As a marketing agency, we don’t sell software, we sell solutions. But a big part of modern digital marketing involves software, and by extension making smart choices about which software tools you use.
I’ll be honest, finding the best-of-breed software product for a specific task at hand is tedious and time-consuming. But the smart and cost-efficient use of marketing technology, or martech, is a big part of who we are as a company and the services we provide.
The guys over at the Chief Marketing Technologist blog have been keeping track through the years of just how big the marketing technology scene is. They say that in 2026, there were over 15,000 martech solutions out there, up from 350 when Salween Group opened its doors in 2012.
Growth in the space has been phenomenal, to put it mildly.
Let me share what software tools we are using right now, both internally and for our clients. Hopefully, this will save you some time, some money, and some pain.
WordPress
WordPress is a content management system (CMS), basically the software behind your website. We consider a brand’s website to be its most important digital asset, so we’ll discuss this first.
A CMS is used for websites that publish, well, content. That can be blogs, news, or a catalogue of widgets for sale online.
WordPress powers more than 40% of all websites online today and commands a respectable 60% market share of the CMS space. It is such a big deal in what we do as an agency that I have written a separate article on it here.
Over the years, we’ve worked with some pretty shocking legacy systems in place at some Fortune 500 companies. We’ve also seen the trend where IT over-engineers the brand website with some very sexy vibe coding and the latest software libraries, creating sites that marketing can’t touch. That then requires an IT ticket to get anything updated, let alone integrated, and the site gathers dust until the next rebrand cycle.
We’ve been through the pain, so you don’t have to. Trust us. Go with WordPress.
We incorporate hosting in our Managed Web Services offering and host dozens of client sites at Pressidium, a dedicated WordPress hosting provider. If you run a WordPress website, working with a hosting provider that specialises in WordPress is a smart way to go. We also have good things to say about WP Engine and Pantheon.
We also use WordPress to create landing pages for our Managed Web Services clients, allowing them to launch targeted campaigns at the speed of marketing.
If we don’t manage your site and you need landing pages for your campaigns, we can set up a subdomain such as go.yourbrand.com and publish landing pages via a WordPress instance there. That is a great solution for companies where access to the brand website is limited for compliance or security reasons (it happens), or whose brand websites are managed by teams that are not nimble enough to meet the modern marketer’s needs. A subdomain specific to marketing is an answer.
That’s also a great use case for tools like Framer if you want to try in-house builds for landing pages. Unbounce is also good for that and has been around forever.
Google Analytics and Search
At a minimum, a website should have Google Analytics and Google Search Console installed. GA and GSC, respectively. They are both free. Consider that table stakes from a marketing analytics standpoint.
GA and GSC are tools that provide insights about visitors to your website and landing pages, and how they found you.
The number of users visiting your website, sessions, time on page, top pages, top sources of traffic, etc., are all answered by GA.
GSC tells you which organic search terms led them to your website.
Together, those tools are part of the suite we use for search engine optimisation (SEO), an ongoing process to improve your visibility in organic search, and answer engine optimisation (AEO). Being able to be easily found in search or AI answers is a pillar of digital marketing.
For us, SEO/AEO involves both making sure your website is technically accessible to search engines and making sure the content on the site, be it static copy or articles, is search engine-friendly and answers users’ needs. That is called on-page SEO.
Off-page SEO is the stuff that drives traffic to the site or drives awareness such as PR, social media, and people sharing links to the awesome content on your site.
Marketing Automation
If you have the budget and the resources (or need our help), the step up from GA and GSC is a marketing automation platform (MAP).
The key feature there is the collection of first-party data; you can track individual visitors to your website and see how they interact with your owned properties.
Depending on your tooling, quite a lot of data is available. I won’t touch on PDPA or GDPR here because it’s too big a topic (and I’m not a lawyer), but the simple answer is to always seek consent to process a person’s data.
If you are on a budget, ActiveCampaign is a tool we have used both with clients and internally for years. It provides email marketing, marketing automation, website tracking, forms, and a simple CRM in one easy-to-use platform.
If you have the budget and resources to manage it properly, HubSpot Marketing Hub is the gold standard in the MAP space. It’s what we use along with Sales Hub.
The starter versions are an alternative to ActiveCampaign, but HubSpot has signalled a move upmarket, so today I’d only recommend it for well-resourced teams. It is expensive and requires at least a part-time admin.
I am loath to mention Salesforce. My excuse is that by the time you read this, they will have acquired yet another marketing software solution, bolted it on to their CRM, and called it “agentic” something.
I can say we’ve had positive experiences with both the ActiveCampaign and HubSpot Marketing integrations with Salesforce.
