are spending the most time (especially helpful for those of you producing long-form content).
Crazy Egg allows you to A/B test different variations of pages so you can continue to make iterations.
Getting insights on how your users interact with you is invaluable for optimization. Quit your slacking and start using heatmaps.
Speaking of slacking…
6. Slack
Collaborating and communicating across teams and departments shouldn’t be a boring, tedious or annoying process.
And, it shouldn’t be an afterthought, either.
According to HubSpot, the more aligned your sales and marketing team is, the better overall growth you’ll achieve.
And that’s where Slack comes into play.
With Slack, all of your team communication exists in one place. You can message individuals directly, create a group, and create Slack channels to keep conversations topical and organized.
Plus, they have integrations with EVERYTHING. GitHub, Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, Heroku and countless other MarTech tools. The list doesn’t end.
Slack is where work gets done, and team communication stays fluid.
7. Marketo
Latest data shows that 91% of companies using marketing automation find it to be an integral piece of their marketing strategy.
The fact of the matter is, with so many channels and platforms available to marketers today, automation is necessary to thrive.
And Marketo is a powerhouse of automation designed for marketers by marketers.
If you’re in B2B and want to get an idea of how your prospects are interacting with all your marketing channels, Marketo is the wingman you’ve always wanted.
Built on the same core platform as Salesforce, Marketo is a necessity for any team running multiple channels for customer acquisition.
With an easy-to-use modular system featuring marketing automation, consumer engagement marketing, real-time personalization, and marketing management, you can customize everything for your specific business needs.
Marketo is designed for scaling businesses.
The platform allows you to clone entire programs such as landing pages and email marketing, so you don’t have to create new ones as your grow.
Using advanced reporting to pull detailed customer analytics and then compare across channels, Marketo can integrate with just about any other MarTech tool you use.
Marketo is built for the power-user. For the marketing team that attacks multiple channels and needs heavy equipment to get the job done.
8. AdRoll
AdRoll arrived on the MarTech scene as a retargeting platform but has since transitioned into a full-funnel DSP (demand-side platform).
What does this mean? AdRoll allows you to attract new customers to your site, convert site visitors at scale, and continue to maintain a relationship with your existing customers.
Programmatic marketing has gotten some flack recently, but the numbers don’t lie:
There is a reason AdRoll has over 30,000 customers (well, there’s at least 30,000 reasons).
And what AdRoll is working on in the future is even more interesting.
AdRoll plans to focus more on incrementality utilizing big data and machine learning to get a complete sense of which ads are actually causing customers to make a purchase.
They are building out an account-based marketing solution and are poised to become a market leader in the space.
Take their access to over 300 ad networks and exchanges, add an advanced bidding tool, and layer in very specific customer data from Bombora.
That’s a recipe for potential success and more money in your company war chest.
Their account management is second to none. For mid-market companies, you will not get the same level of customer service from Google or Facebook.
Want a platform to help grow and nurture customers? Look no further.
9. Sprinklr
CXM, or customer experience management, is the audience engagement need for your MarTech stack in 2018.
Have you heard the maxim, “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care”?
With CXM, that core idea rings true. Engaging with your audience is an absolute must-have for creating a dialogue about your brand.
Sprinklr makes this easier than ever to put into practice.
Their CXM platform gives you complete control over the customer experience.
Pull over 25 social channels into a unified platform. Reach and listen to all your customers in one place.
Add context to data pulled from other platforms, like your Salesforce CRM.
Schedule your campaigns and monitor results with ease.
Leverage Sprinklr’s app marketplace to make the most of your CXM data.
With diverse integrations, you’ll be able to connect Sprinklr to any other tool in your stack.
10. MailChimp
When it comes to email marketing, there are countless platforms available.
But starting out with your first platform can make or break your success.
Some cost a fortune, and others are meant for top-level companies.
Thankfully, MailChimp exists, allowing any company of any size to start an email marketing campaign in just minutes.
With powerful analytics dashboards, you get clear data on your campaigns without vanity metrics:
Using a drag-and-drop email building system, you can get campaigns established fast with the look and appeal of a high-tech, high-cost platform:
The fact is, email still reigns supreme in 2018.
Email is still one of the most influential information sources for B2B audiences.
On the B2C side of things, welcome emails generate 320% more revenue than general promotional messages.
If you aren’t capitalizing on the opportunities to maximize revenue from your email marketing… well, then what are you doing?
MailChimp makes it easier than ever to build automated campaigns for drip funnels and promotional marketing, with templates that make the process a breeze for you and your team.
You can quickly split your audiences into lists for optimal campaign performance.
As with most MarTech tools, it integrates with just about every app on the planet.
My personal favorite tactic is using Gleam to build a competition, then leveraging automation in MailChimp to convert those participants into customers.
All that’s left to do is sit back and watch yourself win.
11. Wrike
Keeping everyone on the same page is just as vital as getting your MarTech stack working overtime.
