First off – what’s a marketing stack? It’s the collection of tech tools you use to handle your business’ marketing. Unsurprisingly, with lots of different competing tools, your stack can get out of control and you might be spending too much money on tools that do lots of the same things.
We’re talking traditional software, social media tools, CRM and analytics – you catch our drift.
It’s really useful to visualise the overlaps, gaps and time you’re spending with your different tools, so you can strike out any inefficiencies and get rid of tools that aren’t working for you, or find a few new ones that do more stuff.
Modern marketing is pretty impossible to carry out without having some tech at your disposal, so having the best tools to help you will give you an advantage.
What do Marketing Stacks help with?
There’s a whole load of things stacks can help out with:
Project Management – tech can help you to keep account of what your business is spending money on, what’s going on, who’s doing what and alert you to any elements that you need to keep an eye on or might be creating inefficiencies.
- Trello, Asana, CoSchedule
Insights – you can gather lots of incredibly valuable data for your business from certain tools that interact with and collect insight from your customers, such as CRMs etc.
- SalesForce, HubSpot, InfusionSoft
Social Media and Content – keep on top of what your audience is saying online with social listening, see how your content is getting on, optimise it for SEO and post it easily across platforms.
- Hootsuite, SproutSocial, Buffer
Analysis – generating stats from key metrics that you’ve identified for your business can help you to do some analysis and inform your decisions.
- Google Analytics, KissMetrics, Adobe Analytics
Journeys – learning about how your customers move along on their buyer journey through customer service tools; what influences them, exit points, abandoned carts gives you lots of info about how to build your campaigns to create the best customer experience that you can.
- ZenDesk, FreshDesk
Keeping Calm and Control of your Stack
As you can tell, there’s loads of marketing tools you could be using for your business. And the chances are that you’re not going to be an expert in all of them, or have the time to flick through tens of software packages – not to mention the cost!
It’s worth doing a regular audit of all of the tools that you’re using to make sure that they’re actually adding value to your business and you’re not just wasting lots of money.
Enlisting the help of marketing agencies (hello!) or freelancers who can give you some expertise with some of your marketing tools is a good shout too. They can show you how to use your tools in better ways or ways that you might not have even thought of to help you make the most of them and save yourself time, hassle and money.
If you want more help and advice about good marketing tools for your business, or you’d like DOWO to take over a few, get in touch today.