Having the right tools in your marketing technology (martech) stack is an integral part of your growth plan. The correct set of tools can make your everyday work more efficient and enable you to grow your business.
As much as we want to promise you that growth will be effortless with the right tools, it’s not. It will still require continuous effort. But having the right tools will most certainly make your life MUCH more manageable when they are in place to facilitate your work.
At the same time, choosing the right tools can be challenging. There are so many options to choose from. 😭 And you can’t implement everything at once — certainly not all 7000+ of them.
Where do you even begin to prioritize the tools you need? 🤔
We'll start with the essentials for every B2B SaaS company!
When you’re building your sales, marketing, and customer service toolset, it’s vital to lay the foundation right from the get-go.
The tools you select create the core of your tech stack and set the standard for your daily marketing operations. Now repeat after us☝️:
The tools you select create the core of your tech stack and set the standard for your daily marketing operations.
What it means is your initial selection sets the base for other tools you’ll need a little way down the road.
Your goal with martech tools is to ensure your CMS, CRM, and marketing automation software are well connected, work together, and act as a whole.
Even though your core tools can work separately, they really shouldn’t. Integrating these tools allows you to collect customer data efficiently AND use the data in your marketing operations.
It’s your key to creating a unique and superior experience for your customers.
Here are some of the use cases an integrated martech stack allows you to do:
🚀 Personalize your website based on the data that you have collected in your CRM.
If your current visitor is already a customer, you can personalize the content on a website to suit their needs. That way, returning customers and first-time visitors will have targeted content to help them achieve what they want on your website.
If you have multiple customer segments, you can highlight different products and services on the front page of your B2B SaaS website accordingly. Your website shouldn’t be static. Instead, it should align with the data you have collected about your customer (with consent).
🚀 Build automated marketing campaigns for your customers based on their lifecycle
When your CRM is connected to a marketing automation software, you can easily build automated marketing campaigns for each step of your customer's lifecycle.
For example, with new leads or new customers. You can automate nurturing or onboarding programs to guide them further down the funnel. If you have multiple customer segments, these should be customized for each target audience.
Read more:
- Customer lifecycle marketing: How to maximize the LTV of your B2B SaaS customers
- HubSpot essentials for growth marketers: Lifecycle management
🚀 Enrich your customer data in CRM
Your CRM should be connected to your website to enrich your customer data automatically. Apart from integrating data into your CRM, it should also take note of a contact’s behavior.
It allows you to target your marketing efforts based on their needs. For example, if you have information about a visitor who landed on your pricing page, you can target them with relevant information.
🚀 Build new audiences from existing customer profiles.
With a connected CRM and marketing automation tool, you can use your existing customer base to create similar audiences in social media and paid advertising.
In practice, you can drive target audiences who match your ideal customer profile (ICP) to your website and turn them into customers when the time is right.
Your core three martech tools are essential in your customer's life cycle phases. They set the foundation for you to build targeted solutions as your customers move through the pirate funnel.
This is a typical SaaS customer lifecycle through the lens of the pirate funnel.
- Awareness: Getting the audience to your website.
- Acquisition: They know your solution and are in the consideration stage. They are also willing to share contact information with you in exchange for more value.
- Activation: People are using your product and are experiencing the value you promised. They are still in the consideration stage but are closer to making a decision.
- Retention: Users are now returning and using it several times. It’s decision time!
- Revenue: Users subscribed to your tool. They are now your paying customers.
- Referral: They love it enough to start sharing it with their peers.
As a general rule of thumb, you should continuously improve the funnel as a whole. That’s in an ideal world. The reality is, it doesn’t always work that way. Usually, some parts of the funnel work better than others.
In this case, it’s worthwhile to determine ways to improve specific areas based on what your data tells you — and utilize your martech stack to do the job for you.
With over 7000 tools available on the market, the possibilities in the martech landscape are endless. We’ve cherry-picked a few examples to help you in different phases of the customer journey to save the headache.
Activation is the phase where visitors are ready to take the first action towards becoming a customer. For example, creating a new account, signing up for a webinar, or starting a free trial.
In this stage, you have the contact information of the person and can begin to target marketing directly to them. In other words, they deem your offering worthy enough in exchange for their personal details. Think of their contact information as a form of currency.
To keep taking them taking them down the funnel, you’ll need tools for:
🤝 Customer relationships management
Your CRM tool is the most important one at this point. Ideally, it should start gathering a profile for people activated. The data you collected during this stage is later used for targeted marketing activities.
🤝 Marketing automation
The next in line is your marketing automation tool. It’s essential to use one that integrates well with your CRM. This is the tool that executes automated marketing activities based on the data collected in your CRM.
🤝 A chat or a chatbot
Having a chat or chatbot is a good option for when you want to contact potential customers directly — especially when your website visitors need immediate answers from you. Our recommended tools include LiveChat or Olark. On top of that, CRMs such as HubSpot also offer chat as an add-on.
🤝 Webinars
Webinars are another great way to reach out to your potential customers. Organize webinars around various topics of interest and value to your target audience. Make sure to follow up with them after the webinar!
During the retention phase, your goal is to make certain customers start returning after the first contact. It is crucial to start building, or strengthening, your relationship with the customer. You don’t have to meet every single one of them face-to-face. But you could utilize martech tools to nurture the relationship. For example:
❤️ Customer Service
You’ll need a customer service platform or a ticketing system to handle and organize customers’ requests properly. The chosen tool should have all the necessary functions to manage and keep track of each request so that you can personalize help, services, and communication accordingly.
If you’ve ever come across a chatbot or a help center that sends you in circles without providing any support, you’ll know how frustrating that can be.
What are some of the tools we recommend?
HubSpot Service Hub is a great option for customer service if you’re already using the platform as a CRM — it’s that convenient! Zendesk is also another strong option in the field but may be a slight overkill for some. If so, you can consider other alternatives such as HelpScout.
❤️ Customer Success
While the customer service team reacts to the requests, the customer success team is responsible for managing and improving customer relationships.
Whether your customers choose to stay with you or churn highly depends on your customer success team — that means proactively solving possible challenges before any given situation escalates into a deal-breaker.
The tool you use should provide predictive data that shows you all of the above. Having customer success platforms such as Planhat can make a huge difference in the way you serve your customers.
❤️ Knowledge base
Having a knowledge base platform is an excellent way to educate your customers on using your solution more efficiently. Don’t underestimate the power of this platform. Even the most straightforward solution has its complications (that you’re not aware of).
Have a collection of resources to help your customer make the most out of your product or service. You can also integrate your knowledge base with your chatbot.
As for tools to do so, both ZenDesk and HubSpot offer good solutions for building an effective knowledge base. Sometimes, all that’s needed is a little guidance towards the right direction and resources before talking to an actual customer service representative.