Your private equity firm’s tech stack is more than a series of digital marketing tools. Each piece of software serves an invaluable purpose, and they all add up to something far more important than any one of them could be on their own.
To really make sure that your people have access to everything they need to work “smarter, not harder,” you need a solid marketing tech stack or “martech” as it is commonly referred to.
As of this writing, there are over 10,000 marketing software products out there. It can be overwhelming! We’ve simplified and broken out these components and will explain some of the options. Here are the key components you will want to have:
1. Website Content Management System
The goal of a content management system (or CMS, for short) is to ensure that your website lets you introduce and publish blog content without requiring any technical expertise.
Publishing to your website will serve as a powerful asset over time, especially as it starts to rank well in search engines and points users to your company domain. The CMS you choose should make publishing content to your website easy and SEO-friendly.
“SEO friendly” means that you can control URLs, window titles, meta descriptions, alt image naming, and more – all from a single place. As long as your CMS allows you to do all of these things, you should be good to go.
While we are typically agnostic when it comes to technology and platforms, we do favor WordPress. WordPress is the most popular choice by a long shot, mainly thanks to its never-ending capabilities that allow you to build your own custom plugins, along with the use of its many native and third-party options. We also find it to be far less constricting when it comes to implementing a custom design.
If you want to explore outside of WordPress, the CMS options seem truly endless these days. There are several more that meet the fundamental criteria we’re talking about such as Drupal, Joomla, Adobe, Craft, and others.
All told, you want your content posts to be as flexible as possible. We love the idea of the kitchen sink – a sample blog post that contains everything under the sun. This means all sorts of different content types and formatting: pull quotes, collapsible and expandable sections, photo treatments, video, tabbed content, you name it. The idea is to keep this post NOT published, but instead to have it serve as a reference to whoever is loading content.
2. Email Marketing @ the Least
We say “@ the least” because while email marketing in and of itself is good, the more advanced approach I want you to consider is called marketing automation. We’ll get to that in a minute, though. Stay here if you are a beginner with limited resources – you will still get a lot from an email marketing platform.
With all the great content you will be publishing, email is one of the essential methods to make sure your ever-growing list is actually receiving and regularly consuming your content. Consistent branding and nice design functions will be native to whichever email marketing platform you choose. You’ll also be capable of measuring opens, conversions, and click rates and segmenting audiences to send the right content to the right niche. Consider segmenting your lists if they aren’t already. You could have lists for intermediaries, limited partners, clients, portfolio targets, etc. This an extra step of effort, so beginning with that approach doesn’t need to be a top priority since one distribution list will still make an impact.
Now, here are my picks for some of the preferred email marketing platforms that we think are definitely worth your attention:
- AWeber – Part of why we like AWeber is because they are local to us, headquartered nearby in Trevose, Pennsylvania. My team has visited their offices and besides having a cool space with the option to take a slide instead of the stairs (yes, really!), they keep a big focus on deliverability while keeping things simple. Full disclosure, we get a commission if you use this link when signing up for their services!
- MailChimp – MailChimp is easy to work with and ever-evolving, introducing a myriad of user possibilities on a regular basis. Their free plan is the most popular email marketing platform out there, but you will likely find use for some of their paid advanced features, too.
We may favor the ones listed above, but there are plenty of others you can evaluate – Campaign Monitor, iContact and Constant Contact are all viable options, just to name a few.
Before you go any further – do you have an email signup on your site? That feature is easy enough to put in place and integrate with your email marketing or marketing automation platform. Once you begin the content journey your site traffic will be increasing and you want to give readers the easiest opportunity to keep hearing from you. Getting them to sign up for your email list so that they can get a steady stream of great content delivered right to their inbox is how it happens.
3. Marketing Automation (MA)
Email marketing definitely has its place, but marketing automation goes much more granular and will provide a more useful return in the long run. Here’s exactly why we believe that to be the case:
With a marketing automation platform, you’ll get the same design functionality as email marketing, and then some.
Marketing automation provides a full view of leads and even a glimpse into anonymous site visitors, giving you insight on how to best interact with them. Once a user has clicked on a link in one of your emails or filled out a form on your site, you’ll be able to track their behavior in far greater detail versus simply seeing who opened and clicked.
