What Is Martech? Top 23 Tools for Optimizing Marketing Efforts

Digital transformation has changed nearly every aspect of how we conduct business, including how we perform marketing. Digital marketing enables companies of all sizes to reach a large audience through technology that their consumers use every day.

With advances in marketing technology—known as martech—teams can track any marketing campaign’s success. Martech enables businesses to track, measure, and change the different digital elements that comprise each campaign. Martech also allows teams to influence prospects, follow the buyer journey in the marketing funnel, and measure return on investment (ROI).

As with all technology initiatives, choosing the right martech tools for your business takes careful planning. Our guide covers what martech is, its benefits, and why it’s essential for your business. We also highlight 23 top martech tools.

What is martech?

Martech is a combination of marketing techniques and technology solutions used by digital marketers to create, communicate, automate, and adjust marketing efforts. It’s particularly crucial for startups where efficiency and scalability are key.

From advertising and promotion on e-commerce sites and landing pages to content marketing and buyer journey touchpoints, martech gives marketers the insight and capability to make data-driven decisions. This improves the performance of marketing campaigns and allows teams to personalize marketing efforts around the customer while proactively communicating with them through omnichannel messaging.

Email marketing is a simple example. Martech enables marketers to send triggered emails to customers in response to their specific actions.

For instance, if a customer visits your website and provides an email address to download a white paper, you can use this action to send an email inviting the customer to attend a webinar on the topic or provide more customized, targeted information about your products or services. Martech also helps you learn more about customer preferences, interests, and needs since you can track the links they click on when they read email content.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being integrated into martech to provide deeper insights, automate tasks, and improve efficiency. For example, AI-powered tools can analyze larger volumes of data faster and more accurately than humans, which is crucial in marketing where understanding the customer can make or break a campaign. Generative AI can also help marketers create email subject lines, social media posts, blog articles, and more.

However, the use of AI in martech should be strategic. AI is a tool that can provide significant benefits, but it requires a clear understanding of its capabilities and limitations, and it should be used in conjunction with human expertise.

Difference between martech and adtech

While martech and adtech are often used interchangeably, they serve different purposes in the digital marketing ecosystem.

Martech encompasses all technology solutions used to plan, execute, and measure marketing efforts. This includes tools for email marketing, content management, customer relationship management (CRM), social media management, and marketing automation. Martech focuses on the entire customer journey and is often used for long-term relationship building and B2B marketing (business-to-business).

Advertising technology (adtech), on the other hand, refers to tools and platforms used for planning, buying, managing, and measuring digital advertising campaigns. This includes demand-side platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs), ad exchanges, and data management platforms (DMPs). Adtech is more focused on paid media and is often used for short-term, acquisition-focused campaigns.

While there is some overlap between martech and adtech, particularly in areas like attribution and audience targeting, they serve different primary functions in a marketing strategy. A chief marketing officer (CMO) might use both martech and adtech solutions to create a comprehensive digital marketing approach.

Importance of martech

Martech tools automate and streamline the digital marketing process from asset creation and testing to deployment and monitoring.

Some benefits of using martech include:

• Increased marketing efficiency. Automating and streamlining digital marketing efforts makes it possible to manage multiple marketing channels and improve productivity. For example, email marketing platforms can automatically send out emails to thousands of subscribers at once, which can be time-consuming if done manually.
• Generation of more and better-qualified leads. Lead generation is a crucial first step to an effective marketing campaign. Use martech tools that support digital ads, email marketing, search engine marketing, and more to create lead generation. These tools can help marketers reach a larger audience and attract more potential customers.
• Multichannel view of prospect behavior. Martech platforms can aggregate data from multiple channels to provide a comprehensive view of a prospect’s behavior. This can help marketers understand their audience better and tailor their marketing strategies accordingly.
• Better alignment on goals (marketing and sales). Martech can provide objective data that can help align marketing and sales teams. This data can provide insights into which strategies are working and which ones need to be modified, enabling better coordination between the two teams.
• Improved conversion and better ROI. Martech includes tools that support A/B testing, incrementality testing, remarketing, upselling, and other marketing efforts designed to drive conversions and improve ROI.
• Ability to automate repetitive tasks. By automating repetitive tasks such as social media posting or email sending, martech can free up time for marketers to focus on more strategic and creative tasks.

Competitive advantage. Using advanced martech tools can give businesses a competitive edge by enabling them to provide better customer experiences, reach a larger audience, and optimize their marketing strategies based on data.

