Make all your marketing tools play together to make more money

Get a unified view of your customer journey, and track full ROI of your marketing. Learn to evaluate, eliminate, and integrate the tools that will drive growth for your business.

Optimizing your marketing tech stack

By Dan McGaw, CMO @EffinAmazing

With the right set of tools, you can finally get the marketing results you’re aiming for

What’s a marketing tech stack?

Marketing tech enables you to piece together different useful tools to track the full customer journey while measuring the ROI of your marketing efforts.

Your “martech” stack might include marketing automation software, tools for analytics and data piping, a CRM, support and live chat systems, community forums, prospecting tools, and more.

It’s nearly impossible for most businesses to build the right stack from the beginning – unless you get expert help

With dozens of competing tools to choose from in each of these areas — and the teeth-gritting, time-wasting frustration of integrating multiple platforms using code or APIs —

During this 8-class course, marketing expert Dan McGaw will show you how to evaluate, eliminate, and integrate the tools that will drive growth for your business.

You will learn exactly how to:

Choose and set up the right tools — No more throwing away your monthly marketing budget on forgotten or useless subscriptions
Build a taxonomy guide to scale your business — Imagine the confusion you’ll sidestep by helping all your team members use the same words for the same concepts
Integrate tools to build a holistic marketing machine — Stop exporting and importing data from one platform to the next
Set up segment.com to put your customer data to work — Use your existing data to create a better customer experience that drives higher revenue
Track lead and engagement scoring to identify hot leads — Instead of guessing who might be ready to sign up or buy
Get shit done without engineering — No coding required
Convert more customers using your tools — Set your stack up once and watch it do the heavy lifting for you

What effective marketing tech stack will enable you to do

Confidently pick the right tools for your business

There are so many tools on the market right now (7000+), it can be hard to even choose an email provider. Using Dan’s quick product evaluation matrix, you can be sure you’re committing to the right platforms.

Build an integration plan & make your tools talk to each other

Every marketing tech stack requires integration. Getting the planning right is the most critical part of creating a successful stack, which is why this course includes templates to guide you through the planning process.

Discover the keys to seamless integration

Truly reliable tool integration happens two ways. First, give your engineers a structured integration plan to head off any development delays. Second, hack together the tools you need (with zero coding skills required).

Earn a raise or promotion for upgrading your analytics & operations skills

Marketing technologists are some of the highest-paid marketers. During this course, you’ll learn the fundamentals of marketing operations and how to set up your analytics tools for useful data — making you a much more valuable team member.

Improve your sales & marketing conversion rates

Once your new tool stack is up and running, you’ll be able to automate processes you’ve always done manually. You’ll run tests across multiple channels, platforms, and audiences (and your analytics alone will tell you exactly what is or isn’t working). With all of these processes operational, you’ll see conversion lifts in every area of your sales and marketing.

This course is right for you if …

You’ve explored some marketing tools, but haven’t decided which will yield the best value
You’ve begun to collect data from various tools, but need to fit all the pieces together
You’re interested in learning more about marketing automation, analytics, CRMs, data piping, support systems, live chat system, forms, & prospecting tools
You have a general understanding of marketing automation & integration, basic Google Analytics reporting skills and some technical know-how (or Zapier experience)

This course is probably not for you if…

You can’t stand looking at numbers, graphs, or data, and you’d rather just trust your gut
You’re not currently working with any sort of marketing tech or tool
You’re looking to learn about advertising or content marketing tools
You want to dive deep into technical integration using Google Tag Manager or code

Skills you should have:

A general understanding of marketing automation.
Basic reporting skills using Google Analytics.
A basic understanding of how to integrate tools.
Some technical know-how and Zapier experience.

Your full course curriculum:

Optimizing your marketing tech stack

Lesson 1

What is a Martech Stack and how does it solve my marketing problems?

