As the Head of Digital at Moneypenny, Dan Marshall has a wealth of experience navigating the world of marketing technology. With countless tools on the market, each claiming to be the next big thing, Dan knows the challenges of building an effective marketing stack better than most.
In his latest piece, Dan shares his insights on how to cut through the noise and find the tools that truly make a difference. From maximising ROI, to achieving your marketing objectives and making life easier, here’s his guide to selecting the right tools for your business needs.
With so many tools available, with different use cases, multiple features, and often a lot of crossovers in functionality, it can be difficult to identify the most effective tools for your marketing stack. When looking at incorporating new tools I ask myself 3 questions.
This might seem a strange thing to think about, but there are many tools that share features, and I’ve often found that when investigating new tools to help with a specific use case, something we already use offers that feature. Or there might be a particular tool that offers a lot more features than just the thing I need it for.
I’ve particularly found this with a lot of digital marketing tools like AHrefs, SEMrush etc. they all have a lot of similar features, so it is about understanding what you really need from that tool and working out which one offers the best functionality.
It ultimately comes down to making sure that the tool in question drives an ROI, it’s really easy to end up with an expansive tool stack, full of similar things, which is just wasting your marketing budget.
As marketers we all have objectives to work towards, whether it’s driving awareness, increasing lead generation, improving lead qualification or any of the 101 other things we must do, and our tool stack needs to help us in achieving them.
I’ll always think about the particular objective I’m trying to achieve and question how a specific tool is going to help me achieve that in order to justify the investment.
An example I had recently was that I really wanted to better understand the impact of running LinkedIn Ads. We did some research and came across Dreamdata. Through their LinkedIn impression attribution, we can now see which accounts in our pipeline viewed an ad on their route to conversion, something we had no visibility of before. It’s now helping me to validate the spend on that platform and to optimise and scale our activity.
It’s even better if the tool you are looking at offers some kind of free trial that can give you some data to back up why you want to buy that tool.
This might seem a bit selfish, but ultimately, we’re using tools to make a process more efficient or to give us some insight we didn’t have before, both resulting in our jobs becoming a little easier. And the one thing that helps this more than anything else… integrations!
By utilising tools that integrate into other platforms, particularly CRMs and Ad Platforms, all your data gets connected, insights are easier to access, and you can start impacting your performance much quicker.
I always look at a new tools list of integrations to see what platforms they can integrate with and particularly look out for if they already integrate with things that I know might present a challenge, like more bespoke CRMs. Always ask about integrations on demos too, a lot of tools can do more bespoke things for you if you ask.
Choosing the right marketing tools is essential for building a tech stack that gets results, improves efficiency, and gives you a good return on investment. As Dan mentioned, it’s all about looking closely at what each tool can do, how it fits with your goals, and if it works well with the systems you already have.
If you’re looking to further refine your marketing stack in 2025, keep an eye out for our new playbook, The State of Lead Management 2025. In our guide, we explore the latest trends in lead management, share tips on the best tools to add to your tech stack, and highlight important findings from our recent survey about how businesses are handling lead management in the upcoming year.
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