What is a martech stack?

Nearly all companies use multiple technologies to engage with customers, automate and streamline the digital marketing process, and collect and analyze data. The collection of tools used to accomplish this is called the martech stack.

Building the optimal marketing technology stack

Before you begin building a martech stack, develop your marketing strategy and review current marketing practices to identify if changes are required. Your strategy and practices will determine which martech tools you’ll use. For example, if your marketing efforts don’t include remarketing, you won’t need martech supporting it.

Marketing technology is exciting, but stick to essential tools and only add new technology when you’re ready to use it. Companies with expertise and history using martech may eventually build a complete martech stack to address every marketing funnel stage. However, if you’re a beginner, keep it simple.

Creating the optimal martech stack for your business comes down to understanding your most pressing goals, the extent of your digital asset management requirements, and where you can potentially improve your ROI. Once you know these things, you can determine which martech tools will support your goals.

Martech tools include:

• CMS. Content management software (CMS) like WordPress, Ghost, Joomla!, and Wix enable you to build, edit, manage your website, and quickly add, edit, and remove pages or sections.
• Advertising. Digital advertising martech includes but isn’t limited to Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and YouTube Ads.
• Social media. Martech tools support streamlined social media management, including automated scheduling, statistics and reporting. These tools enable marketing teams to collaborate on social media efforts.
• Conversion. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) tools focus on visitor behavior on your website, first-time visitor conversions, and return visitor conversions, which can help you increase conversion goals.
• Email. The latest martech aimed at email marketers provides more flexibility and features, such as automated trigger-based emails and premier email analytics.
• Customer service. Customers and prospects are savvier and demand more today from the brands they choose. Martech supports more personalized engagement and a customized buyer experience.
• Analytics. Martech tools collect, measure, and analyze digital advertising data so you can understand the impact of marketing activities and maximize ROI.
• CRM. CRM technology brings marketing, sales, and customer support activities together on one platform. ‍‍
• Automation software. Marketing automation supports repetitive marketing tasks that nurture sales leads and prospects and personalize marketing messages and content.

23 best martech tools

More than 14,000 marketing tools are available to digital marketers today. With this staggering number, how do you choose? We highlight 23 of the top martech stack tools to consider.

1. AdRoll

AdRoll is a digital marketing platform that helps businesses reach their target audience with relevant ads across devices and channels. The platform’s features include retargeting, audience targeting, dynamic creative optimization, and reporting.

Best for: Businesses wanting to reach their target audience and improve their marketing results

Pros:

• Partners with major ad exchanges (wide reach)
• Has retargeting capabilities
• Allows user segmentation

Cons:

• Has limited advanced features
• May be complex to set up

‍Pricing: Can pay as you go or $36 per month for subscription (billed annually)

2. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a website heat map and user behavior analytics tool that helps businesses understand how visitors interact with their websites. Features include scroll maps that let you know how far your customers scroll down your webpage and A/B testing to determine which version of your website is more effective.

Best for: Businesses wanting to improve their website’s user experience and conversion rates

Pros:

• Offers ability to segment heat map data by different variables
• Intuitive and easy to use
• Has integration capabilities, including Shopify and WordPress

Cons:

• Limited in scope
• Doesn’t have real-time data
• Allows only limited customization

‍Pricing: Free trial available; paid plans start at $99 per month (billed annually)

3. Google Ads

Google Ads offers pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements that appear in search results based on your selected keywords on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). The platform offers various targeting options to help you show your ads to customers most likely to be interested in your products or services.

Best for: E-commerce businesses looking to reach people searching for products or services online

Pros:

• Has a large reach
• Offers extensive user control over ads
• Easy to measure results of ad targeting

Cons:

• Can be a complex platform to use
• Cost depends on the competitiveness of keywords, so it may be too expensive for small businesses

Pricing: Contact Google team for a custom quote

4. Google Analytics

Google Analytics ​​is a free web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. The tool can help businesses understand how people are finding their website, how they’re using it, and where they’re coming from. Tracked metrics include website traffic, conversion rates, bounce rate, and session duration.

‍Best for: Businesses wanting to understand their website traffic and improve their marketing campaigns

Pros:

• Free to use
• Can integrate with other Google products
• Easy to use

‍Cons:

• Can be overwhelming when presented with a lot of data
• Isn’t always accurate

‍Pricing: Free

5. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that allows businesses to manage their social media presence across multiple platforms from one central location. The platform offers various features like scheduling, publishing posts, social media monitoring, team collaboration, analytics, and reporting.

