What does your mobile app GTM tech stack look like?
Hi everyone,
First time poster here, a marketing/demand gen person coming from a mobile app launching this summer. I am curious, what does your go-to-market tech stack look like? I am responsible for identifying and building out the systems needed to shape and guide users from awareness through download, retention and (hopefully) advocacy, as well as analyze and segment based on behavior.
The problem is, if you ask software vendors what tools are essential parts of the mobile app GTM stack, they will always say their solution is. I think it would be really great if we could trade notes on what we have, wish we had, and maybe wish we didn't have.
I'll go first: I know there is missing stuff, that's why I am here :)
HubSpot CRM/MA. This came before I joined, I love hubspot but I don't know that it's the best platform for mobile apps as it doesn't do well with product usage data and is strongest at B2B (and many of its modules are B2B-specific).
PostHog for Product Analytics. This is a great tool with a free platform approach that got us very far. No secrets here. Some functionalities are stronger than others.
Hootsuite for socials and social listening. Also purchased before me — I think that having a place to track and manage social and community engagement is important but probably not worth investing much in until you have a following. A lot of good community building can happen just posting from the platform itself.
AppsFlyer for Deep Links/attribution. Feels essential, everyone likes it, even the free version was enough to get started. Need it to run campaigns that go straight to our app or app store.
Considering (would love opinions here):
A Customer Engagement Platform (e.g. Braze, Airship, Iterable) to build and manage an integrated customer comms experience across email, in-app, push and eventually SMS. We are currently running it manually in siloed systems and it's going okay.
A Customer Data Platform (e.g. Segment) to organize/enrich customer data and orchestrate to those users. Anyone understands the value of a unified customer view/ unbroken data pipeline, but we are managing sort of okay manually configuring HubSpot and PostHog to behave like a quasi CDP.
Dedicated Analytics (e.g. mixpanel). Just wondering if we got a CDP how many additional tools we would need to get full (or even just worthwhile) value from it.
Dedicated Data Warehouse (e.g. RedShift.) Same as above, is this a prerequisite for a CDP? It's not even really in my scope as I am on the marketing side of things but there are technical resources required to implement a ton of this so need to think about it all.
Anyway, thanks for reading! I'll be at MAU Vegas next week if anyone wants to chat in person on this.
Replies
Let me state first that I have no experience with any of these tools. My main business is SEO consulting though and there are some parallels. As nobody else was answering yet, I hope I still can give you some advice.
I see how my customers struggle to gather and analyze all kinds of (SEO-related) data, using lots of great tools. Over the years I‘ve learned three things:
Ensuring data quality and consistency during all phases is extremely hard, but crucial.
All the tools are only as good as the people using them. Very often, it‘d be better to use fewer tools, but make sure the users are well-trained on them.
Most of the data and the reports that are generated from it, aren’t used in any meaningful way.
As a consequence, I wouldn’t concentrate on the tools or the stack, I‘d concentrate on what insights you really need to get actionable tasks. If this is defined, work your way backwards to the tools and data you need for it.
@stefanfis Good advice! Thank you for sharing. The dream is to be in a place where the product is so good you don't need all of the data immediately because things are going well. But if they're not, it certainly helps to have the data that can help you find the cause.