Let’s play a game, imagine that you are a Carpenter. For the record, I imagine you are a super talented Carpenter.
Since your talents are in demand in the current housing boom, you have just been hired by a local home builder to be his finish carpenter. The person who brings the beauty, the person who brings that specific attention to detail that makes the homeowner cry when they first see their dream come to fruition.
Congratulations, salutations, and whatever else people say in these times of joy.
You show up to your first day of work feeling good, looking good, ready to change some lives or at least some wood. Chop, Chop, you quickly realize that you will be a lot busier than you could have ever imagined.
You arrive at the first job, ready to climb this mountain of work.
Dumbfounded and confounded, like a nightmare you can’t wake up from, you realize you don’t have any of your tools. No tape measure, table saw, or sander, you are simply left with some hand tools.
Being the confident person you are, you get right to work, trying not to be phased by your lack of resources. As the hour’s pass, you realized you are rapidly becoming behind on your schedule. This would be frustrating enough alone, to say the least, but also you may or may not be the laughing stock of the job site.
The day ends, and you have only accomplished a fraction of the work you wanted to get done. Tomorrow you will fall even farther behind. Frustration and stress come at you like a bullet, and you rush your work, and the quality suffers because of it.
The moral of the story here if I can so eloquently spell it out for you is that even with an army of the most talented people on your staff, without the right tools, you are already putting them at a disadvantage and setting everyone involved for output that lacks quality. However, with the right tools, you can accomplish anything, break glass ceilings, or if you are a carpenter build wooden ones.
What is a marketing stack?
It’s the missing tools in the story above. It’s the software or technology that your company uses to execute, analyze and improve your marketing. This includes everything from your contacts to your email and social media.
Most companies whether they have heard the term or not have a marketing stack already. Think about the CRM system you use for your contacts or the email platform you use at your company. These are prime examples of software or systems in your marketing stack.
While marketing stacks are unique to the wants and needs of your company, in full transparency, you can check out what makes up our marketing stack here at BoldThink.
Social Media – We all know at this point that social media should be a big part of your brand. You know the usual players here, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. To maximize your time and energy we highly suggest investing in platforms like Hootsuite to post and control your social media.
Digital Ads– Paid Search is a huge part of every digital marketing strategy and isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. We use a few tools depending on where the ads are going. Google Adwords, Facebook Ads Manager, and Adespresso to name a few.
Website – Depending on how complex and what you use your website for the software and programs you use can widely differ. For us, we use WordPress for our CMS or content management system. We also use Google Analytics to track what’s happening on the website. Using tools like Crazy Egg you can track heat maps and see where people are clicking, and what is making them leave your site.
SEO – Personally I like when leads come to me, instead of the other way around. SEO is a huge part of making that happen. We use a few tools to help us with SEO like SEM Rush, Yoast SEO, and Google Analytics.
Contacts – A CRM or customer relationship management platform will work wonders for you. From simply organizing all your contacts and vital information on them to automating your prospecting and sales contacts. We use Infusionsoft, and it works great for us, but do your research for this is one area because there are plenty of options, either specific to your industry or more of a “one solution fits all” CRM.
Email – This one is vital to almost every company. We use a combination of our CRM Infusionsoft’s built in email system, and others like Mailchimp and Constant Contact for clients.
Project Management – We are big believers in Basecamp to manage and coordinate our projects. Other tools like Slack are great for communication, and Google Docs for sharing and editing documents.
In general, a marketing strategy is about having the right tools and coordinating them to make things more effective and easier to manage. A marketing stack is how you get the strategy working. It’s important to review how your tools are working and working together continuously. If something isn’t working, try something else until you find the stack that works best for you and your organization.