Databox
Data is at the heart of digital marketing. By its very nature, digital marketing is measurable, and data is used to measure your campaigns’ efficacy and optimise them.
To make it easier to digest the multiple sources of data available, we run all our client data through Databox.
With over 130 out-of-the-box integrations and the ability to create our own with their API tools, we migrated to Databox because it’s more focused on providing true Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics than just pretty agency reports.
We still generate pretty reports, but they are just more insightful and actionable now.
Databox normalises our data, allows us to create and maintain our own datasets, and has a solid MCP server so we can run deep cross-channel analysis with our in-house LLM tools.
Personally, I use it daily.
ClickUp
No martech stack would be complete without a project and task management tool. This is probably the software choice that haunts me the most at night (not really, but that sounds foreboding).
Your project management tool defines your workflows and how you interact with others in your organisation. By its very nature, it requires universal buy-in. Your whole team needs to adopt it and use it religiously.
What do we use? ClickUp.
For years, we used Asana, but as we grew, we needed the features only available in their enterprise plan, and the commercials didn’t work for us.
We moved to ClickUp, and it has been awesome. You can customise it and then lock it down, enforcing standardised processes and workflows.
Like the CRM and MAP space, project management software is another place where you’re spoiled for choice, but once again, that magic “best price to features to the ease-of-use ratio” is what guides our choices. ClickUp ticked the boxes.
Claude
This one might change by the time you read this, but our in-house AI tooling is designed to be LLM-agnostic.
But we are on Claude for Teams now, and our team members use the full desktop suite.
Not breaking new ground here, but we have created a library of custom skills and manage our “context” files in repositories on GitHub.
We primarily use Claude for research, competitive analysis, and data analytics. We also use it to automate a lot of our internal operations processes.
What we are not using it for, for the most part, is writing copy. Beyond human-in-the-loop (HITL), for content creation, we prefer human-at-the-wheel. The world doesn’t need more AI slop disguised as thought leadership.
You can read more in our AI Transparency and Responsibility Statement.
The Rest
What else do we use? SaaS sprawl is real. Particularly for a tech geek like me, the temptation to try one more tool or get one more subscription is hard to fight.
I now keep a list in ClickUp with all our SaaS subscriptions, monthly cost, and renewal date. I’ve become quite brutal at renewal time. If a tool is not contributing, it is out.
And we still spend roughly $800 per month per team member on SaaS!
Here are other tools we are paying for, in no particular order:
- Planable: Our social media management tool. A good feature set and granular permissions allow us to give seats to our clients where we co-manage their social channels.
- Wistia. Video hosting. I have another article in the works about why you should not host your corporate videos on YouTube. Wistia and Vimeo are the alternatives we suggest. Vimeo is blocked in Indonesia, Wistia is not, so we use Wistia for our website (we do a lot of work for Indonesian clients) and suggest it for anyone who needs to be seen there.
- Vimeo. Cheaper than Wistia. This is your best choice if you don’t care about your videos being seen in Indonesia.
- Muck Rack. A PR tool. Media monitoring, outreach, alerts, and reporting in a slick interface. Not cheap by any measure, but worth it if you are paid to do PR.
- Grammarly. Multi-platform spell check. We are communicators, and we are humans who make mistakes. We’ve been subscribers since they were in beta. Love it.
- Flockler. Social media walls. Allows you to aggregate social accounts and curate the content for embedding on websites or screens. Great price/feature ratio.
- Adobe Creative Cloud. We are an Adobe CC shop, from Ps to Ai to Pr to Ae to Au. You have to be. It is what it is, and you pay for it. You pay A LOT for it.
- Riverside.fm. More of a video production tool, we use Riverside to prerecord podcasts and vlogs for later post-production.
- DataForSEO: API/MCP server that provides SEO, AEO, SERP, backlink and marketing data to our internal tooling.
- Exa: Web search API built for agents. Better than Claude/ChatGPT for deep search. Used by our internal tooling.
- Apify: Technically a marketplace for agents, we use it specifically for web scraping by our internal tooling.
- Zapier. No-code glue that binds otherwise unconnected web apps with triggers and actions. Things like “send a message to a Slack channel when a sales enquiry form is submitted”. Very useful tool.
I mentioned at the start that we don’t sell software, we sell solutions. Through the years, we have been agency partners of a few of the products mentioned here, and if we got commissions through any of our partnerships, we transparently passed those back as cost savings.
We’ve unwound that so we can be a truly objective partner to our clients, able to offer the right tools for the job, transparently and without bias.
Do you have a favourite tool you think would help us work smarter? Or want more details on our experiences with any of the software mentioned above? Drop us a line, we’d love to hear from you.
