The technologies your business uses are a key factor in its success. A good marketing technology (martech) stack has many important components, but one of the most valuable may be your customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
CRMs offer a central location for storing customer data, enabling you to personalize how you nurture leads based on their information and where they are in the customer journey. Although typically thought of as a sales tool, CRMs can play an important role in marketing as well. Plus, integrating your sales and marketing platforms and combining your data helps you enhance the entire user experience and make your sales and marketing processes more efficient.
Let’s explore the role a CRM can play in an effective martech stack.
A marketing technology stack, or martech stack, is the collection of software tools and platforms a company uses as part of its marketing efforts. These tools are used to manage marketing processes, enhance efficiency, and track results. Integration is a key factor in the effectiveness of a company’s martech stack.
What is a CRM?
A customer relationship management system, or CRM, is a tool businesses use to manage their interactions with prospects and customers and enhance these relationships. These platforms serve as a central repository for customer data and help businesses leverage this data to manage their pipelines, automate their sales and marketing processes, and collaborate across teams. CRMs typically include features like contact management, pipeline management, sales automation, and more.
Benefits of using a CRM
Using a CRM provides many benefits to businesses across sales, marketing, and beyond. These benefits include:
Organizing contact information in one place: Without a CRM, customer information tends to be spread out across multiple spreadsheets and other locations. A CRM helps you collect that information in one place and keep it organized so that your team has a central source of truth.
Tracking sales processes and interactions: A CRM makes it easy to organize your sales process and track where leads are in it. You can also look back and reference all of the interactions your team has had with a customer to personalize your next interaction.
Increased efficiency through automation: CRMs also automate tasks such as sending emails and moving leads between stages, saving your team time and effort.
Enhanced analytics: Collecting your data in a CRM allows you to gain enhanced insights you can use to improve your customer interactions, sales processes, and more. CRMs also typically offer built-in reporting features. With a CRM, you can easily analyze elements like sales performance, lead volume, and conversion rates.
Improve understanding of your customers: With all of your customer data in one place, you can create a single customer view that enables you to better understand your customers. With this understanding, you can personalize your outreach and make business decisions with your customers’ needs in mind.
Enhanced collaboration: CRMs keep all of your data and interactions in one place, enabling multiple teams to easily work together and align your sales and marketing efforts.
Other core components of a martech stack
A CRM is an essential part of any marketing tech stack, but there are many other important elements as well. Here are some of the tools most commonly included in effective marketing tech stacks:
Content management system (CMS): With a content management system (CMS), you can create, manage, and modify website content without needing extensive technical knowledge. It streamlines content publication and ensures your site stays fresh and relevant, which is key for SEO and user experience.
SEO tools:Search engine optimization (SEO) tools help you improve your website’s visibility on search engines like Google. They provide insights into keyword rankings, backlink analysis, and overall site performance to improve organic traffic.
Paid advertising platform: Paid advertising platforms, such as Google Ads and social media ad platforms, enable you to reach audiences with targeted campaigns. These tools often integrate with CRM systems to ensure you’re delivering personalized ads based on customer data.
Email marketing tools: Email is still one of the most effective marketing channels. Email marketing platforms help automate campaigns, segment audiences, and personalize messages, ensuring your customers receive timely and relevant communication.
Forms tools: Forms are crucial for lead generation, capturing customer information, and gathering feedback. Tools like form builders integrate into websites, providing a user-friendly way to gather important customer data.
Tag management: Tag management tools like Google Tag Manager simplify the process of adding and managing marketing and analytics tags on your website, reducing the need for developer support.
VoIP systems:Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) systems allow businesses to handle calls through the internet rather than traditional phone lines. These tools can integrate with CRMs to log call activity and streamline communication with customers.
Customer data platforms (CDPs): CDPs unify customer data from various channels, enabling a 360-degree view of customer behavior. This allows for better personalization and more effective data-based marketing strategies. These tools provide insights on overall user behavior rather than interactions with specific users or accounts.