As much as you would like them to, deals just don’t happen overnight. With marketing automation, you can nurture leads at their many stages based on their behavior with your firm on the web.
For example – Jack, an entrepreneur with a growing company visits your site from an email he received. You subsequently have a number of conversations with him. Then what seemed to be a promising deal has gone cold as Jack has been MIA. Two months later Jack is back on your site and you know this because you have received a push notification from your MA platform letting you know that he visited and what he viewed. You can then choose when to reach out to Jack based on his behavior on your site and make an informed decision on the right approach to take.
If your marketing automation platform is well configured, you will see the entire life of your leads. You can look at contact and see all their site visits, email exchanges, where they are in your sales funnel, etc. We are only scratching the surface of what you can do with marketing automation. No platform is perfect, but the real key to succeeding with any software is adoption and implementation.
For the purposes of this guide, we are taking an agnostic approach with our list. Any one of them would get the job done, but remember that they will offer different features, some of which will suit your firm better than others. Now, let’s take a look at some of the players that you’ll definitely want to pay attention to:
- SharpSpring – We have been using SharpSpring for some time now. The interface is intuitive and easy to use. It’s cost-effective and very robust, offering a full CRM and many other digital marketing tools we use daily. We like that it’s easy to implement and that even if you just start using its basic tools, you’ll understand the immediate benefits without making a major effort on your part.
- Dispatch by Dealcloud – Dealcloud is well entrenched in private equity, so if you are already using their CRM, Dispatch is definitely worth considering. This particular solution caters to deal makers in capital markets. Some of its special features include the ability to distribute industry analysis reports and to schedule and send deal announcements, press releases, newsletters, and many other communications.
- Hubspot – Hubspot offers easy integration to your site and many integrative features from third parties that you may already be using. It scores high on efficiency with its ability to manage multi-channel inbound marketing content, all from this one platform.
- Marketo – This was one of the early platforms and it’s simple and intuitive to use. We have extensive experience in integrating it with the websites we build, so we can speak to its ease to that end. It competes closely with Hubspot, but is more adept in addressing the needs of B2B.
- Pardot – Pardot is Salesforce’s marketing arm, and with so many out-of-the-box features and the fact that it is so tightly integrated with Salesforce, it could be the top contender if you’re already using that particular platform.
- Keap – Formerly known as Infusionsoft – for smaller firms, this would be a decent one to consider. With a built-in CRM, especially if you don’t already have one set up, this might be your package. It is costly upfront, but with the CRM and a heavy-on-support built-in training, the initial investment may be worth it to you.
4. Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
If you don’t have a CRM in place, now is your opportunity to start fresh!
Most of the marketing automation platforms listed above have a CRM in the family, or one included in the platform itself. If you have an existing CRM, make sure that your platform is capable of “talking” to it – meaning that the two offer native integration with one another.
By that, we mean you should see the information captured by your marketing automation linked to any given contact you might view in your CRM. Far too often we see that the people dealing with the clients/partners/prospects are living in the CRM and have no insight into their web and email behavior. As long as your CRM offers an API (and most do), the right partner should be able to make the two talk to one another. There are loads of CRM’s out there, Salesforce and Dealcloud are the ones we see most often in private equity.
5. Google Analytics
We hope you already are regularly using Analytics – if not, make that so! A few suggestions for your Analytics:
- Apply Filters – You want your analytics reports to be based on real people vs. bots. Applying some filters will allow you to exclude office and bot traffic, all so your reporting is clean and reflects true users.
- Setup Goals – With goals you can measure completed activities (e.g. smartphone user clicks to call your #, newsletter signup, contact request, etc.). This is a fundamental component that allows you to measure conversion rates, etc.
- Automate Key Reports – Get proactive in analytics and automate three reports to send to key contacts each month.
6. Contact Cleaning
If you’re in the business of email marketing, you already know that maintaining a clean list is absolutely crucial if you want to get satisfactory results.
Clean lists mean a lot of things: maximum deliverability, the lowest possible amount of bounces, fewer spam complaints, better IP reputation, and more. Though a crucial task, email list cleaning is not easy. However, in today’s world, you can simply relegate the task to professionals who know what they are doing.