‍Best for: Businesses wanting to manage their social media presence across multiple platforms

Pros:

• Includes collaboration features
• Offers a wide range of integrations, such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Mailchimp
• Provides 24/7 customer support

Cons:

• Has a long learning curve, especially if new to social media management
• Offers limited customization
• Can be expensive, especially for larger businesses

‍Pricing: Free trial available; paid plans start at $99 per month (billed annually)

6. HubSpot

HubSpot is a software company that provides a suite of marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM tools. Core products include HubSpot CRM, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub. HubSpot also offers an extensive ecosystem of integrations, allowing businesses to connect the platform with other software they use like Salesforce, Shopify, or Zapier.

‍Best for: Businesses looking to improve their marketing and sales processes

Pros:

• Has an all-in-one platform
• Offers integration capabilities
• Provides robust marketing automation

Cons:

• Has reporting limitations
• Has a long learning curve
• Offers limited customization

‍Pricing: Free tools available; paid marketing plans start at $800 per month (billed annually)

7. Instagram Ads

Instagram Ads are a type of online advertising that allows businesses to create sponsored content to reach a larger and more targeted audience beyond their existing followers. Instagram Ads can be displayed in a variety of places on Instagram, including in the feed, Stories, and Explore sections.

Best for: Businesses that want to showcase products with strong visuals

Pros:

• Generally features high engagement
• Offers visual appeal
• Includes shopping features (can tag products in ads)

Cons:

• Limited audience demographics (younger audience)
• May have frequent algorithm changes
• Offers only limited text

‍Pricing: Priced based on cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand impressions (CPM)

8. LinkedIn Ads

LinkedIn Ads are a type of online advertising that allows businesses to reach their target audience on LinkedIn. Theprofessional networking platform has over 1 billion members. This means that LinkedIn Ads can be a great way to reach professionals interested in your products or services.

Best for: Businesses that sell B2B products or services

‍Pros:

• Reaches a professional audience
• Includes advanced targeting features like job function, seniority, and company name
• Offers a variety of ad formats

Cons:

• Less effective for B2C
• Includes limited ad creative options
• Delivers lower user activity than other social media platforms

Pricing: Determined using an ad auction

9. Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing platform that helps businesses create, send, and track email campaigns. The platform allows you to segment your audience to send targeted emails to specific groups of people based on certain demographics and interests.

Best for: Businesses with small to midsize email lists

Pros:

• Has a broad template variety
• Offers integration capabilities, such as WordPress and Salesforce
• Includes automation features

Cons:

• Offers only limited customization in the free plan
• More advanced features can be complex
• Can be blocked by spam filters

‍Pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start at $13 per month (billed annually)

10. Adobe Marketo Engage

Adobe Marketo Engage helps B2B and B2C marketers automate and measure marketing engagement, tasks, and workflows. The marketing automation platform includes features for email marketing, A/B testing, lead nurturing, website personalization, and reporting.

Best for: Businesses wanting to improve their marketing results

Pros:

• Includes integration capabilities, such as HubSpot, Hootsuite, and GaggleAMP
• Has lead scoring and nurturing capabilities
• Allows a high degree of customization

Cons:

• Implementation can be time-consuming
• Can be complex to use
• Cost is based on the size of the customer database

‍Pricing: Contact Adobe for pricing

11. Meta ads

Meta ads (formerly Facebook ads) are a type of online advertising that allows businesses to reach their target audience on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. Meta ads can be used to promote a variety of products, services, and events.

Best for: Businesses with a large or specific target audience to increase brand awareness

Pros:

• Offers granular targeting
• Has a large user base
• Includes a variety of ad forms

Cons:

• Maintains strict advertising policies
• Has limited organic reach
• May be subject to ad fatigue (seeing the same ads multiple times could lead to less engagement)

‍Pricing: Priced per CPC or CPM

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12. Moz

Moz is a comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) platform that helps businesses improve their websites’ visibility and organic search rankings. Features include keyword research, competitive analysis, link building, and on-page SEO to help businesses be seen online.