Ensuring that every team is interconnected, working together and sharing information isn’t easy.
Especially when teams are hard at work.
And that’s where Wrike comes into play.
Wrike has an advantage as one of the leading productivity management platforms in the world.
When your MarTech needs to stay on track, count on Wrike to keep all your campaign tasks organized.
Wrike helps you to test workflows before launching them into campaigns and manage communications across members of your team.
In addition to a robust free trial and extensive documentation to get you started, Wrike boasts a library of integrations — including some of the market-leading MarTech tools.
Wrike is perfect for businesses that get work done and need to share that work across various departments and teams.
Integrate it into your marketing stack for streamlined communications and efficiency.
12. Zapier
Say you need to connect your Kissmetrics campaigns to reports to Crazy Egg, and then email those reports to your supervisor at 4:00 PM on the dot?
Diverse, detailed and seriously precise marketing automation like that is hard to come by.
And that’s why Zapier is dominating the competition.
Connecting anything to well, anything, is as easy as selecting a few dropdowns. Choose the apps you want to connect, create a hook, and voila — instant MarTech magic.
Zapier is the Muhammad Ali of automation. Using easy, customizable triggers and actions, you can connect any app in your stack to run highly specific tasks.
Once you’ve set it up, you simply let it run in the background, automating most of your daily tasks that kill your time.
13. SERPs
SEO has changed dramatically in the past ten years. In fact, Google makes updates to their algorithm nearly 600 times each year.
That’s more than once a day.
Staying up-to-date with SEO is crucial, and there is perhaps no better way to know who is outranking you on specific keywords than SERPs.
SERPs is the one-stop shop for competitive SEO insights. Your SEO is never good enough in today’s algorithm-shifting world.
Until you hit #1 ranking for every targeted keyword, there is always opportunity to improve.
SERPs helps you go above and beyond plain old research to deliver actionable insights about your competition.
When researching their Google ranking index or keyword research database, you can gather insights on which keywords competitors are targeting, campaign costs against those keywords, and SEO rankings for specific landing pages or blog content.
Stop doing keyword research with sub-par platforms or directly on Google.
Integrate SERPs to get the benefit of keyword research and competitor research in one.
Bringing it all together
Building a MarTech stack is a complex problem.
You have over 5,000 options to choose from with a very specific budget and a list of requirements.
Want to hear some good news? You’ve already done the hard work. Finding the right resources is half the battle.
The other half of the battle is getting your knowledge to align with actions.
You are the glue holding your MarTech stack together. Without your decisions, there is no marketing ROI for you and your team.
You still need to bring everything together to ensure your team can make the most of this powerful MarTech tool stack.
First, ask yourself these two key questions.
What are my immediate goals?
Your initial answers to this question led you here, so it may be time to really look into what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
In my first marketing role at a SaaS company, we spent about $10,000 on LinkedIn Ads that only converted 0.1% of users who clicked through.
In some companies, this is a campaign that can put you out on the street.
You know what our team did instead of stressing about the results? We doubled down with a clearer objective.
Our initial goal was too broad. “Convert 1% of user click-throughs” only works if you’re offering real value and understand why your content is valuable.
We were trying to sell ourselves without telling a story, and our prospective customers could see right through it. So what did our new goal become?
“Convert 1% of user click-throughs and increase total ad clicks by 5,000.” Then we were prioritizing context as well as optimization.
Bringing this back around to the finish line, your goals are the hidden driver for your MarTech stack.
Understand your why and be clear about how each MarTech tool guides you toward success.
Where are you going to achieve a greater ROI?
The trick is actually more simple than it may seem.
You’ll generate ROI when you test assumptions and land in the right place at the right time.
With measurable and actionable results, you tell a more informed story about your customers.
A better story leads to better experiments. Before you know it, your marketing machine does all the heavy lifting for you.
For example, your life is easier when you put the majority of the load on your MarTech stack.
With Kissmetrics, for instance, it’s easy to analyze, segment, and connect your marketing automation in a single platform.
Your MarTech tool stack is the key to achieving successful ROI in your marketing efforts. Without it, you’re Captain Ahab in the ocean minus a paddle and spear.
Conclusion
Marketing stacks are key to streamlining your marketing campaigns in the modern world.
With so many options to choose from, it can often be overwhelming.
For your average mid-market company, a combination of Kissmetrics (below) + Crazy Egg + HubSpot + Google + Facebook may be all you need.
Even startups can benefit from this stack.
Enterprises can combine these tools and more to achieve even more growth.
With the addition of Sprinklr and other CXM tools, every channel becomes a potential revenue stream.
You’ve shown an appetite for winning in the marketing game by getting this far.
Go forth, build your MarTech tool stack, and show the world what you can do.
What completes your MarTech tool stack?
About the Author: Neil Patel is the cofounder of Neil Patel Digital.
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