Momentum Episode 9:
Choosing Your Technology Stack

Maintaining momentum as a business in today's digital age regardless of your industry you'll likely need a number of technology platforms and systems to communicate your purpose, attract customers, and ultimately manage your business and employees.

This digital toolkit is what we call a technology stack and virtually every business with an online system needs one.

The choices you make for your technology stack can be crucial for the success of your organization but with so many options to choose from it can be overwhelming if you're a small business or just starting out.

So where do you even begin? Well, let's talk about it.

Hey everyone, welcome to Momentum, a podcast by Jotform where we talk about technology, productivity tips, best practices, and strategic insights that help us move forward in business and in life.

I'm Elliot, your host, and I'm back once again with Chad Reed, Jotform's VP of Marketing Communications to talk about technology stacks.

Good to have you back Chad.

I think by now audiences might start to figure out you're more of a regular than a special guest but I'm still going to treat you like you're special.

I would expect nothing less.

Excellent.

I think it makes sense for us to mainly focus on what we know best as far as marketing tech stacks go for this episode which really should be pretty applicable to most of our listeners because any organization needs marketing tools in some form to effectively make their presence known online these days.

Speaking from the perspective of a company in the technology sector definitely gives us a better line of sight into what digital tools work well for a lot of these functions.

So all that to say I don't think talking about our own marketing technology stack at Jotform for instance will alienate listeners in another industry because these are all pretty universal applications.

Which is a good segue into our first topic addressing the basic marketing needs businesses face that technology stacks can meet.

You want to start by diving into some of those here?

For sure.

Marketing technology stacks really depend on the type of business and the type of budget.

There's an amazing infographic that was posted on chiefmartech.com by Scott Brinkley who's also the VP of ecosystem at HubSpot.

About 10 years ago he created this first infographic that just had a logo of every marketing technology platform out there and there were 150.

Today there are 7,000.

So the ocean of different technologies that you can use to enhance your marketing has grown exponentially.

By the way, Jotform is on that list, represented as one of them.

It took me a good 15 minutes to zoom in and find which category it was under but that's just a huge growth.

What's he categorizing as a marketing application in that regard? Because Jotform has a lot of applications but we're grouped into marketing technology.

How's he sort of categorizing that?

He gives six categories and then dozens of subcategories: advertising and promotion, content and experience, social and relationships, commerce and sales, data and management.

Among those, I couldn't guess where we were going to get listed.

I figured maybe data management but we were under content and experience under the subcategory of interactive content.

Well it makes sense because marketing is so broad in the data that it requires and everything that falls under the marketing umbrella.

You need all these things and all these platforms to pull off marketing successfully.

I think I know the infographic you're talking about; we'll link to it in the description somewhere so people can see it but it is really pretty cool.

For any business at your most basic level, this also includes how you publish your website, your social media, your email marketing.

Those are kind of the core and then there's a lot that branches out from there.

As you add personnel or goals to your marketing team and your small business, you're just going to keep acquiring more and more technologies that need to help you get there as well.

One funny thing is as a department, the Jotform marketing department, I was just pulling up our ever-growing group of logins for the different tools that we use and there's well over 150.

That's just a lot and that's just marketing.

Our design team is kind of separated but they have their own logins and our growth team as well.

So really hundreds of companies that we're using in our tech stack just for Jotform marketing.

A lot of them are pretty specific but yeah, that's a good point.

We're in triple digits for the number of tools that we use and I think bringing that up is a good point of how expansive a technology stack can be.

We're obviously not going to go through 100 plus recommendations on this but I think it serves as a long example of how many tools and toolkits are out there to help you succeed digitally online.

I guess that's kind of narrowed down a little bit to some of our key ones.

Like our key ones at Jotform.

First of all, Jotform, we do use Jotform.

I think ours has grown a lot as our priorities have shifted.

I would include all social media channels as they get lumped into our technology stacks.

From an early standpoint, that was certainly something that we needed.

We're SEO focused, which is such a critical part of our optimization so we're well versed in a lot of analytics tools.

Anything that can tell us more information on search trends or domain ranking.

A-refs and Moz certainly are some big players used every day by our teams.

Just in case someone doesn't know, can you go a little bit into the background of domain ranking and what that really means?

Yeah, it effectively just means the strength of your website.

There's no perfect way to determine that; Google safeguards their algorithm.

Are there authoritative sites linking back to your website? Is it showing up for the keywords you'd like to target?

That's effectively domain authority and there are a lot of really good resources for determining that.

That's important to help cultivate SEO traffic.

A-refs helps with stuff like that.

Speaking to a few of those other platforms you mentioned, you mentioned social media as our own technology stack in some ways.

There are even digital tools that help with social media management.

It seems kind of daunting when you sum it all up, right?

Why can't all these things just be replaced with good old-fashioned emails and memos like in the old days?

It's funny, I saw that question ahead of time but it made me think of my first marketing job 10 years ago at a very large Fortune 500 financial advisory group.

We were so hamstrung in what we were allowed to use for marketing efforts because it all had to go through compliance checks and bureaucracy.

We had Constant Contact which was great but only that made it through compliance.

