Building a better martech stack with social data
Social media is more than a marketing channel. It’s where trends are born, news stories break and culture evolves. This cultural dynamism makes social a powerful force, shaping how consumers see the world—and your brand.
But it’s more than a cultural epicenter. Social media is also a real-time feedback loop where customers research, recommend and react to brands. According to The Sprout Social Index™ 2025, 93% of consumers believe it’s crucial for brands to keep pace with online culture. Ignoring this expectation means missing out on critical insights that could define your relevance in the market.
So, how do you unlock this potential? By integrating social media data into your martech stack. In this guide, we’ll explore the fundamentals of marketing technology stacks. We also break down the role social media plays in driving smarter strategies, deeper customer connections and better business outcomes.
Understanding the modern martech stack
Before we get into the unique role social data plays in marketing technology, let’s start with the basics. Here’s everything you need to know about the modern martech stack.
What is a martech stack?
A marketing technology stack, or martech stack, is the suite of tools and technologies marketers use to attract, engage and retain customers. From lead generation and email marketing to social media management and SEO, these tools streamline workflows, automate processes and provide critical performance insights.
A good martech stack is in a constant state of iteration. As the technology landscape evolves, marketing data and associated metrics become more vast and fragmented. Maintaining an up-to-date marketing technology stack unifies these insights, setting teams up to drive smarter, more impactful marketing strategies.
Why marketing technology is important
Marketing technology sets your team up to work smarter, not harder. By streamlining routine efforts—like email campaigns or social media reporting—martech stacks free up valuable time for marketers to focus on strategy and innovation.
Beyond process automation, martech stacks provide the foundation for data-driven decision-making. With tools that collect and analyze performance metrics, marketers can gain actionable insights into campaign effectiveness and customer behavior. These insights inform smarter strategies, ensuring that every marketing effort is optimized for impact.
Perhaps most importantly, martech enhances how brands engage with their audience. By enabling personalized experiences and seamless customer service, it transforms interactions into relationships. In a competitive landscape, this ability to connect meaningfully isn’t just an advantage—it’s a necessity for staying ahead.
Key components of martech stacks
The makeup of your martech stack depends on your organization’s unique needs and priorities, but certain tools are foundational across industries. Here are some key components often included in a martech stack:
- Marketing automation software: Streamlines repetitive tasks like lead nurturing, freeing teams to focus on strategic initiatives.
- Customer relationship management (CRM) tools: Centralizes customer data and provides insights into how marketing efforts influence sales outcomes.
- Content management systems (CMS): Powers websites and blogs, serving as the digital front door for customer engagement.
- Email marketing platforms: Enables email creation, automation and analytics to nurture leads and stay connected with audiences.
- Social media management tools: Simplifies social engagement, monitors brand mentions and provides insights into platform performance.
- Search engine optimization (SEO) tools: Assists with keyword research, rank tracking and backlink analysis to enhance organic visibility.
- Advertising technology: Covers tools for search engine marketing (SEM), display ads and other paid channels to drive traffic.
- Analytics platforms: Delivers critical insights into website performance and marketing ROI to guide data-driven decisions.
- Digital asset management (DAM) systems: Organizes and stores digital assets, making it easy to find and reuse content across campaigns.
Marketing technology users
Marketing technology stacks serve a wide range of users, both directly and indirectly.
Marketers are the primary direct users, relying on various tools within the stack for tasks like campaign execution, automation and performance analysis. Sales and customer service teams also use martech tools, leveraging insights to build customer relationships, address inquiries and improve day-to-day workflows.
Indirect users, on the other hand, include anyone who benefits from the data and capabilities martech stacks provide—and that’s just about everyone.
From your c-suite leaders who rely on insights for strategic decisions to your customers who enjoy personalized service and seamless interactions, the impact of a martech stack is far-reaching. By connecting teams and creating a better customer experience, martech stacks act as a shared resource, delivering value far beyond the marketing department.
The role of social media management in martech stacks
Social media supports every stage of your marketing funnel. Whether someone is just discovering your brand, making their first purchase or simply asking a question, they’re doing it on social.
Each of these touchpoints creates valuable customer information that can answer your most important questions about how to manage and expand your business.
To truly understand the value of your social data, you need to think beyond inbox management and post scheduling. While those tools are important, they scratch the surface of what can be done with a social media management tool.
Connect with your ideal customer faster
About one-third of all consumers anticipate making more purchases from social networks in 2025. This rises to nearly half among Gen Z.
This creates new opportunities for marketers to achieve their goals faster than ever before. Think about it: With traditional advertising methods like print or radio, you only have one shot to get it right. When your ad goes live, there’s no tweaking. You have to wait until the results roll in.
With the right social media management tool, you can optimize campaigns with real-time insights from your fans. Sprout customer Papa John’s does this by tracking social conversations and engagement around specific offerings, like their Cheesy Burger Pizza. This additional layer of analysis helps them narrow in on exactly what’s working so they can repeat their successes across global markets.
Findings like these can do more than just optimize your social strategy. Social data can be applied across channels to make better use of your existing investments. With social data, you can:
- Use messaging that’s driven higher engagement to inform email nurture campaigns and paid search headlines.
- Test new brand creative to gauge audience response before making website updates or rolling out new print campaigns.
