As product guys who’ve spent years in the Boston start-up community, we often get questions that center on how to structure the “perfect” mobile marketing stack.

Questions like:

• How do we do cross-channel marketing?
• Some of our Marketing & Analytics tools seem redundant, do we need them all?
• How do we build the “perfect” marketing stack?

It’s natural to have these questions. Mobile is a fragmented market, filled with hundreds of vendors, each promising they can do it all. It’s confusing & overwhelming. To make matters worse, mobile spans multiple groups within your organization, each with different priorities and requirements. It’s really easy to find yourself with a hodgepodge of redundant products and still unable to accomplish your goals.

What to do?

Well, first, take a deep breath and remind yourself of three things:

• Multi-channel analytics & marketing is hard. Even the smartest companies struggle.

• No single vendor has an “all in one” solution. It doesn’t exist on the market today.

• Clever companies define their desired architecture and pick the best solution for each piece.

With that in mind, hopefully we can help you sort out your own perfect Marketing stack.

Define your Marketing Architecture

The first step is to define your Marketing Architecture. The diagram below shows how we think about organizing all the different tools into one integrated architecture:

Customer Profile Data

Customer Profile Data is where you store all your customer data including contact info and customer IDs. Some of our clients choose to fill this part of their architecture with a simple, custom database. Some folks use Salesforce or another Sales focused CRM. Some clients swear you’ve got to have a sophisticated DMP (Data Management Platform). Don’t overthink this piece. At the end of the day, you just need one spot to store your customer data. Be sure to set your own unique ID for each customer. You’re going to need this identifier to track users across the Web and Mobile.

Vendors:

If you go the CRM route, Salesforce is the undisputed leader but we prefer Base. It’s cheaper with a much better UX. If you don’t need a Sales CRM, Adobe Audience Manager, Lotame, and Exelate are all solid options, but we love the guys at Intercom as a solution for storing customer profile data.

Rocket Top Picks:

Analytics

We all know data is important and everyone wants one unified dashboard that will show the user journey across Mobile & the Web. We all expect - and are told - that every analytics vendor can give you “true cross-platform insight into your user journey.” It’s a great pitch - and exactly what everyone wants - but here’s the dirty little secret. No single vendor can actually do this for you. It’s possible to get a unified dashboard, but you really have to build it yourself. Or customize one of the tools we suggest in the insights section below. In this “Analytics” section of your infrastructure, you’re only going to worry about picking the right data collection tools for Mobile & the Web. You’ll push all your Web traffic and Mobile engagement data into the “Insights” section of your architecture and combine it with your Marketing data for a true unified dashboard..

Vendors:

Most people end up picking multiple analytics solutions for both the Web and Mobile. For the Web, everyone seems to use the free version of Google Analytics (which kinda stinks) plus something else like Adobe Analytics (expensive & complicated) or Webtrends (less expensive, equally complicated). For Mobile, Localytics does App Analytics well, as do Mixpanel and Google Firebase.

Rocket Top Picks:

Insights

This is your unified dashboard. Where you combine all your Web traffic, Mobile engagement and Marketing data in one spot and roll it into a good looking set of dashboards. Remember how we said it’s super important to set your own unique identifier at the individual customer level? You’re going to need that ID for this Insights dashboard. The really advanced companies hire a Data Scientist to both ensure the data is flowing properly and feed insights to the different parts of your business.

Vendors:

Many clients we work with end up building something custom. The cool kids seem to really like Tableau or Amazon Redshift.

Rocket Top Picks:

Automation

This is your core Marketing “plumbing”. The intelligence behind your campaigns. It’s also the most complicated piece of your Marketing stack. It’s really easy to get lost in a sea of point solutions that have overlapping functionality and a bunch of features that you probably won’t use. For us, we like to keep the Automation simple. Focus on one solution for scheduling campaigns and one solution for A/B testing.

Vendors:

Ultimately your Marketing team is going to have a strong opinion on what they believe is the best Marketing Automation system. For our money, we like Intercom or HubSpot. For A/B testing, we believe the best solution by far is Optimizely.

Rocket Top Picks:

Experiences

This is the most complex portion of your infrastructure. You literally have thousands of companies that offer some tools for reaching users. It’s usually where people get the most confused and frustrated. The best way to get your arms around this portion of your stack is to break it down into the following sections:

Advertising
Attribution / Remarketing
Emails
Push & In-App Messaging

Advertising

If you run an ad supported business, you need an ad trafficking solution to schedule your campaigns & manage your creative. In addition you probably will want a solution to both manage your ad network partnerships & ad exchange listings. Advertising is a huge topic, part black art & science, which we barely understand. So, we’ll recommend the top ad server (DoubleClick) and leave the advertising detail to the professional Ad Monsters.

Rocket Top Picks:

Attribution / Remarketing

Attribution is knowing where your users came from. Remarketing is sending marketing messages to people that were users previously and stopped using your Website or app. AppsFlyer and Adjust are two very strong Attribution solutions, and no-one beats Facebook for Remarketing. Across all the companies we work with, one universal trait is that everyone uses Facebook to find “lookalike” users and bring churned or old users back.

Rocket Top Picks:

Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around forever. We all have a favorite solution. It seems that Mail Chimp is still a popular favorite along with Constant Contact for small business and ExactTarget (now Salesforce Marketing Cloud) for the Enterprise.

Rocket Top Picks:

Push & In-App Messaging

Back in the day, Urban Airship was the gold standard. Times have changed and now you can get Push and In-App messaging “for free” from one of the vendors you selected in another part of your stack. For example, if you like Localytics for app analytics, you can use their in-app & push messaging. If you’re an Amazon Web Services customer, they have a very inexpensive push messaging service. If you anticipate sending a ton of Push & In-App messages, it’s worth looking at AppBoy. With an elegant UX and some powerful functionality, AppBoy is the only stand-alone app marketing vendor we recommend for Push & In-App Messaging.

Rocket Top Picks:

Conclusion

Whew. You certainly need a bunch of stuff to understand your customers. It’s a complicated problem to solve, but the good news is you can absolutely solve it. While no one vendor offers a “perfect” marketing stack, we’ve worked with plenty of smart companies that have the insight, confidence and tools they need to run their business.

It’s worth noting that what we’ve suggested above is perfect for companies that have grown out of the bootstrapped start-up days. If you’ve just starting out, you won’t have the luxury of building your perfect marketing stack. You just need the bare minimum to get started. If this is you, you’re probably best served by Google Analytics for Web and either Localytics or Google Firebase + Amazon Push Messaging. You won’t get everything you need but you’ll be able to cover the basics without breaking the bank.