Marketing automation tools: Marketing automation platforms streamline repetitive tasks like sending emails, managing social media posts, and running ad campaigns. These tools ensure consistent communication across channels and free up time for more strategic activities.
Analytics and reporting tools: Analytics tools enable you to evaluate how well your marketing campaigns are performing by collecting and evaluating campaign metrics. These tools help you make informed decisions to improve your marketing efforts.
The role of CRM in a martech stack
You can do a lot with a CRM on its own, but when you integrate it with a full marketing tech stack, it becomes even more powerful. When you combine your CRM with the rest of your martech stack, you gain an even more holistic understanding of your customers and their buyers’ journeys.
A CRM provides a central location for data about your customers and interactions. With an integrated tech stack, you can integrate your customer, sales, and marketing data even further. You can send sales, revenue, and customer data to your marketing and send data from your marketing campaigns to your CRM. This helps you create a more holistic and efficient customer journey.
A martech stack that’s well integrated with a CRM also enhances collaboration between various departments, including sales, marketing, and customer support.
Here’s a closer look at some of the more specific capabilities you can get when you integrate your CRM and martech stack:
Improved campaign targeting: With a CRM integrated with your tech stack, you can use your CRM data to inform your ad campaigns, improving targeting and personalization.
Remarketing to current leads: By sending lead data from your CRM to your marketing tools, you can easily market to leads currently in your sales pipeline.
Finding more qualified prospects: Using current customer data from your CRM, you can create lookalike audiences in advertising tools and prospecting tools, enabling you to find more qualified prospects that match your ideal customer profile easier.
Enhanced marketing attribution: When you pass revenue and sales data from your CRM to marketing analytics tools, you can tie marketing campaigns to new revenue, helping you evaluate campaign performance.
More extensive automation: Integrating your sales and marketing tools can help you to automate more of your processes, from sending emails to personalizing ads, saving your team time and effort.
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Having the right tools in your martech stack is one important element. To get the most out of your marketing tools, you also need to integrate them.
To make the most of your integrations, work with your CRM provider to choose the best integration method for your needs. It’s also important to plan what you want the integration to do and why so that you can tailor your setup to help you meet your goals.
Native integrations are existing integrations that are built directly into your CRM. These integrations are easy to set up since your CRM or marketing tool has already created them. Native integrations only exist for certain tools, but you may be able to request new ones if the platforms you use don’t yet have the built-in integrations you’re looking for.
API integrations and custom code
If you or someone on your team has development skills, you can also create your own custom integrations using an application programming interface (API). This option lets you connect nearly any two tools and offers the most customization potential. However, it does require more time and effort than other methods.
Connector software like Zapier
You can also use connector software such as Zapier to simplify the integration process. These connector tools serve as an intermediary between software and allow you to connect them without custom code. While these integrations are not quite as customizable as fully custom ones, they still open up a huge range of possibilities for integrating your martech stack.
Built-in tools from a single provider
The easiest method for integrating tools in your marketing technology stack is using software that already contains multiple tools. For example, you might use a CRM with built-in email marketing. Since you’re using several tools built right into the same platform, the integrations are seamless and require no setup.
Nutshell and your martech stack
The tools your marketing team uses—and how well those tools work together—are an essential ingredient in the success of any business.
Your CRM plays a vital role in creating an effective tech stack, so it’s important to choose one that has the features, support, user experience, and integration capabilities you need.
With Nutshell, you get built-in marketing tools like Campaigns for email marketing and Landing Pages for custom landing page creation. Plus, we offer extensive built-in integrations and additional integration capabilities through our AppConnect feature.
Nutshell can also help you take your CRM and martech integration even further through our partnership with WebFX—a top-rated digital marketing agency. WebFX’s revenue marketing software, MarketingCloudFX, offers a range of tools to help you measure your marketing campaign success and use your data to improve your marketing performance.
MarketingCloudFX integrates seamlessly with Nutshell so you can connect your CRM and marketing data to improve tracking and reporting and leverage your CRM data to enhance your marketing strategies. Learn more about how Nutshell and MarketingCloudFX work together below.
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