Share Your Marketing Stack: At Hive, marketing automation and integration are everything

From the top of the funnel down to the customer experience and retention efforts, learn how the project management platform Hive, sees success with integrated solutions in its marketing stack.

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Hive is a project management software and team collaboration tool that combines messaging, to-do lists, project tracking and file sharing on one dashboard. The platform boasts over 100 integrations with other popular marketing and productivity tools.

Not surprisingly, Hive relies on its own platform as a key component of its marketing stack to keep everybody on track and productive and involves other departments across the company, including engineering, sales and the customer success groups.

Guiding principles

Toland Lawrence, one of 10 people on the Marketing and Operations team at Hive, says that while building their stack is a continuous process for the growing company, it’s all about efficiency.

“We employ a lean marketing strategy that uses data to direct and guide our decisions. In terms of tools, we aim to keep our stack simple and take advantage of every opportunity to automate. Like most marketing departments, for us, it is about sending targeted messages to the right users at the right time. Through our data and analytics, we are able to see where customers join and drop off and identify opportunities to optimize their experience,” said Lawrence.

The framework of this stack

  • Marketing automation/CRM — Hubspot
  • Data & analytics — Segment, Chartio, Google Analytics
  • Customer experience — Intercom
  • Collaboration and productivity — Hive

Key tools & platforms

Hive allows the team to see the status of all major marketing efforts and quickly make adjustments if needed. Plus, Hive integrates with all the other tools they use and gives a broader picture of what is happening across the whole marketing machine. Finally, Hive has processes set up for various key marketing tasks that help the team set standards for producing high-quality work.

Hubspot is the main engine behind Hive’s marketing machine. The company uses the Hubspot CRM to manage the sales pipeline and their marketing software to manage social media and email outreach.

Lawrence adds: “Given the tight integration between these two products, it is easy to coordinate between the marketing and sales departments. For the sales team, Hubspot does an excellent job collecting key data for all leads that make it easy to qualify leads. For the marketing team, Hubspot workflows allow us to automate many parts of the marketing process, freeing up our time to think about marketing strategy.”

Segment captures data from across every platform so that the marketing team is able to access it in all the tools they use, and employs the help of the engineering team setting up and monitoring. The marketing team imports all the data that Segment collects and imports into Chartio to gain insights and make better decisions to improve customer experience and the overall marketing strategy.

Intercom is the customer service engine that helps the company support the customer experience and keep them engaged. “Everything related to customer support is in one place, and it’s super easy to use,” says Lawrence, and adds that the “live chat function has been helpful in many instances in supporting customers as they consider whether or not to sign up for Hive. It’s also been key in keeping customers engaged through targeted email and in-app messaging.”

Submit your marketing stack

Want to share your marketing stack with fellow martech professionals? Here’s how:

  • Design a 16:9 (minimum 1920 x 1080 pixels) visual representation of your organization’s marketing stack, and submit it in a high-resolution PPTX, PDF or  JPEG format.
  • Please include the following details as applicable:
    • Include a paragraph or two that describes the rationale behind the way you’ve organized your stack and any guiding principles that you feel are important in its architecture.
    • Explicitly name as many tools and commercial products as possible. You may use some generic placeholders (e.g., CRM, DMP) for products that you do not wish to disclose, but fully detailed stacks offer more tangible visualizations for the martech industry.
    • Include a brief sentence for each key product that explains how or why your organization uses those tools.
    • Name and note the roles of key managers and/or departments involved with managing various components of your marketing stack.
  • Email your marketing stack and brief description to: [email protected].

As an extra incentive, every submitted stack will be automatically considered in the 2017 Stackie Awards competition, presented by Scott Brinker at the MarTech USA marketing technology conference in San Francisco, May 9–11, 2017. (We’ll be sharing additional information about the Stackie Awards in the coming weeks.)

By submitting your stack for consideration, you grant Third Door Media and its partners permission to republish and distribute the contents.


Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech. Staff authors are listed here.


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Martech is a conference for the growing community of senior-level, hybrid professionals who are both marketing-savvy and tech-savvy: marketing technologists, creative technologists, growth hackers, data scientists, and digital strategists.

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