We couldn't change a comma in an existing piece of text without approval.

My job was basically to send direct mail, folding envelopes, stuffing boxes, and then sending it out.

The sales team would follow up and we had an installed version of ACT, a CRM before CRMs were in the cloud.

It was really burdensome and slow.

You need systems that integrate to save time.

That was a double whammy because financial institutions are normally more rigid and strict.

We weren't even allowed to have a Facebook page or really any social media presence.

After I left, they approved the capability to have a Facebook account but I can't imagine the process.

Starting my marketing career at a really restrictive company opened my eyes to how great technology can make your marketing efforts.

It harkens back to the old door-to-door salesman approach where marketing was literally going door-to-door.

The digital revolution has revolutionized that and it's become so important to utilize digital tools to reach people where they are.

If you're building a marketing tech stack or starting from ground zero with all these tools and capabilities, how do you filter out the decision sets?

It's trial and error and it really depends on what you need.

There are so many cost-effective tools, free trials, and freemium products where you can get started for free.

Jotform is a freemium product where you get full access and only pay as your usage increases.

Many services we use at Jotform are still under free plans and we upgrade when needed.

Just dive in and become conversant because it generally doesn't cost anything to trial these tools.

The margin for onboarding a new user is usually so small that platforms can afford to give away something for free hoping users upgrade.

It really depends on the individual needs and the scale of the organization.

Even with around 300 employees, we can get away with free plans of some digital tools.

Smaller organizations probably won't need premium plans and bigger organizations might not get away with as much.

Are there solutions where you can get key features rolled into one platform or are you stuck navigating dozens of digital toolkits?

Many companies are evolving to be a full suite of small business marketing tools, like website publishers such as Weebly and Wix.

They offer some function of analytics, website building, social tools, and even form builders.

That's great if you're a small business starting from the beginning and want something simple to focus on your business.

My sister started her own veterinary practice and had to do everything from scratch including logo, website, booking system, forms, payments, flyers, and email marketing.

There are many systems for solopreneurs and small businesses that hand it all to you, though there is a learning curve navigating dozens of systems.

Marketing is what we do and are paid to do, but small business owners want to focus on their core business and fit in marketing somehow.

Simplicity and cohesiveness of platforms giving multiple solutions in one platform helps a lot.

Systems are trying to become more sticky and comprehensive with portfolios to retain consumers.

Customers wanting an easy experience will find a site offering more all in one.

It all goes back to assessing individual needs and prioritizing your time and energy.

If you're starting the journey, what are some resources to find products like email marketing or tools for your business?

I recommend pulling up that infographic with 7,000 logos and sifting through it over time.

There are also great review sites like Capterra, G2, and AppSumo that offer comparisons and user reviews.

Many publications like TechCrunch, Martech Series, Martech Today, Search Engine Land, and TechRadar provide great product reviews and details.

Product Hunt is another site where you can see new tools to increase productivity and stay on the cutting edge of technology.

Or just googling your problem like how to get better competitor analysis or create a landing page is common.

Review sites are key to avoid just clicking sponsored ads and to find informed aggregated reviews.

Referrals from friends or colleagues are also huge and some sites pay for good referrals.

Let's boil it down to favorites and break out two lists: premium technology stacks for large organizations and budget options for small businesses.

For premium marketing technology stack, I veer toward a couple unusual but really useful platforms like Clarity.fm.

Clarity is a platform for discovering experts in any field and paying per minute for consultations.

We've used it for pricing decisions and YouTube strategy; it's an awesome platform any marketing team can use regardless of size.

Voices.com is another premium one, a site for getting voiceovers for videos.

You upload a sample script and get many responses quickly, making it hard to choose the right voice.

We used Voices.com for our Jotform Tables April Fools video and got hundreds of responses.

You can specify age range, accent, intonation, and personality traits for voice actors.

Moz is a great SEO platform for comparative reasons, checking competitors, trends, and keyword performance.

Moz can scale with your marketing team and has a wonderful blog on all things search marketing.

For budget marketing technology stack, Answer the Public is a quick and dirty SEO tool with a paid version under fifty dollars a month.

It visualizes data on any keyword showing questions and statements people search about.

Unsplash is a site for really high quality, user-curated, free stock images perfect for blogs and landing pages.

Using royalty-free licensed images is important to avoid legal issues especially in corporate use.

A story from early in my career: using images from Google led to a heavy fine from Getty Images because they enforce licensing strictly.

In advertising, running unlicensed ads can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and the agency is liable.

Always make sure you have rights to materials used in marketing to avoid big mistakes.

Google Trends is a free tool many use for marketing to see search volume over time and competitive analysis.

It allows simultaneous searches and geographic breakdowns, useful for tracking brand trends and competitors.

These are two good lists and I think we've covered a lot about marketing technology applications, how to filter and find what's right for you.

Any last tidbits of wisdom?

Just get started; companies emphasize user experience and making products easy so the learning curve is never as difficult as you assume.

Don't let ignorance stop you from learning yourself; just get out there.

Thank you for this; I think that wraps this up for this episode.

Be sure to tune in next time when we'll be talking about video marketing.