What tools do the best marketing sites use?

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How does your ‘marketing stack’ compare? Do you use the same tools as the best in the business?

Marketing tools can speed up processes, automate messaging and boost conversion rates. Whatever area of digital marketing you are involved in, you can bet they’ll be a plethora of tools to choose from which could help you do your job better. Tools can be incredibly useful, but with so many different types to choose from it can be really tricky to decide which is the right fit for your business.

Here at Smart Insights we hope to help marketers make informed decisions on which tools are available to use for different purposes, and give them an idea of the range of solutions that the many vendors on the market have to offer.

So, we’re currently working on categorising all the different types of tools for collecting insight about online audiences, competitors, digital business performance plus the many services for managing and executing marketing activities. That’s a lot of categories… But we think we have a good solution, based across our RACE planning framework which helps consider the best tools to inform improvements to marketing across the Customer Lifecycle.

We’ve been inspired by Scott Brinker’s awesome map of the vendors across the Martech landscape which we have featured on the blog. While Scott’s visual does a great job at highlighting the many opportunities for deploying different ‘Enterprise marketing tools’, it is less helpful for smaller businesses or for highlighting the many ‘hands-on’ tools including free services to improve SEO, Social media. Although awesome, it is also scary, but in a good way since it prompts marketers and technologists to consider how their marketing stacks – the combination of marketing services which are deployed and integrating different data sources compare. It also prompts the question of do we select all-in-one or marketing cloud solutions where possible, or are best-of-breed services best in some cases.

Comparing the web services used by seven different sites

Smart Insights members will be familiar with our capability reviews that benchmark your progress across different areas of digital marketing, such as SEO, Content Marketing and Social Media. We produced these reviews because comparing your marketing efforts to the industry standard or the best in the industry can be a very useful way to establish what you need to do in order to take your marketing to the next level.

Building on that idea we thought it would be useful to review what marketing tools some of the best websites in the marketing world utilise, to establish if there were any tools used across sites that stand out as industry leaders. It also might reveal some nifty little less well-known tools that are worth checking out.

We used SimilarTech and Builtwith to find out what tools were being used on site by HubSpot, Kissmetrics, Moz, Sprout Social, CMO.com, Salesforce and even our own site! There was a big mix of analytics tools, CRO tools, Content management systems and testing tools, as well as much else besides. The social sharing tools of the big four social networks were present on just about all the sites analysed, but we haven’t included them here because they are standard across just about all sites and everyone will be aware of them already.

The word cloud below shows all the tools we found in use of the sites mentioned. The larger the word the more times they were found across the sites.

Kissmetrics, Optimizely and Mandrill stood out as the most popular tools across the seven sites we examined. Kissmetrics is a market leader in proving analytics which shows customer acquisition data for each user. It’s far from cheap, so isn’t right for every business, but if you market a SaaS product using a lot of content marketing it is well worth considering because you can review what content is drawing conversions and what pattern of content interaction leads people to buy.

Optimizely is a A/B testing platform which is easy to use and has a free version which although much lighter than the full platform does have some useful capabilities which may be enough for certain small businesses. With testing so important it’s easy to see why it’s so popular across many of the top marketing sites.

Mandrill is perhaps less well known than Kissmetrics or Optimizely. Named after the Mandill monkey, the branding seems odd until you realise it’s owned by MailChimp. It lets you send personalised, event-triggered emails, so it’s great for e-commerce sites and some SaaS businesses. Mandrill works with MailChimp templates so it’s a good solution if you already use MailChimp.

If we were to discuss every single tool used by these marketing sites we’d be here all day (and so would you!), but If you’re interested below are the tools used by each of the sites we analysed, with the ubiquitous social sharing buttons not included.

Hubspot

HubSpot (surprise surprise)
Perfect Audience (Facebook retargeting platform)
Facebook retargeting pixel
Gaug.es – updates your traffic data in real time
Pingdom – web performance monitoring
Crazy Egg – Heatmaps
Optimizely – A/B testing
Facebook connect
Wistia – Video hosting
Youtube – embedded videos from YouTube
Google Tag manager

Kissmetrics

Pardot – Marketing Automation
Kissmetrics (Obviously)
Bounce Exchange – conversion analytics
Crazy egg – heatmaps
Optimizely – A/ B testing
Facebook Connect

Moz

Google Ad Words conversion tracking
Double Click Conversion tracking – measure ad effectiveness
AdRoll – ad retargeting platform
Google Remarketing – ad retargeting platform.
Google Analytics
StatSounter – analytics
Facebook Domain Insights
KissMetrics -Web analytics
MixPanel – engagement tracking
Quantcast – Analytics
Optimizely – A / B testing
Facebook Connect
Qualaroo – User feedback and web survey tool
Disqus – comments system
Intercom – customer messaging tool
Eventbrite – online event registration
WordPress
Pingback support – Notifies when somebody links to an article
Mandrill – Email infrastructure service
Sendgrid – Transaction email delivery system

Sprout Social

Marketo
Google Analytics
New Relic – Application performance management
Facebook connect
LiveFyre – real time conversation
Jazz – track job applicatants
Wistia – Video hosting
Maxymiser – Multivariate texting
Mandril – email infastruture service

CMO.com

Bizo – ad targeting platform
Facebook connect
Cvent – event organisation
Demandbase – web analytics

Salesforce

Pardot – marketing automation
Chartbeat – web analytics
New Relic – Application performance management
ClickTale – Heatmaps
WuFoo – online form builder
Salesforce- obviously!
Vidyard – video hosting
Rocket Fuel – Programmatic ad tracker
Mandrill – email infrastructure service

SmartInsights

Infusionsoft – CRM / Marketing Automation
WOW analytics – Real-time traffic stats
Kissmetrics – Web analytics
Gravity Forms
FancyBox – ‘lightbox’ display tool
HelpScout – live support
Kampyle – Feedback management
WordPress- Content management
Pingback – Notifies when article linked to.

What digital marketing tools do you use that you find particularly useful? Let us know in the comments. We’ll be covering digital marketing tools in more detail over the coming weeks, so stay tuned if you’re currently considering what tools to use for your business.

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