
Integrated stack with stable product marketing tools is critical for superior product marketing. The stepping stones are clean data that you can act on at scale, and stable tools that help you avoid a stackpocalypse. The goal is a systematized contribution that your marketing makes to your product’s revenue growth.
We’ve published a guide on the ultimate MarTech stack, and now we’re giving you a version specialized on tools in the product marketing stack. This guide offers insights into the tools we’ve selected and integrated for our amazing clients such as Wistia, Segment, Sprinklr, or Eventbrite.
Contents
- #1 RudderStack – Customer Data Platform
- #2 Google Tag Manager – Tag Management System
- #3 Amplitude – Product Analytics & Experimentation
- #4 Appcues – Product Onboarding
- #5 FullStory – User Testing
- #6 Looker – Business Intelligence
- #7 Intercom – Customer Support
- #8 Iterable – Customer Engagement
- #9 SendGrid – Transactional Email System
- 3 Common Challenges When Building a Product Marketing Tech Stack
#1 RudderStack – Customer Data Platform
Collecting and managing customer data is a time-consuming and complicated process, especially as your business grows. That’s where a customer data platform (CDP) comes in.
A CDP is a tool that helps you collect, store, and analyze customer data so you can operationalize it in your marketing efforts. It’s the backbone of your stack.
RudderStack is a great CDP option. It’s an open-source, enterprise-ready platform that works with most well-known MarTech tools. Best of all, it requires less work from developers, freeing them up to build features instead of integrating products.
Your marketing website and app are rich with customer data:
- Salesforce wants the data for sales
- Google Analytics wants it for conversions
- Amplitude needs it for product experience
Rather than integrating these tools individually, RudderStack uses a combination of SDKs, control planes, and Reverse ETL to optimize performance and centralize customer data across your martech tools.
While it may not feel like a priority in the early stages, a CDP will become integral to workflows like alerting your sales team, triggering an email campaign, and lead qualification.
#2 Google Tag Manager – Tag Management System
Quickly deploy tracking code on your website with Google Tag Manager (GTM) without wasting precious time going back and forth with your development team.
There are over 70 tag templates supporting marketing powerhouse tools like Crazy Egg, Salesforce, Segment, Google Analytics, and all of your PPC advertising pixels.
With these tracking scripts neatly consolidated in GTM, at a glance, you can implement code, see what is installed and for what circumstances, and preview what tags are deployed on the individual pages on your site.
For further customizations, create templates and rules to control when and how tags are deployed. For example, fire a tag based on when a user clicks on a button or scroll depth on a page.
With GTM’s version control system, experiment with triggers on your browser until you’ve dialed it in to launch publicly. And if your tracking code starts playing up for whatever reason, you can roll back to a previous version without a development team.
GTM is the hub for all your marketing tags and a critical cog in your product marketing tech stack. And it’s free.
If you’re not using GTM, you’re wasting time and money with your marketing efforts. Even the smallest businesses can benefit from ensuring the tracking code is working correctly—while future-proofing your system for more sophisticated campaigns.
It’s worth noting that GTM is a code injector and can be susceptible to ad-blockers and security issues. Optionally, make GTM the destination after routing through RudderStack. As RudderStack doesn’t inject code into your website and uses proxied server-to-server integrations, you don’t have to worry about ad-blockers.
#3 Amplitude – Product Analytics & Experimentation
As a technology partner of McGaw.io, Amplitude is one of our most highly recommended marketing tools, and we’re not alone. Amplitude was awarded #1 in Product Analytics by G2.
Amplitude is world-class at uncovering customer journeys and user behavior data, including:
- Seeing and predicting which combination of features and actions translates to business outcomes.
- Monitoring loyalty to lifetime value and intelligently adapting each experience in real-time based on these insights.
- Leveraging data science tools so you can understand your data without hiring an analyst (although they can certainly help).
With these features, you can boost your targeted marketing campaigns and, therefore, your ROI. You’ll also build a bridge between marketing and product, to create synergy in growing the product together.
Amplitude requires custom configurations to get up and running on your product. Specifically, you’ll need to install libraries and SDKs to collect data. Instead, you can delegate the deployment to RudderStack by adding Amplitude as a destination.
You can also use Amplitude’s GTM template to send event data from GTM to Amplitude.
#4 Appcues – Product Onboarding
Appcues is a product marketing platform that allows you to deliver scalable customer onboarding experiences without code.
You can build interactive product walkthroughs, hotspots, and widgets for new visiting users and provide ongoing, on-demand support throughout the user journey.
Get detailed insights into every feature usage and adoption rate, enabling you to make data-driven decisions to improve your product’s engagement and conversions.
Appcues also supports A/B testing for in-app messages and walkthroughs so you can find what works best for your customers.
RudderStack, Amplitude, and Appcues harmonize for high-converting onboarding sequences for seamless implementation.
For instance, instead of dealing with Javascript SDKs with your development team, RudderStack consolidates this step.
Then you can set up event tracking in Amplitude to capture data in the Appcues onboarding funnel. This feedback loop gives you insights on where to make changes in your onboarding to increase engagement and customer LTV.
#5 FullStory – User Testing
Get extensive insights into customer behavior with FullStory. Tracking the user journey and analyzing incoming event data helps you identify opportunities to improve engagement and retention.
FullStory also offers session replay and heatmaps, so you can see exactly what a customer did on your site. This is an invaluable resource for understanding customer behavior and identifying issues that need to be addressed.
FullStory puts the rest of your product marketing tech stack on steroids. For one, you can watch how users interact with your onboarding sequence in Appcues so that you can make necessary optimizations.
Then, by placing both the qualitative and quantitative data front and center, FullStory and Amplitude are the perfect complements to your stack. The duo enables you to create engaging experiences that convert and generate measurable success by giving you a deeper knowledge of your customer’s actions.
Lastly, leverage GTM and RudderStack for centralized deployment of FullStory tracking data. For example, when you integrate RudderStack with Fullstory, you’ll get all the relevant information about your customers in real-time, including their interactions with your product.
- Connect live to your data.
- Describe and consolidate reusable business definitions.
- Output and share results across a variety of endpoints and workflows.
#7 Intercom – Customer Support
#8 Iterable – Customer Engagement
- Automated welcome emails.
- Personalized cart abandonment campaigns.
- Targeted cross-sell and upsell programs.
#9 SendGrid – Transactional Email System
Your product marketing tech stack wouldn’t be complete without a transactional email system. SendGrid is a cloud-based SMTP provider that allows you to send email without maintaining your own email servers.
You can easily set up automated emails to inform your customers about their purchases. You can also segment your list by product interest and target them with relevant content, coupons, and special offers.
SendGrid integrates with your marketing stack, including Intercom, Iterable, and Looker. So you can automatically send transactional emails based on customer behavior or product interactions.
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