Inbound marketing is a notoriously slow burn. It can take 6-9 months—and in some cases, even longer—to start to see the results of an inbound investment. Although patience is certainly a virtue and the long-term results speak for themselves, waiting isn’t the only thing that you can do.
Your martech stack plays a critical role in your inbound marketing efforts, and when properly optimized, it can be the fuel that ignites your growth. The right tools are the backbone of any successful inbound strategy, notably your:
Without these tools, inbound marketing is nearly impossible, but just having technology isn’t good enough. Without being strategic about the tools you use, your growth will be limited in scope and scale.
There is an infinite supply of marketing tools and new technology in the market these days. Although different tools can be fantastic at serving unique and specialized purposes, technology consolidation has a number of benefits, including:
Although it may be a daunting project for any organization to make changes to its marketing tech stack, the short-term pain and heavy lifting will ultimately pay off in the long run with more scalable marketing systems.
Here are six steps your team can take to consolidate your inbound marketing tech stack.
Regardless of the maturity of your organization, you likely have some tools in your stack. Create a spreadsheet or a list of all of the tools you use. Include your CRM, CMS, email marketing platform, marketing automation platform, reporting and analytics tools, webinar platforms, and anything else you access digitally.
You can use our free martech stack audit template (or create your own!) to accelerate the process. Once you can clearly see all of the tools that your team uses, begin collecting information about each tool in a spreadsheet, such as:
Now that you can clearly see the purpose, cost, total features, and the value of all of the tools in your martech stack, consider your needs. Which are mission-critical to your organization? Common needs for a martech stack will include:
Other needs specific to your organization might be employee engagement platforms, live chat software, sales enablement platforms, webinar tools, prospecting tools, and more.
As you gathered your needs, you’ve likely identified gaps. Are you missing social tools? Or maybe your team has an email marketing platform, but the automation tools are not sophisticated enough for their needs.
If you are using our martech audit template, write add the following information to the overlap analysis tab:
Analyze the “Martech Stack Overview” and “Overlap Analysis” tabs you filled out, and start to include your recommendations for consolidation, elimination, or keeping tools currently in your stack. There may be overlap, but some overlap is expected, and even important. For example, Google Analytics and Google Search console will be of high value for reporting and analytics, even if you use a tool like HubSpot with its own reporting.
Now that you have a better idea of where the gaps and overlaps are in your current martech stack, take into consideration the kind of maintenance that is in place now and what any future changes might require.
Questions to ask yourself include:
Next, it’s time to make decisions and create a plan. Decide which tools can be consolidated, eliminated, or added, and then prepare for it! You won’t be ready to turn systems on or off until you have a solid plan for any necessary migrations.
A seamless migration is an important step to make sure no data is lost, reporting remains accurate, and systems don’t end up breaking down and causing headaches later on. Be sure to have a plan for the following:
This is the fun part: Once you’ve planned, it’s time to press the big red button! Well, OK—in most cases, it’s more like a seven-tabbed spreadsheet mapping properties, manual or automatic data migration, and then lots and lots of quality assurance.
Once you feel confident with your new tech stack and things are ready to roll, it’s important to take the time both at the beginning of the process and, in the months after, to test for gaps. Testing for gaps can look like ensuring that your CRM is sending the most up-to-date information to your email marketing tool, or that your reporting and analytics tools are displaying the correct source data. Testing will vary widely depending on the tools you are using, but it’s important that someone is explicitly responsible for keeping track of any potential errors or gaps between your tools.
Inbound marketing is a slow-burning fire. It starts as just a few embers before growing into a lead-generating blaze. By taking the first step towards a consolidated and frictionless martech stack, you’re adding that extra kindling or fuel to start (and keep!) the inbound fire blazing.
If you haven’t done so already, you can download our free martech stack audit template to get started right away, or to hold onto for later. This download is a Google Sheet that you can save to your drive, adapt to your needs, and help make the transition to a consolidated tech stack an easier lift.