LocalGov Drupal and Marketing Technology

What is MarTech?

Simply put, it’s tools for marketers that help them do their job better, typically via automation and execution of routine tasks. From A/B testing tools to automated lead generation, communications tools to streamlining advertising budgets.

Open-source MarTech

We are currently working with two tools, Matomo and Mautic, which provide us with strong insights into the people who engage with us online.

Matomo is an open-source, drop-in replacement for tools such as Google Analytics. It’s interesting for organisations concerned with user privacy. You can self-host, so you have 100% data sovereignty and make the rules.

Mautic is a marketing automation tool that allows you to filter your contacts into lists of leads, execute campaigns, collect data and much more. Again, it is open source and you can self-host, plus both products have GDPR compliant defaults.

How is this relevant to LocalGov Drupal?

We don’t need to tell you about analytics, you might be using Google Analytics already Matomo is a drop-in replacement that provides far stronger data security.

Mautic is more interesting. Local authorities exist to serve the public. This requires strong communication efforts and platforms like Mautic exist to make this an automated process that is still personal. Notify residents about efforts to stop fly-tipping, changes to bin routines or council tax, requests for participation in schemes and studies; there are many messages local authorities need to talk about. Mautic is a tool you can utilise to reach, engage and nurture relationships with the people in their areas.

The product provides a range of channels - landing pages, dynamic content, file downloads, emails, embeddable forms, tweets, SMS messages and more. By identifying individuals who interact with your content as contacts, Mautic can build a picture of their engagement with you. As well as tracking their engagement with Mautic assets directly, it provides tracking code you can embed in other applications such as Drupal.

There is also a complex Campaign Builder allowing you to create automated marketing campaigns that execute without you on a schedule or when triggered by defined actions.

You can segment your contacts into meaningful groups, score their engagements and react when they carry out certain activities. For example, when a contact gains a certain number of engagement points you might push them to a CRM, or when they enter a certain segment because they engaged with a particular asset you could email a team.

Mautic also helps you manage your Twitter presence. It's Twitter integration allows you to get a better understanding of not only who you’re talking to, but what they want, allowing you to deliver your messages in an optimised way and get better response rates.

How do I get started?

One of the great things about both products is that they run on the exact same stack as Drupal, so if your team or agency is already well-versed in hosting Drupal, then adding Matomo and Mautic into the mix is fairly straightforward.

They also both have existing Drupal modules. Assuming you have a Drupal website you can go ahead and plug them in. After that, it’s just configuration and training.