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Now more than ever technology is playing a fundamental part in allowing marketing teams to operate effectively, even on limited budgets.
Identify the business, sales and marketing goals
As you’d imagine, we’re always going to advocate starting with the problem and desired outcome, rather than recommending a product and setting about how it can be put to use. Business goals are likely to be fairly top level - “win more clients”, “retain customers”, etc. - so practically it makes sense to dig a little deeper at the outset, and define more specific sales or marketing outcomes, such as:
- Establish a brand identity around a key topic
- Build awareness with little or no budget
- Transition from founder-led sales to a scalable engine
- Move opportunities through the pipeline faster
- Increase conversion rates
- Improve incremental business from existing customers
Lock in on a connected portfolio of tools
Scott Brindler’s MarTech Landscape has evolved to thousands of tools, with huge overlap across individual brands. The largest players such as Salesforce and HubSpot quickly build out their feature sets to overlap with any startup providers that may have spotted a niche in their ecosystem, but rarely do this as well as the original innovator (and usually charge more). This means there’s always a balance between one-stop-shops (already fully integrated) and knitting together best-of-breed options.
Below is the collection of tools and technologies we’ve used with clients over the last couple of years. Generally speaking, we prefer to stick with one or two products for each use case, having tested a much broader range before settling on these as the best for most scenarios. At the centre sits the CRM (our preference is HubSpot despite its rising costs), and typically everything is integrated natively where possible, or through Make (which, in our view, offers far more flexibility than Zapier).
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Integrate where appropriate
We’ve mentioned Make, but it’s worth noting that in most cases the first integrations are usually best built into Slack. Virtually every marketing or sales technology will be offering Slack alerts out of the box, and it’s ridiculously simple to set these up and begin automating communications between the tech stack and employees, in the feeds where they are operating already.
The effect of this is more than just improved information sharing, as it also serves to shift the culture towards one where these technologies are seen as a core part of processes, workflows, activities and tasks, setting a rhythm for the business and an easily accessible data feed.
It’s also worth saying that you don’t need to integrate everything just because you can. Integrations should solve specific problems, improve accuracy, or reduce human workload, and they shouldn’t be so complicated that maintaining them becomes a critical point of failure.
