Choosing Your Marketing ‘App Stack’
Many gray hairs ago I was IT Director for a small, fast-growth company. With no outside funding, we had to pinch every IT penny. And like every other IT department we had to make conscious decisions about the makeup of our infrastructure or ‘app stack.’ For each decision, we made ROI calcs for the cost of desktop hardware, operating systems, within the local network ops center and our web-facing servers.
Today, the same is true in marketing.
Choosing your marketing app stack is harder than ever — there’s a ton of vendors with ever-increasing offerings. At a minimum, marketing departments need to identify and have an ROI calc for:
- CRM
- Email nurturing, segmentation and transactions
- Content management, delivery, and landing pages
- Analytics and dashboards
- Web forms
- Competitor research
- Company/brand alerts
The Good news?
Much of your marketing app stack can be had completely free, while a few are free to start and most are comparatively inexpensive. Wiring your marketing stack together with your operations, finance and IT infrastructure can be a costly headache, but rejoice! You are living in an era of marketing technology abundance. Thank your lucky stars you don’t have to wait for IT to build any of this stuff! (IT ladies, you know I love you)
What are your best choices for your marketing app stack? In future posts we’ll talk through your options.
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About ROI Studios
We help marketers connect and integrate cloud-based marketing services like Salesforce, Eloqua, Marketo, Twitter and 100s more. Result? Our customers get a more agile marketing department with real-time, 360 degree control of campaigns, customers, content and KPIs.Your Marketing Cloud. Connected.