Best for: Businesses looking for a comprehensive SEO tool

Pros:

• Includes high-quality educational resources
• Provides MozBar, a free browser extension
• Offers free SEO tools

Cons:

• Provides limited keyword data
• Has a relatively slow crawling speed
• Has limited international data

‍Pricing: Paid plans start at $39 per month (billed annually)

13. Optimizely

Optimizely is a digital experience platform (DXP) that helps businesses create, test, and deploy website and app experiences that drive conversions and engagement. You can target your experiments based on various factors, including user behavior, demographics, and location.

Best for: Businesses wanting to improve their website or app experiences

Pros:

• Includes a wide range of features, including content, design, and functionality
• Offers a variety of integrations, such as Google Analytics and Salesforce
• Features robust testing capabilities

Cons:

• Not all features available in all plans
• Advanced features require coding knowledge
• Has limited customer support

‍Pricing: Contact Optimizely for specific pricing

14. Salesforce

Salesforce is an integrated CRM solution that provides a single, shared view of every customer’s interactions with multiple departments within a company, such as marketing, sales, commerce, and service. Salesforce offers a range of services, including contact management, lead management, sales automation, analytics, and reporting.

Best for: Businesses that need to track a lot of leads or have a large number of contacts

Pros:

• Includes a full suite of CRM tools
• Has a cloud-based solution
• Offers security with role-based access control and data encryption

Cons:

• Can be expensive, especially for larger businesses
• Can be complex to learn and use
• Is a dependency platform—locked into using Salesforce’s products and services

‍Pricing: Per-product pricing; paid plans for sales cloud start at $25 per user per month (billed annually)

15. Semrush

Semrush is a cloud-based, all-in-one platform that helps businesses improve their online visibility, content, PPC ads, social media, and competitive research. A core feature is its keyword research tool to drive traffic to your website by helping it get found by search engines.

Best for: Businesses looking to improve their online visibility and marketing performance

Pros:

• Offers a wide range of features
• Can be expensive, especially for small businesses
• Has a user-friendly interface

Cons:

• Has a long learning curve
• Data may not always be accurate
• Lower-tier plans have limitations

‍Pricing: Paid plans start at $117.33 per month (billed annually)

16. Slack

Slack is a cloud-based messaging platform that allows teams to communicate and collaborate in real time. Discussions are organized in channels, which can be created for departments, projects, or any topic you want your team to collaborate on. Within these channels, team members can send messages, share files, and have voice or video meetings.

Best for: Businesses that need a way to communicate and collaborate in real time

Pros:

• Offers integration capabilities, including with Google Drive and GitHub
• Customizable
• Includes search functionality

Cons:

• Can be distracting if a part of many active channels
• Has only a limited free plan
• Can be expensive for larger teams

Pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start at $7.25 per person per month (billed annually)

17. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management platform that helps businesses of all sizes manage their social media presence across multiple platforms. Sprout Social offers a unified social inbox, social listening features, the ability to schedule and publish posts, and analytics and reporting capabilities.

Best for: Businesses wanting to manage their social media presence across multiple platforms

Pros:

• Offers comprehensive features
• Has a unified inbox
• Includes collaboration capabilities

‍Cons:

• Offers only limited customization in reports
• Can be expensive
• Has a relatively long learning curve to use

‍Pricing: Free trial available; paid plans start at $199 per seat per month (billed annually)

18. TikTok for Business

TikTok for Business is designed to help businesses and marketers leverage the power of TikTok, a popular social media platform known for its short-form video content. Some features include various ads format, creative tools and templates, brand collaborations, analytics, and insights.

Best for: Businesses wanting to target younger demographics

Pros:

• Has developed strong influencer partnerships
• Rapidly develops trending challenges and virality
• Has a large user base

Cons:

• Appeal is primarily a younger demographic
• User-generated content can be unpredictable
• Can be costly to produce videos

‍Pricing: Priced based on CPC and CPM

19. X Ads

X Ads are a type of online advertising that allows businesses to reach their target audience on X. Ads can be targeted to a variety of demographics, including age, gender, location, interests, and even past purchase behavior. This allows businesses to reach the people most likely to be interested in their products or services.

Best for: Businesses that want to engage with their audience

Pros:

• Can reach a large audience
• Provides detailed reports to track engagement
• Can engage with the audience by running contests, polls, and other interactive campaigns

Cons:

• Requires quick action for the fast-paced environment
• Less effective for certain industries, such as B2B
• Has a smaller user base than other social media platforms

‍Pricing: Determined using an ad auction

20. WhatsApp Business

WhatsApp Business is a free mobile messaging app designed for small and midsize businesses. It provides a dedicated platform for businesses to communicate with their customers, share information, and provide customer support. Features include a catalog for products or services, broadcasts, and one-on-one chats.  

