The Ultimate Product Marketing Tech Stack for 2023

Product marketers have a complex set of tasks to accomplish and that usually comes along with a complex tech stack; there’s often a specialized tool for each step in the workflow. When evaluating a tech stack, PMMs need to think about not only how well those tools can communicate with one another, but also how they can share information with key collaborators and stakeholders as smoothly as possible. 

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When looking for the right set of tools for your tech stack, it can often involve digging through a B2B Marketplace for hours. Luckily, we’ve put together the ultimate product marketing tech stack to guide you in choosing the absolute best tools out there to meet your team’s needs, fit your budget– and ideally grow with you as you scale. 

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Let’s get into it. 

For research 

Product professionals have different types of research to conduct. There’s competitive or market research– understanding competitors and your place in the market– and customer research and analysis, or understanding customer needs plus analyzing any feedback received from them. 

For these tools, you’ll want to consider your resources; not only budget, but how much time you have to dedicate to sifting through and updating key competitive intel or compiling customer insights. To save precious time, you need to automate as much as possible and be able to easily share it with the right teams, like sales, marketing, and customer success. 

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Competitive or market research

Recommendation: Crayon ‍‍

Pros: 

• Automated insights 
• Easy to share across teams
• Multiple integrations

Cons: 

• Blindspots on social: can’t pull in LinkedIn data due to API restrictions 
• Limited updates via email
• Can be overwhelming to curate insights relevant to one team member 

Alternatives:

• Klue
• Kompyte 
• Ignition 

💡Did you know Ignition offers automatic and affordable competitive intel? That includes news, SEO, reviews, and more to help your teams do their best work (win more deals! retain customers!). The best part? It's super easy to manage even for tiny teams.

Other useful tools: 

• SEMRush or Ahrefs can help you stay on top of SEO vs. your competition
• Buzzsumo can help you stay on top of news around your brand with budget-friendly pricing 

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Customer research/feedback analysis

Recommendation: Momentive 

Pros: 

• Faster results with AI-driven insights 
• Custom research design and translations available
• Offers a wide selection of insights, from market and brand research, to feedback on customer, product, and employee experiences

Cons: 

• Amount of available options can feel overwhelming
• There’s a high price point for some advanced features 
• Momentive Enterprise has limited capabilities offline, making it difficult to collect feedback in areas with limited internet access

Alternatives: 

• Typeform
• Pollfish 
• Ignition 

💡Did you know? Ignition is also built for customer insights. You can collect user research via surveys or analyze Voice of Customer insights from customer conversations with AI.

Other useful tools: 

• G2: see reviews from customers– not only about your own products, but the competition as well (what gaps can you take advantage of?) 
• Kraftful: “ChatGPT, but for product research” 
• UserEvidence for capturing customer feedback and automating social proof like case studies, testimonials, and quantifiable stats.
• Wonder for broader market research like trends analysis and best practices.

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For planning and collaboration 

Product teams have a lot of collaborating to do across their organizations and it’s vital for smoother release cycles that everyone has access to the information they need– particularly key stakeholders and decision-makers– at the right times. 

Without that, release cycles get slowed down as everyone has to be manually updated on plans and progress. And that’s the best-case scenario! At worst, the wrong things get prioritized as decisions get made with incomplete or incorrect information, wasting resources and building frustration across teams. If that builds up enough, it can impact employee satisfaction, leading to higher turnover, and eventually impacting revenue. 

Roadmapping

Recommendation: Productboard

Pros: 

• A high level of customization is available 
• Makes it easier to prioritize development tasks and keep key collaborators on the same page 
• Free product management community available to join for additional support and resources

Cons: 

• No integration available with CRMs on base plans
• Mostly Engineering-focused, hard to handoff to GTM teams
• Performance issues when a high level of items are displayed

Alternatives: 

• Aha!
• ProductPlan
• Ignition 

💡Did you know Ignition serves as an all-in-one product hub? All of the customer and competitive insights you’ve collected through your research can be translated and prioritized as shareable roadmaps – then those roadmaps can be easily communicated (with full context) to the right teams. 

Other useful tools: 

• MURAL or Miro for virtual whiteboarding (they also have basic roadmapping templates available) 
• Canny for idea voting 

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For project management 

A special note on project management tools: these are what we recommend for teams who are looking for a tool that just does task management. These tools are fantastic for smaller teams who need to coordinate getting things done and see at a glance what’s left or overdue. 

For larger teams or those coordinating more complex projects like a go-to-market launch, it’s important to keep in mind the limitations in seats available with these tools– so the need for manual updates on specific tasks or a bigger budget to give everyone a seat– or everything involved with a launch beyond a simple list of tasks. 

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Recommendation: Monday

Pros: 

• Lots of integrations available 
• Desktop and mobile app available to work from anywhere 
• Very intuitive for first-time project management software users

Cons: 

• Automations can take lots of effort to set up, and break often
• The free version is limited
• Difficult to see the “hierarchy” of different projects

Alternatives: 

• Asana
• ClickUp
• Ignition 

💡Did you know Ignition was purpose-built for GTM teams, who have more on their minds than a list of tasks to complete? In Ignition, you can actually do the work vs. just keeping track of it. 

