A tech stack helps you to develop customizable, responsive websites, web applications, and marketing automation tools while effectively managing and analyzing your marketing data.
The right tech stack can significantly improve your marketing company’s workflow, performance, and outcomes. Conversely, the wrong tech stack can lead to higher costs, delays, and dissatisfaction within the team.
A marketing tech stack should be flexible and helpful to scale your clients’ campaigns and your range of services. While marketing companies have varied needs, indispensable features of an effective tech stack include the following:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software: An essential tool for the modern marketer, CRM software helps you manage customer data, track activities, and improve customer interactions.
- Marketing automation software: Automation software can help you streamline your marketing campaigns.
- Analytics and reporting: These tools are essential for analyzing campaign effectiveness and making data-driven decisions on marketing tactics.
This article explores the importance of choosing the right tech stack for your marketing company’s needs, which tech stack Kinsta recommends, and its strengths and key features.
Understanding Marketing Company Needs
Marketing companies focus much of their effort on reaching customers online. At the same time, marketers leverage online tools to run and optimize their campaigns. To keep up with this growing demand for technology, marketing companies have particular needs for their tech stack.
Web and Application Development
Websites are essential to most marketing strategies, and web applications are crucial for automating marketing activities. For example, your company might develop an application to monitor and assess customer behavior, engagement, and preferences. You can then use this data to improve marketing campaign effectiveness and personalize the customer experience.
Data Analysis and Management
Businesses generate data from websites, social media platforms, customer feedback, and sales. However, without appropriate tools to help process this data, many companies can be overwhelmed trying to identify traffic patterns, trends, and insights. Understanding this data is essential for optimizing marketing campaigns and customizing the customer experience.
One possible approach is to use a Data Management Platform (DMP) to gather, store, visualize, and analyze data from multiple streams in a centralized location. DMPs give marketing businesses real-time access to client data so you can make informed decisions and offer your clients’ customers a tailored experience.
Analyzing marketing performance data is also crucial to assess campaign effectiveness. Marketing analytics software provides real-time insights into website traffic, click-through and conversion rates, consumer engagement levels, and other vital metrics to optimize your marketing campaigns.
By integrating third-party tools and services, you can access and manage data from a central location, making it easier to analyze and act on the information.
Integration With Third-Party Tools and Services
Integrating CRM systems with marketing solutions helps you manage customer data and increases customer interaction. With their data, you gain insights into customer preferences and behavior and use the information to build customized ads.
Email marketing and social media are crucial elements of a modern marketing strategy. Integrating email marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or Campaign Monitor into your CRM allows you to automate email campaigns, measure outcomes, and improve customer engagement.
Scalability and Flexibility
Marketing techniques and approaches are constantly evolving. It’s no small feat for businesses in this industry to remain competitive. Your company must adapt to market trends, scale your marketing services, and take on new technology and tools as they become available to support your clients and their needs. You need agile marketing procedures that can adjust quickly to changing conditions.
The MERN Stack: Kinsta’s Recommended Tech Stack for Marketing Companies
There are many tech stacks out there, but Kinsta recommends the MERN stack for ease of use and flexibility.
MERN stands for MongoDB, Express, React, and Node.js — the four core technologies that comprise the stack.
- MongoDB: A NoSQL database that can manage enormous volumes of data, making it perfect for storing analytics and consumer data.
- Express: A quick and adaptable web application framework to make REST APIs and server-side apps.
- React: A popular frontend library for creating dynamic and responsive user interfaces.
- Node.js: A dynamic backend runtime environment for running server-side applications.
The MERN stack is highly flexible and scalable, able to build unique web applications and automation tools, manage massive amounts of data, and integrate an ever-changing array of external services and tools.
Technical Advantages of the MERN Tech Stack
The MERN stack offers various advantages, including performance and scalability, ecosystem and community support, and flexibility and adaptability.
Performance and Scalability
The MERN stack provides excellent performance and scalability, making it a great choice for companies with evolving technology needs. React’s virtual Document Object Model (DOM) lets you render content quickly, while Node.js provides a scalable server-side solution to handle high traffic. MongoDB’s NoSQL database provides easy horizontal scaling.
Ecosystem and Community Support
The MERN stack offers extensive ecosystem and community support for marketing companies. React, Vue.js, Node.js, and other components in the stack have large and active communities that provide support, resources, and updates.
The MERN stack also offers rich libraries, tools, and resources for developing and integrating your existing marketing tools.
Flexibility and Adaptability
The MERN stack’s modular architecture makes integrating new tools and services easy as your needs change without rebuilding the whole system.
The MERN stack can also accommodate evolving marketing needs and technologies, keeping your infrastructure up-to-date and supporting business growth.
Business Benefits of the MERN Tech Stack
The technical benefits of the MERN tech stack result in powerful business advantages.
Cost-Effectiveness
The MERN stack is built on open-source technologies, making it affordable.
Quicker to Market
The MERN stack provides rapid development frameworks and tools for efficient project completion, helping companies bring their products to market faster. The availability of reusable components increases efficiency and accelerates the development process.
Enhanced User Experience
With React or Vue.js for front-end development, marketing companies can create responsive and dynamic interfaces that lead to better engagement and conversion rates. This improved user experience translates to higher customer satisfaction and increased sales for your clients.
Alternative Tech Stack Options
Due to its many benefits, Kinsta recommends the MERN stack for marketing companies. However, every technology stack has advantages and disadvantages. The decision depends on your marketing company’s needs and goals. There are possible alternatives to the MERN stack.
Django and Python
Django and Python provide a reliable and scalable solution for companies handling large volumes of data and implementing machine learning algorithms into their marketing processes. Python is flexible, readable, and easy to use — making it a good data analysis and manipulation language.
Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails offers a comprehensive toolkit and convention, facilitating the rapid development of scalable and reliable applications. Its emphasis on convention over configuration makes it a good choice for companies that need to build and iterate on applications quickly.
LAMP
LAMP — consisting of Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP — is a reliable and widely used technology stack for web development. It provides a solid foundation for creating dynamic and scalable web applications but doesn’t match the modern flexibility of newer stacks.
MEAN
The MEAN stack uses MongoDB, Express, AngularJS, and Node.js to enable the development of robust, flexible, and scalable web applications. However, because the MEAN stack requires users to become proficient in multiple technologies, it has a steeper learning curve than other technology stacks.
Summary
Although marketing companies can choose from various tech stack options, and Kinsta supports many languages and frameworks, Kinsta recommends the MERN tech stack for most marketing use cases.
The MERN stack offers many benefits to marketing companies: it provides high performance, scalability, and flexibility. It has a robust and cost-effective ecosystem, shortens the time to market, and provides your users with an enhanced experience. With the MERN stack, you can develop customizable, responsive websites, web applications, and marketing automation tools while effectively managing and analyzing your marketing data.
To go with your tech stack, marketers like you need hosting partners that can provide short loading times and reliable back-end support. Kinsta’s hosting services for managed WordPress sites, applications, and databases offer excellent performance, reliability, customer support, security, and scalability. To learn how Kinsta supports your tech stack, sign up for a Kinsta demo today.
Marcia Ramos
I’m the Editorial Team Lead at Kinsta. I’m a open source enthusiast and I love coding. With more than 7 years of technical writing and editing for the tech industry, I love collaborating with people to create clear and concise pieces of content and improve workflows.