Contrary to common practice, a marketing tech stack is more than just the motley collection of tools you’ve been using to run campaigns. This class will cover:

How to think about your stack, and the types of tools it should contain — You might just be overlooking a platform that can grow your business

What problems the right stack can help you solve — Freeing up more time through automating your lead-gen and follow-up processes is just the beginning

Lesson 2

Choose the right tools for your stack

With over 7000+ tools to choose from, the selection process can be confusing or overwhelming. Dan’s step-by-step approach will help you evaluate and choose the best marketing and business intelligence tools for your needs. Here’s what Class 2 will include:

Ways to discover new tools to keep pace with innovation — So you’ve always got best-in-class tools on your side
How to keep your stack organized — No more hunting for data in the wrong platforms, or wondering “Which tool does that again?”
How to choose the best tools for your business model — Not all marketing tools are created equal, and not all will fit your unique business
Dan’s straightforward way to choose tools and present findings — It’s not enough to find the right tool. You need buy-in from your team, too

Lesson 3

Integrating the stack

Everything in your marketing technology stack needs to be integrated with your site, product, and other business tools. Get it right by knowing the shortcuts, longcuts, and pro secrets. We’ll go through:

What the integration process for different tools looks like — And how you should set up integrations for faster data transfer and less redundancy
Why tag managers are a godsend for marketers — Your Google Analytics team will be jumping for joy at this one

Whether or not you should be using a customer data platform for integration — Not all businesses need this type of tool. But if you do, it can be a game-changer

Lesson 4

Building your stack taxonomy

From automating marketing and sales processes to helping you obtain reliable, meaningful intel, your tech stack should power your business for the better. But if nobody knows how things are named or where to find information, you’ve got no chance getting your team to embrace new systems. Occasionally boring, but wildly important topics include:

How to build a taxonomy and schema sheet — Standardize your stack structure and names in an easily scalable, referenceable document
The proper way to name the actions your users take — So that things like “sales-qualified lead” mean the same to everyone in your company
How to store important demographic, technographic, and firmographic data — The right classifications make it much easier to search, sort, and segment
How to maintain data governance in your marketing stack — Make sure your tools generate untainted, reliable data at every step of the process

Lesson 5

Data driven analytics

With the right analytics setup, your data can tell you a ton about your customers. Whether you want to understand demographics, firmographics (organizational insights), or simply know more about how people behave, it all starts with the correct analytics setup. Dan will show you:

How to improve your reporting and KPIs — Stop tracking vanity metrics, and start running more meaningful reports
Which analytics tools can help you track behavior — Often, customer and prospect behavior can tell us more about their needs than the customers themselves
Why Google Analytics just isn’t enough nowadays — Supplement your main analytics platform with tools that fill in the missing holes
How to track phone calls in your analytics — Paint a more complete picture of where your wins are coming from

Lesson 6

Capture emails and generate more leads

No matter your line of business, capturing emails should be one of your highest priorities. This class will show you tools and tricks to generate more leads with richer context. We’ll answer questions like:

What are some of the main providers to help you capture emails? You’ll want to consider how these tools integrate with your email marketing platform, and what data is most valuable to your marketing team
What are the different types of lead-generation solutions? Choose the right tool for your audience, your business model, and the information you need from prospects
How can we collect email addresses and enrich them with valuable information? Getting someone’s email is good, but getting someone’s email while learning more about them is much better

Lesson 7

Automating your marketing

Automation is eating the world — and businesses that don’t use will get eaten too. Learn the main players in the marketing space and how you should go about choosing an automation tool for your business. Dan will also reveal easy, effective marketing automation hacks that help personalize your marketing (and clear busywork from your calendar). You’ll learn:

The main features you should look for in a marketing automation tool — Sort the genuinely good players from the sea of copycats
How to map the fields in your automation tool to the rest of your stack — So form field values land where they should, every time
How to present the cost of a tool to leadership — Make your case for a valuable tool in the most persuasive way possible
Create a progressive profiling onboarding program to improve personalization — We’ll talk about what questions to ask customers and when
Personalize each touchpoint for your customer journey — So that not only are YOU generating higher revenue, they’re happy with your service or product, and loyal to your brand

Lesson 8

Relationship management with CRMs

The line between marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) tools is becoming blurred. That said, there are still “worth it” CRM tools that enable you to better manage your customer relationships. If you have a sales organization, you have to have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. In this class, we’ll cover:

Your main considerations when choosing a CRM — Including whether your team will be able to adapt to it or not
Why the CRM is not longer just a sales tool — It’s time to break down the departmental silos and work as one team
CRM attributes that matter most — Overlook bells and whistles in favor of tools that enable real, useable insights

How to port Salesforce “action tracking” into your analytics tool — Know who customers are, what they’ve been up to, and what you need them to do next

Show off your new skills: Get a certificate of completion

Once you’ve completed the course, take a test to get certified in building a marketing tech stack.

Add your certification to your resume, your LinkedIn profile, or just get that well-earned raise you’ve been waiting for.

Screenshot 2019 06 11 Optimizing your marketing tech stack online course with CXL Institute