Building a Modern Marketing Stack

Here at Segment, our marketing team takes a twofold approach to planning for the future. We foster a strong data-driven culture which helps keep everyone aligned around common information and goals. And we use that data to experiment with improving our targeted marketing and customer experience.

We believe in open-sourcing the creative projects we develop, so we’ve released a report that details the exact processes and tools that we use to help you build a best-in-class marketing stack using the latest technologies.

TL;DR: Get a head start on 2017! Learn about Segment’s modern marketing stack and hear what 12 visionaries have to say about the future of marketing.

The Modern Marketing Stack

But what exactly is a modern marketing stack? What factors should be considered when deciding what to include in one or how teams can leverage one effectively?

Our VP of Growth and resident mad scientist, Guillaume Cabane, not only championed a culture of being advanced with our own data analysis, but also built a machine of interconnected tools using Segment that collect, pipe, and enrich data. Though his shoot-from-the-hip attitude towards trying new tools and connecting systems together might seem like unhinged madness, he is in fact quite deliberate in his approach to assessing new tools and automating various growth processes.

“The goal with these systems is to use personalization to create authentic rapport,” Guillaume says. At the end of the day, good marketing campaigns are about people. When automating those campaigns with data, we need to create that rapport and trust. “What would a sales rep do if they had unlimited time and data? How would they handle our leads? The automation must feel authentic to the end user.”

One example of an automated process at Segment to achieve personalization across multiple channels. Download the free report for more examples.

This important principle — creating authentic rapport — is one of a handful that guide our approach towards data, automation, customer interaction, and the process of building our modern marketing stack.

Visionary marketers weigh in

But Guillaume is just one — albeit, highly capable — mad man. We decided to extend the question about the future of marketing to visionaries and experts across the industry. They consist of Andrew Chen of Uber, Danielle Morrill of Mattermark, Hiten Shah of Quick Sprout, and many others.

We’ve narrowed down the considerations for building a modern marketing stack to a set of questions regarding data culture and governance, optimizing for the customer journey, and what personalization means for your customer-facing teams.

Again, their responses focus on the customer. Every customer interaction must be personalized and add value. “Customer engagement is the new marketing,” offers Danielle Morrill. Additionally, your customers don’t interact with your email or CRM tools — they interact with your brand. Hiten Shah echoes this sentiment, saying, “In a crowded market, you don’t win with marketing, you win with brand.”

These expert marketers, though spanning across different medias and verticals, understand that the customer is ultimately responsible for the success of your business.

Your Marketing Stack

While there are larger principles that guide how tools are selected, connected, and used by your team, the modern marketing stack should ultimately reflect the needs of your business. We hope that our white paper, along with the trend observations of marketing experts inspire and guide you not only to build the marketing stack that your organization needs, but also to leverage the data to more strongly connect with your customers.

Get a head start on 2017 and view all of the visionaries responses.

Learn how Segment can help your business grow. Get a demo today.