Do a little pre-cleaning then pass it on to the professionals. There are services you can use to do this, like Neverbounce, Zerobounce, TheChecker, and many others.
The above 6 components are what we consider to be “must-haves” for publishing content. If you are interested in upping your game from here, read on.
Tools to Take you Next Level
The following are not necessarily “essential tools” for your content strategy, but in our opinion, they do add structure and give insight into your market and audience behaviors. In turn, they allow you to optimize and refine as your production gets going – which should be one of your most important priorities of all.
Publishing Tools
Your marketing automation may even have a publishing tool built-in, which will help you plan out and schedule your content. Here are a variety of publishing tools, some complete and others that offer planning features only:
- CoSchedule – This high-end content calendar and social media publishing platform accounts for almost every type of content planning. It comes standard with scalable user permissions and allows for the pre-planning and scheduling of virtually any type of marketing activity.
- Monday.com – We have always been very impressed with their interface and ease of use. We even considered using it for project management, but it wasn’t quite the right fit for what we needed. We think it would be an excellent tool for managing publication dates and associated tasks.
- Airtable – A super flexible database platform. We use it to track client’s sites, CRM, recurring traffic, and more – meaning that we can genuinely sing its praises. We have no doubt it can be effective for managing content publication, tracking schedules and tasks as well.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
There are a number of tools you can use that allow you to see how your site is being interacted with on an ultra-specific level. Hotjar is the one we use, which lets you observe the live activity of a user’s journey on your site. You’ll get data like how deep individuals are scrolling and heat maps to see your geographic performance – even beyond how useful it is, it’s pretty neat stuff.
Deeper Analytics & Research Tools
SEMRush is our go to here. It is great for keyword research and selection when forming content ideas. You can add your competitors and see how you stack up with regards to your search engine rankings, traffic, and more.
Armed with the information above and all of the due diligence you’ve done to this point, you can get to work on building the right tech stack that works for your firm and your budget. Your tech stack can and should evolve over time.
The options listed above are by no means exhaustive, so feel free to explore and test out other tools. Never forget that man started with rudimentary tools to hunt and secure food — daggers, spear points, and hand axes. My point being, whatever tech tools you begin with will be the means to get started, but don’t be afraid to innovate that stack. Start with what has been tried and true for others and what you feel will be easily adopted by your firm.
Here are some key accomplishments you will want to make while building out your tech stack:
Coordinating Your Contacts
You have to identify all data sources for your contacts so that you know what you’re working with and, more importantly, where it’s all coming from. Centralize them and make sure that this source updates when contacts take certain actions – like when a new lead introduces themselves through a call or email, or a contact submits a form on your website.
This should be coordinated among the different team members and platforms within your organization. Go all out and create a diagram of the process so that all can really understand how it works. Where does your contact data live and how is it updated? Use your diagram to answer that question to mitigate running into problems like this one – missing an update to a contact’s email in one system when it’s been manually made in another after moving companies. In an ideal world, there is one master source and all other systems are updated automatically. This will require you to document and communicate as needed with vendors and/or team members to either improve or have any manual processes in place so you can keep all of the data clean and systems updated accordingly.
Related to contacts, make sure you have strong calls to action on your emails and website for users to sign up for your email list. Prompt those who sign up to indicate their industry interests. This will not only tell you what type of content is valuable to them but also data for the types of content you should be focusing on overall.
Building the Team
Make no mistake about it – you are building a strategic team to fuel this effort. And in short, the team will be these folks:
- Technology Providers – These are the companies and people providing your stack. Software companies (e.g. your marketing automation platform provider, hosting provider, etc.).
- Partners – These are the people and companies that are technology enablers. They get their hands dirty and do the heavy lifting. These are your writers, web developers, designers, and more.
- Internal Marketing – These are ideally your internal folks that are managing the process and provide strategic direction. They also get their hands dirty with content loading and distribution.
- Subject Matter Experts – The brains for your content are not responsible for the final product. Their role is to brain dump and make sure you are serving the best quality stuff.
With all of the above accounted for and those core elements firmly in place, you’ve got a rock-solid foundation upon which to build from moving forward. And that’s exactly what you do with our next step in the process, and probably our favorite:
Actually getting your hands dirty and creating the type of content that people will love.