As a marketing automation company, we’ve shared the benefits of our technology time and again. However, with marketing automation as your core, there are more than a handful of other technologies that are great complements to ours.
Technologies That Work With Marketing Automation

  1. Without a doubt, connecting a CRM to your marketing automation platform is essential. They are (as I’ve said before) like peanut butter and jelly – working so amazingly well together to improve marketing and sales performance. They work so well in fact that some marketing automation companies are getting bought by CRM companies because of their deep connection and usefulness.
  2. Retargeting parallels with what standard marketing automation platforms do – continuing to nurture and stay visible to prospects who are at different stages in the decision making process. By creating highly honed segments within your retargeting platform(s), you can also nurture prospects based on their stage with retargeted advertising.
    There is the obvious “site retargeting” that identifies what pages have been visited and then subsequently serves up ads that best fit the prospect’s current interest. Further, you can use your marketing automation and/or CRM platform data to create what is called “CRM retargeting” campaigns that can also present relevant advertising based on activity and demographic information about your prospect. These are examples of what you can do – there is more to retargeting than these high-level examples.
  3. Webinar software fits very well with marketing automation platforms. It is especially useful when your marketing automation forms can automatically register people into a webinar without having to re-direct them to a 3rd party site. This provides a better user experience up front (I’ve always despised when I’ve had to send people to a Go To Webinar registration page) and the added value of having the form data in your MA platform to segment on, creating follow-up drip email sequences, scoring leads, sending sales alerts and more.
  4. Video platforms are a perfect combination with your marketing automation platform. Since video content is growing so rapidly as a popular and primary source of research/entertainment, having the data analysis around your videos (who is viewing, length of view, heatmaps, etc.) complements the other interactive data you collect with your standard marketing automation platform.
  5. Social media platforms are clearly a winner, too, when integrated properly with your marketing automation platform. Many MA platforms offer some level of social media marketing and management but I find that integrating your marketing automation with a best-in-class social media platform like Oktopost provides a better experience for marketers. They’ve generally developed much more comprehensive SMM tools while still being able to send the important activity data over your your marketing automation software.
  6. Live chat platforms can go hand-in-hand with your marketing automation platform. It provides similar base-level intel as marketing automation (source, specific page visits and time spent on site) and can act as a lead generation tool. Having your live chat directly integrated with your marketing automation platform is also useful, but you can still get lots of great use of it and your MA platform even if they don’t speak directly.
  7. Using tag management to distribute your marketing automation code on your site (and other software you use that requires code insertion) should become a best practice. Having one code (your tag management code) to rule them all is much more code and resource efficient than having a handful or more individual pieces of javascript added to your site. Further, with advanced tag management you can dynamically deploy and suppress code on specific pages/page sets as needed.
  8. Customer data platforms are the up and coming platform more and more marketing automation platforms are going to integrate with. They are rather greenfield technology that don’t have a huge amount of adoption/integration with marketing automation platforms, but in all honesty, I’d prefer to refer you to Mr. David Raab for much deeper intel on CDPs.

These are some of the key technologies that work well side-by-side or integrated directly with your marketing automation platform. I’m sure I’m missing a few so correct me in the comments below! Thanks!

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Lucy