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Hi there 👋
This week’s newsletter is all about products. I make this ask later down in the email, but I’ll surface it here, too: If you have a favorite tool that you love using in your day-to-day work, please let me know. A recommendation from you would go a long way.
Hope you enjoy the list and maybe even find a new tool or two. Have a great week!
Kevan
Oyster’s Marketing Technology Stack: All the products we use and love
Like many of you, I loooove a good Product Hunt deep dive. I have Chrome bookmarks for days, full of rad tools and services that I can’t wait to try.
Bless my teams, then, because I’m always up for trying new things.
Remember Bonjoro, the video tool that lets you record one-off welcome videos to new signups?
Tried it.
Ever tried analytics tools like Chartbeat, Fathom Analytics, and Lighthouse?
Check, check, and check.
As fun as it is to try all the new products we see each and every day, there remain a few core products that truly drive our day-to-day work within our teams. Yes, it’s fun to have a Photomosh to turn to every now and then, but it can’t really replace Figma.
With this in mind, here are some of the foundational tools that we use on the Oyster marketing team day-in and day-out.
Oyster’s marketing technology stack
Asana — for project management
We’ve recently rolled this out to the team as an experiment in staying organized, collaborative, and efficient now that we’re a big and busy team of 10 people (and growing). Previous to this, we used Notion to organize big projects and small tasks.
Also considered:
Webflow — for our website, landing pages, and blog CMS
Yes, you read that right: We use Webflow for our blog CMS, not WordPress or Ghost or any of the more traditional blogging platforms. So far, so good. We recently did a blog migration from WordPress to Webflow. All of our other web pages are built in Webflow, and we have some Webflow experts on the team to handle the scale.
Along with Webflow, we used Squarespace for our events website, and we use Unbounce for a gated content landing page.
Also considered:
Figma & Figjam — for design and whiteboarding
Figma is our primary design tool for mockups, graphics, and web design. We’ve recently started using Figjam more and more, too, though as you’ll see below, Oyster is more of a Miro company.
Also considered:
Metadata — for B2B demand gen
Metadata has a big role to play in our paid marketing engines, particularly as we set some ambitious scaling goals around paid search and paid social.
Crayon — for competitive intelligence
I just completed an evaluation of Crayon, and we’re getting going with them this week. They have a quite comprehensive, AI-powered feed that pulls in news and updates from any competitor you can name. It may even be able to cover some of the ground that a PR tool like Meltwater used to do for us at Buffer.
Also considered:
Wynter — for user testing
This cool tool / service is built by the team at ConversionXL, so they clearly know a thing or two about user insight. With Wynter, we can put together a few different messaging tests and then get them in front of real users to see which ones win.
Also considered:
HubSpot — for marketing automation
Salesforce — for CRM
We’ve built a system in which both tools sync with one another so that all lead and customer data is tracked through both. There’s likely to be a lot of complexity with these tools as we scale, so we’re also trying to get ahead of it by building out operations teams in RevOps, Marketing Ops, Sales Ops, and more.
HubSpot also acts as our primary email tool at the moment. We previously used a mix of Intercom (which we recently migrated away from) and Mailchimp to send email to different audiences.
Hopin — for virtual event management
We held a virtual event in July, and Hopin was the platform that ran it all. We found it incredibly comprehensive and smooth — and we’ll definitely be running more events again in the future.
Zendesk — for customer support, help desk, and messaging
I may be cheating by listing a customer support tool here in a martech list, but Zendesk has been a big part of our lives the past few days as we’ve migrated onto it … and customers are at the core of what marketing does anyways. For us, our biggest contribution on the Zendesk front is with the Help Center documentation and customer education.
Remote tools (used by the whole Oyster team)
Notion — for documentation, team wikis, and knowledge management
Slack — for real-time communication and chatter
Google Docs — for collaborative documents and ideation
Miro — for brainstorming and idea organizing
Loom — for asynchronous communication of updates and ideas
Tools I miss (from other jobs)
Dropbox Paper — If I could wave a magic wand, I’d turn every Google Doc into a Dropbox Paper doc. It’s modern, smooth, and highly collaborative. The thing I miss the most (which I wouldn’t have anticipated): when you contribute to a Dropbox Paper doc, your initials appear next to your text. With Google Docs or Notion, it’s anyone’s guess who typed what.
Discourse / Threads / P2 — When you’re remote-working, you need a space for asynchronous updates and information sharing. These get lost in the Slack stream, they’re hard to find in Notion, and Google Docs isn’t built for it. At Buffer, we used a tool called Threads, which functioned as an internal team forum.
Over to you
Do you have any favorite martech tools or remote tools? Feel free to drop me a note. As you can see, I’m always up for adding more tools to the list!
About this newsletter …
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙
About Kevan
I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Polly, and Vox.
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