75 Tools, 1 Marketer: Master Your AI Marketing Tech Stack

Ever had that moment where you think a marketing task should take 15 minutes... but 4 coffees, 4 hours, and 4 meltdowns later, you're still wrestling with the tech? 

💡Did You Know AI can Help

💡 Reality Check

• The average marketing team uses 75 different tools and applications

• How well these systems play together across IT, Marketing, and Sales can make or break your productivity

• Even as a solo marketer, your tool choices have massive impact

• The wrong set of AI choices can make this all harder

What Is A MarTech Stack? 🤔

A marketing tech stack typically includes tools for advertising, analytics, content management, social media management, email marketing and now AI. The relevance of various tools in your marketing tech stack may vary depending on your business size and what you are trying to accomplish in marketing. Organizations of ALL SIZES have a two-tier Marketing Tech Stack. 

Most organizations, regardless of size, use a two-tier approach:

• B2B Example: Email Tool > CRM

• Ecom Example: Email Tool > E-commerce platform

It’s a knotted mess of legacy tools and budget compromises…

Is There a Simpler Way Forward?

PSST: Tip Incoming 🔥…

After burning through plenty of time and money (and making all the mistakes), here's what works: adopt a three-tier model. For small businesses, I recommend adding Zapier as your middle layer.

We suggest adopting a ‘three-tier model’. If you are a small business, I would add a tool like Zapier as my middle layer. Why?

✔️ Works with 6550 Applications from Gmail to SQL

✔️ It is easy to learn and use

✔️ Prevents lock-in from tools that may kill the feature you need to run your marketing campaigns. So it’s easier to move your data to a Google Sheet, Database, or new tool

✔️ You can try it for Free!

✔️ Zapier Autoreply feature in Professional plans and above can be a LIFESAVER if one of your tools goes down. It happens.

✔️ You can easily insert AI like ChatGPT or Gemini into a workflow

✔️ It makes automations like this 👇 possible with the right processes and tools:

Build a Bridge between Systems

Think of your Martech Stack as the backbone of your marketing pipeline—a system that fuels collaboration between marketing, IT, and sales while ensuring smooth data flow and results that drive ROI. With a three-tier Marketing Tech Stack, you can:

• Streamline your sales/lead pipeline to optimize campaigns at every stage.

• Measure KPIs with precision to pinpoint successes and areas for testing and further improvement.

• Data is the fuel of Modern AI, and without a clear pipeline you end up with gofer holes of data that are hard to use.

Building an effective Marketing Stack means focusing on:

• Seamless integration to connect tools across your pipeline via API’s or tools like Zapier or Make

• Planned Scalability to adapt as your pipeline volume grows.

• Flexibility: there will be more change in the next few years than in the last decade

By designing your Martech Stack as a cohesive pipeline, you can ensure every campaign flows efficiently from strategy to execution, driving consistent and measurable results.

📈 To create a stack that grows with you, consider the following:

✔️ Choose tools that easily integrate with each other

✔️ Opt for solutions that can be scaled up or down depending on your needs

✔️ Ensure that the tools provide the necessary data and insights to make informed marketing decisions

✔️ Pick native AI tools or ones that work with your company’s core LLM (Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT)

💡 Remember

The primary goal is to help your team execute your marketing strategy more efficiently and effectively. Keep it simple and expand as you gain confidence in managing this new aspect of marketing. 

🕺Let’s Talk More About Our Three-Tier Marketing Tech Stack

CRM Software 💻: The Heartbeat of Your Tech Stack

Your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software isn’t just a tool—it’s the nerve center of your marketing operations. It ensures you stay connected with your customers and streamline your processes. A great CRM empowers you to:

• Organize customer data seamlessly: Centralize profiles, interactions, and preferences in one place.

• Track leads like a pro: Keep a close eye on opportunities as they move through the pipeline.

• Supercharge campaigns: Manage marketing efforts and communications with precision and personalization.

Three CRM Systems We Use (and Recommend):

1. Hubspot has everything you need to grow your business, has limited free options but you can get 2 users for $30 a month on their Starter Plan. HubSpot is an AI-powered customer platform that unifies marketing, sales, and service tools to drive business growth through enhanced customer relationships. Its interconnected hubs—Marketing, Sales, Service, Content, Operations, and Commerce—streamline collaboration and efficiency. Unique features like the Breeze toolset enable seamless automation, lead generation, and making it ideal for businesses of all sizes.

2. ActiveCampaign is a lower-cost marketing automation platform renowned for its AI-driven builder and extensive triggers, enabling users to design workflows faster and more efficiently than competitors. Delivering over a billion emails weekly and saving users an average of 20 hours per month, it stands out for its impressive performance metrics. With 13,500+ glowing reviews and a 4.5/5 star rating, ActiveCampaign is celebrated for its robust tools, multi-channel capabilities, and outstanding customer support.

3. Attio is a next-gen CRM that empowers businesses to execute revenue strategies with precision using intelligent automation, AI, and seamless data integration. Its flexible design adapts to unique business models, providing real-time insights, robust reporting, and a secure foundation for scalable growth.

Marketing Automation Tools 🔧

Our Recommendation: Zapier

What it does: Zapier is a widely-used marketing automation tool that facilitates integration between various tools to automate tasks and processes. 