See how Ignition stacks up against other project management tools like Asana, Monday, and ClickUp.

Other useful tools: 

• Airtable for spreadsheet-style project management
• Time Doctor for tracking time to complete tasks

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Asset management

Recommendation: Dropbox 

Pros: 

• Easily share large documents with collaborators 
• Password-protect specific documents 
• The interface is easy to understand and use 

Cons: 

• The free plan has limited storage capacity available 
• Folder-based file categorization can make brand management/organization of assets challenging
• Automated backup/syncing across devices dependent on internet connection and speed 

Alternatives: 

• Google Drive 
• Bynder
• Ignition 

💡Did you know you can store all of your assets in Ignition so your team has a single source of truth available for all of the latest documents, images, and more they could need? 

Other useful tools: 

• Canva 
• Unsplash 

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Communication and collaboration

Recommendation: Slack 

Pros: 

• Tons of available integrations that allow for real-time alerts and updates 
• Ability to upload and share docs with individuals or teams 
• Features like setting reminders, scheduling messages, and saving items to refer to later make it easy to work across time zones 

Cons: 

• The default setting for notifications can be overwhelming for new users 
• Custom workflows are only available to paid teams 
• The free version only stores messages from the past 90 days, leaving smaller teams without budget vulnerable to losing valuable information  

Alternatives: 

• Microsoft Teams
• Zoom
• Vowel 

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Other useful tools: 

• MURAL, Miro, and InVision all offer visual collaboration options for teams 
• Notion offers a more interactive wiki-type experience for team onboarding and project organization 
• Google Docs for storage and collaboration 
• Loom for short video updates that can be done async, saving the most important topics for real-time meetings 

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For marketing and sales

Marketing and sales teams need their own tools to stay organized and connected with customers and the product people in their organization. Product marketers in particular need tools that will help them stay on top of product plans and easily communicate the necessary aspects of those plans to customer-facing team members. 

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Customer support needs to know when certain updates are coming in order to help existing customers and also upsell newer customers. Sales needs to know when new updates and products are coming in order to capture new customers. Marketing needs to know all of these things in order to build out campaigns, particularly for GTM launches. 

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Without ready access to product team updates around timelines– plus the latest approved product images and documentation– collaboration slows way down. Product teams are constantly interrupted with pings on Slack and emails asking for updates, breaking concentration and progress on important deep work. This leads to longer launch cycle times at best and a path to burnout at worst. 

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Content and asset generation

Recommendation: ChatGPT

Pros: 

• Free version available 
• Can act as an editor 
• Can generate lists of ideas, title options, outlines, and more to kickstart content processes 

Cons: 

• Users need some skill in writing prompts to get the best results 
• Information isn’t always up to date and needs to be fact-checked (for example, SEO information doesn’t account for Google’s latest updates) 
• Struggles with humor, nuance, sarcasm, and other muddier aspects of human communication and language 

Alternatives: 

• Copy.ai
• Jasper
• Ignition

💡Did you know Ignition can generate ad copy, descriptions, blog post outlines, and more? It's an instant GTM campaign at the click of a button.

Other Useful Tools: 

• Midjourney for AI images
• Gamma for creating decks
• UserEvidence for case studies
• Hemingway Editor for assessing reading level of content 

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Sales enablement

Recommendation: Highspot

Pros: 

• Acts as a single source of truth for documents and assets needed for sales teams 
• Templates available to help create new content 
• Ability to see how prospects are interacting with what’s been sent to them 

Cons: 

• Limited users in the introductory package 
• Requires training and oversight so users don’t upload documents multiple times and tag things incorrectly 
• Analytics can be difficult for users to parse 

Alternatives: 

• Guru
• Mindtickle 
• Ignition 

💡Did you know? Ignition has 100% automated Voice-of-Customer analysis! You can upload a CSV of chats, or connect tools like Intercom or Gong to Ignition and it will parse customer conversations with AI, surfacing common feature requests, product strengths and weaknesses, messaging nuggets like common language used, and more. 

Other useful tools: 

• Gong or Chorus for sales call analysis
• Kompyte for win/loss analysis 

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Marketing automation

Recommendation: Hubspot

Pros: 

• Automates manual tasks (email marketing, social media scheduling, lead nurturing, and more) 
• Ability to streamline all of your marketing processes in a single place
• Analytics to drive your marketing strategy forward 

Cons: 

• Cost prohibitive for smaller companies 
• Limited design capabilities for certain features 
• Support can be generic, pointing to articles and FAQs vs. equipped to offer specific resolutions to a user’s unique situation 

Alternatives: 

• Intercom
• Customer.io

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Other useful tools: 

• Canva for creating images to use on social media or in blog posts without design support
• Grammarly extension for basic grammar checks in marketing documents and copy 

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Final thoughts 

Working smarter and faster starts with having the best possible tech stack available for your team. We hope this can help you get set up for success. 

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And if you’d like to lighten your tech stack by tapping into the power of Ignition, we’re always ready to talk! 

💡Did you know? Ignition’s best-in-class planning tools are available a-la-carte, so your team can get exactly what you need for the budget you have. 

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Blast off with Ignition

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