Best for: Businesses that want to improve their customer service

Pros:

• Allows for direct and personal communication
• Convenient and familiar for many users
• Includes multimedia capabilities

‍Cons:

• Has limited automation
• Mobile-only platform
• Verification process can take time

Pricing: Contact sales for a custom quote

21. WordPress

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows you to create a website or blog. It’s free and open-source software. A variety of plug-ins are available to extend the functionality of your website, such as for SEO, social media, e-commerce, and more.

Best for: Businesses wanting to create a business website or blog and want a lot of control

Pros:

• Free to use
• Highly customizable through plug-ins and templates
• No coding is required

Cons:

• Has limited monetization options
• Includes limited storage
• Ads displayed on your website

‍Pricing: Free; must pay for a hosting company with WordPress.org

22. YouTube Ads

YouTube Ads is the advertising platform offered by YouTube. This platform allows businesses and individuals to run ads on YouTube videos or in search results, reaching audiences who use YouTube for entertainment, education, and more. Ads include display, video, bumped, overlay, and skippable in-stream.  

Best for: Businesses wanting to visually demonstrate their products or services

Pros:

• Has a wide reach
• Includes robust targeting options
• Offers engaging format

Cons:

• Creating video content can be costly
• Has less precise targeting than search ads
• May come with a learning curve

‍Pricing: Priced based on CPC and CPM

23. Zapier

Zapier is an online automation platform that helps businesses connect apps and automate workflows. Businesses can link web apps with a few clicks to share data and automate workflows. For example, by linking Slack and DropBox, you can receive a notification via Slack when you have a new Dropbox file.

Best for: Businesses wanting to automate tasks and improve their efficiency

Pros:

• Flexible, so it can be used across an entire tech stack
• User-friendly and intuitive
• Includes multistep Zaps (automated workflows)

Cons:

• Dependent on API changes
• Has limited scheduling options
• Doesn’t have phone support

‍Pricing: Free plan available; paid plans start at $19.99 per month (billed annually)

The future of martech

The martech landscape will continue to evolve due to technological advances, increased data privacy regulations, and changes in customer buying behavior and expectations. We highlight some areas to watch.

Contextual targeting versus behavioral targeting

Behavioral targeting involves using data from visitor browsing habits (search terms, sites visited, purchases, etc.) to display relevant ads and offers and improve campaign effectiveness. Contextual targeting allows you to display relevant ads based on website content rather than visitor data.

As visitor data gathering comes under more scrutiny and privacy laws are enacted, such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the shift from behavioral to contextual targeting will continue.

Customer data platforms (CDP)

CDPs claim to bring together all customer data to create unified customer profiles accessible to other systems. Although it’s challenging to find one that does it all, companies like Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe, and others are growing and evolving their CDP platforms by adding AI and machine learning to expand their capabilities.

Immersive and experiential marketing

Expect these marketing tactics to evolve and expand. Look for innovation to include more immersive, virtual experiences using 3D augmented reality, virtual reality technology, and new ways to leverage 5G mobile networks designed to connect virtually.

AI-powered automation and personalization

AI will play a crucial role in automating and personalizing marketing efforts. AI-powered algorithms can analyze large datasets, identify patterns, and make data-driven recommendations. This enables marketers to automate repetitive tasks, optimize campaigns, and deliver personalized experiences to customers.

AI-driven tools can help with content generation, customer segmentation, predictive analytics, chatbots for customer support, and recommendation engines for personalized product suggestions.

Find martech professionals on Upwork

The advantages of using martech are substantial, but selecting tools and managing a martech stack takes time and know-how. If you don’t have the available staff or a team with the appropriate experience and knowledge to determine which martech tools can streamline digital marketing and improve the buyer experience, consider staff augmentation.

Augmenting your staff increases your team’s talent capacity, filling the gaps with high-quality, independent professionals who have the right skills. Upwork enables you to hire martech freelancers with the confidence you need.

Upwork is not affiliated with and does not sponsor or endorse any of the tools or services discussed in this article. These tools and services are provided only as potential options, and each reader and company should take the time needed to adequately analyze and determine the tools or services that would best fit their specific needs and situation.

Prices are current at the time of writing and may change over time based on each service’s offerings.