With Zapier, you can:

✔️ Automate data flow between different platforms

✔️ Set triggers and actions to perform tasks automatically

✔️ Create custom workflows to streamline your marketing efforts

Budgeting?

Try IFTTT.

It’s a lower-cost option working with 600+ integrations with good support .

SEO Tools 🔬

Our Recommendation: SEMRush

What it does: SemRush is our choice for an all-in-one tool suite for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights. Its tools and reports can help you with: SEO, PPC, SMM, Keyword Research, Competitive Research, PR, Content Marketing, Marketing Insights, and Campaign Management.

To optimize your website for search engines and improve your organic reach, SEM Rush is a powerful SEO tool that helps you:

✔️ Perform keyword research

✔️ Analyze your competitors and their strategies

✔️ Monitor backlinks and find outreach opportunities

✔️ Audit your website for technical issues

Email Marketing Tools 📩

Our Recommendation: Klaviyo

What it does: Klaviyo is an email marketing platform that supports personalized messaging and automates campaigns. It helps you:

✔️ Segment your audience for targeted messaging

✔️ Create automated email sequences and drip campaigns

✔️ Monitor metrics, such as open rates and click-through rates

Content Marketing & PR Platforms 😎

Our Recommendation: Brand24

What it does: Brand24 is a tool that can easily help you monitor and analyze the online buzz about your brand. It collects online mentions of your brand and presents them to you. This cuts a ton of your own time searching for mentions.

Quality content and public relations (PR) efforts are vital for establishing your brand authority in your industry. Content marketing and PR platforms help you:

✔️ Plan and create engaging content like blog posts, videos, and infographics

✔️ Distribute content across various channels

✔️ Manage PR campaigns and press releases

✔️ Monitor your brand mentions and industry news

Social Media Management Tools

Our Recommendation: Later

What it does: Later is a calendar-focused social media scheduling platform with a drag-and-drop interface. Their planning and scheduling tools make it super easy to visualize your social media management. You can edit photos, publish stories and reels, as well as analyze performance. 

To effectively manage your social media presence, you need social media management tools that enable you to:

✔️ Schedule and publish posts across multiple platforms

✔️ Engage with your audience and respond to messages and comments

✔️ Monitor your social media performance and identify trends

Reporting Tools

Our Recommendations: GA4, Supermetrics, Swydo

Finally, having effective reporting tools like Google Analytics 4, Supermetrics, and Swydo in place ensures that you can measure the success of your marketing efforts. These reporting platforms allow you to:

✔️ Track your website’s performance and user behavior

✔️ Analyze marketing campaign performance across different channels

✔️ Create custom dashboards and reports to share with your team.ours for FREE

Data in your MarTech Stack

It’s easy to let Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon keep all your data inside their proprietary walls. This seems fine until they shut you off for some perceived random violation and your marketing tanks.📉

How do we prevent this?

1. Own your email lists;

2. Get SMS too;

3. Gather as much of your own data as possible into your cloud.

Consumer Privacy Implications 😶‍🌫️

In today’s digital landscape, consumer privacy has become a crucial consideration when building your marketing tech stack. With multiple states passing new Privacy laws, the burden falls to Marketing to ensure our tool partners comply with each state’s laws.

AI, Automation, and Efficiency 🤖

Let's get real: We're all drowning in tasks and trying to squeeze more results from shrinking budgets. Here's the good news - AI and automation can be your secret weapons.

Why It Matters Now:

• Marketing teams juggle ~75 different tools (surprisingly less than the company-wide average of 83!)

• Manual tasks eat up 40% of a marketer's day (based on MIT research)

• AI tools can help reclaim that time for strategic work

Quick Wins with AI Automation:

• Content Creation: Let AI draft your first versions

• Social Media: Automate posting and basic engagement

• Email Marketing: Smart segmentation and personalization

• Analytics: Automated reporting and insights

• Customer Service: Basic response automation

Pro Tip: Start small. Pick one repetitive task that drives you crazy and automate it. Once you see the impact, you'll be hooked.

Remember: AI tools are only as good as the data feeding them. Before diving into AI, make sure your basic data collection and organization are solid.

Bonus: Measuring Success Like a Pro ⚖️

Don't just set up tools—prove they're worth it to your CFO. Here's my simple framework for measuring your ROI:

Before You Start:

• Get a baseline of your current performance metrics

• Take screenshots or looms of your existing workflows

• Use internal polls to Track time spent on manual tasks

• Note your current time spent per lead/sale and % of cost

Key Metrics to Track:

• Time Saved: Hours recovered per week/month

• Cost Efficiency: Tool cost vs. value delivered

• Team Adoption: % of features actually used

• ROI: Revenue generated vs. tool investment

• Track Conversion rate improvements

Pro Tip: Create a simple Google Sheet dashboard to track these monthly.

Red Flags to Watch:

• Tools that haven't been used in 30/90 days

  • Track # of logins

  • Track time spent

• Features you're paying for but never touch

• Declining team adoption rates

• Rising cost per conversion

Your 90-Day Action Plan:

1. Audit current tools (Week 1)

2. Set baseline metrics (Week 2)

3. Track weekly improvements (Weeks 3-11)

4. Evaluate ROI (Week 12)

Key Takeaways:

• Your Martech stack should solve real problems, not create new ones

• Measure everything—what works for others might not work for you

• Start simple, then expand based on data

• Regular audits prevent tool bloat and save money