- Dig into audience conversations to pinpoint what your fans will want next from your products or services.
Through social, businesses have direct, real-time access to their customers that provides a clear understanding of their sentiments, opinions and needs. Putting this information at the foundation of your tech stack can do more than just fine-tune your marketing strategy. It can transform your product, support and sales strategies as well.
Tap into the power of social commerce
Social has been a powerhouse for brand discovery for quite some time, but until recently, the path to purchase has been disjointed. The number of clicks needed to navigate from a social profile to a company’s online checkout experience created too much friction in the buyer’s journey, leaving money on the table.
Now, thanks to new developments in several of your customers’ favorite networks, social is more than a showroom. It’s a storefront, and people are buying. According to our latest Index report, 81% of consumers say social drives them to make spontaneous purchases multiple times a year, with 28% making impulse buys at least once a month.
To lean into this new sales opportunity, social, customer care and merchandising teams will need to adjust their workflows. Depending on your technology infrastructure, this can be a relatively easy process.
For example, with Sprout’s fully integrated social commerce solutions, social marketers and support agents can access the context needed to respond to incoming commerce-related social messages in just a few clicks. Additionally, by leveraging Sprout’s influencer marketing tools, brands can amplify their social commerce strategy, driving direct sales through both brand accounts and influencer partnerships
Provide customer support that drives loyalty
Social media is the fastest and most direct way to connect with a brand. Whether they’re sharing feedback on a product or reaching out with a customer service question, people turn to social to be heard—and they expect responses quickly. In fact, nearly three-quarters of consumers expect a response within 24 hours or sooner.
That doesn’t create a single new channel for customer service—it creates multiple micro-channels. Each social network has its own way for users to interact with another person or business.
Between DMs, comments, tags and reviews, there are a multitude of ways a customer can reach out for help on an issue. Consolidating these interactions into one stream is only half the battle. To get an accurate view of a customer’s experience with your brand, data must flow bidirectionally between your social media management solution, your CRM and your customer care platform.
Transforming your martech stack into a CX stack
Putting your customer at the center of every interaction builds stronger, more meaningful relationships that drive long-term success.
While martech stacks are often viewed as tools for streamlining workflows or speeding up outcomes, their true power lies in creating seamless, personalized customer experiences.
Social media plays a vital role here because it offers real-time insights into customer preferences, behaviors and needs—data that can transform your marketing technology into a customer-centric powerhouse.
When integrated into your martech stack—especially alongside CRM tools—social data allows you to move beyond guesswork by revealing what matters most to your audience at every stage of their journey. For example, Sprout’s integration with Salesforce makes it easy to consolidate and leverage social data to inform personalization strategies, fine-tune campaign targeting and ensure consistent, authentic connections across channels.
By embedding social insights into your tech stack, you can bridge gaps in the customer experience, delivering unified interactions that resonate and build loyalty.
How to build a robust martech stack with social media at the core
In 2024, an estimated 5.17 billion people engaged with an average of seven social networks monthly. Each interaction contributes subtle but valuable data points. To turn this overwhelming firehose of information into actionable insights, you need an integrated social media management solution.
Work with your social team to understand their priorities and pain points when it comes to software. Once you’ve surfaced their needs and ideas for the future, you can take what you’ve learned to your colleagues in IT to better assess what’s possible.
Here are some questions you can review as a group to start reorienting your thinking around social data. This will help you clarify your goals while laying the groundwork for more collaborative tech buying initiatives in the future:
- What is the problem you’re trying to solve? People don’t reassemble their tech stacks because they want to. They do it because there is an underlying problem to be solved. Get clear on exactly how your team can benefit from an integrated social media management solution, whether that’s a more accurate view of your sales funnel, share of voice or customer affinity. This will help your IT team better understand your priorities and requirements.
- How can our social media management platform work with our existing technology infrastructure? You may know which tools other departments are using, but do you know how they’re used? Understanding other team’s technology processes can help you identify potential data constraints when assessing integration options.
- Are there any data security or legal concerns we need to be aware of? Marketing software purchases need an additional layer of scrutiny given the personal user information they store. Once you’ve identified how you’d like data to flow between systems, work with IT to identify any potential compliance or security risks this data flow might present.
- Who in our network can we reach out to for additional qualitative input? The best way to validate a new software provider is to pressure test them against the experiences of those in your professional network. As you’re creating a short list of providers to vet, reach out to peers who have made similar buying decisions in the past.
- When during the buying process should we regroup? There’s no need to involve every stakeholder in each step of the purchase process. That being said, the purchasing process can differ based on the provider. Work with your team to come up with a list of scenarios or keywords that can be marked as flags for IT assessment or involvement.
Software marketplaces, like AWS Marketplace, can simplify the buying process by offering pre-vetted providers and flexible purchasing options. These platforms streamline procurement while allowing teams to adjust plans, users or features as their needs evolve.
Sprout Social’s availability on AWS Marketplace offers these same advantages, providing businesses with a scalable, secure and flexible solution.
Additionally, Sprout Social’s seamless integration with the broader AWS ecosystem empowers businesses to unlock new efficiencies and optimize their tech stack. For organizations already leveraging AWS services, Sprout becomes a natural extension—enhancing social media workflows, driving collaboration and positioning your team for long-term success in an increasingly connected digital landscape.
