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Marketing operations in any business should save costs while turning in profits. Businesses constantly analyse all marketing tools and technologies to ensure no redundancies and improved efficiencies.
A marketing tech stack audit systematically evaluates the tools and technologies to see if they achieve the expected results. Businesses can benefit from marketing tech stack audits in various ways. For example, the business saves time by auditing marketing tech stacks.
The audit looks for the most efficient marketing technologies and prioritises them while eliminating redundant ones in record time. Businesses want to also eliminate tool bloat and save money in their marketing operations. Marketing tech stack audit does all this among other things.
The Real Cost of Tech Stack Bloat
Tech stack bloat is a major concern for businesses the world over. Particularly it affects the operations of small and medium businesses. Many businesses end up accumulating more marketing tech and tools than they need to use.
This unnecessary accumulation has financial implications that affect small and medium businesses the most. From a time standpoint, IT professionals waste approximately 7 hours and 19 minutes weekly due to bloated tech applications, impacting the success of business operations.
As more businesses waste precious time, it leads to huge revenue wastage to the tune of 84 billion dollars annually in the U.S. alone. At the same time, businesses end up paying monthly or yearly subscriptions to marketing technologies and tools they don’t use.
Audit Preparation Framework
Auditing marketing technologies requires a prepared framework to choose the right solution that optimises marketing efforts and achieves business objectives. The framework has the guidelines businesses can use to audit the many marketing tools.
Marketing Tools Audit Steps
The business will take some steps to audit its stack of software effectively:
- Defining Marketing Objectives: The Audit should define what the preferred marketing tech stack should achieve for the business. It could be lead generation or optimising customer engagement. Anything outside the objective can be considered inefficient.
- Documents Marketing Tools: The business will list down all the marketing technologies currently in use. The business will also add a description of what each tool does.
- Gap Analysis: The business then compares each marketing technology against the marketing objective. This assessment reveals underutilised tools, inefficient ones, or techs with overlapping functionalities.
- Evaluating Marketing Tool Performance: The evaluation looks at the efficiencies of the selected marketing tools in achieving the objective. Also, it looks at seamless integration with other tools for smooth data flow and a unified marketing performance.
Core Tech Stack Assessment
The main reason why a business should assess the most important marketing tech stack solution is to achieve the best marketing effort results. Also, the assessment looks at the performance of the chosen marketing technology. The assessments focus on specific aspects of the marketing tool:
Marketing Effectiveness
After a business has selected a few marketing tools to use for marketing, it will check if each tool delivers on its promise. A good marketing tech should streamline marketing efforts and enhance productivity.
Seamless Integration
Also, the business wants marketing tools that work seamlessly with each other for a unified marketing effort. The systems should communicate effectively with each other to eliminate manual work.
Cost-Benefit Analysis
The main goal of purchasing marketing technologies is to optimise marketing and increase profits. The benefits should justify expenditure on subscription plans. For this reason, the business wants to ensure that it’s getting more benefits from paid marketing technologies.
Ease of Use
Another aspect to assess is the user experience of each marketing tech stack. The user interface should be intuitive and user-friendly.
Data Analytics
Most importantly, the tech stack should provide data on the progress of the marketing efforts. The data can then be used to make adjustments to optimise marketing for better results.
Tech Support
It’s also important to ensure the preferred marketing technologies have robust tech support in case of downtime. The tech support should help the business recover any data required to streamline business operations.
Scalability
As businesses grow, they deal with more potential customers and need marketing technologies to keep up. Therefore, the chosen marketing technologies should grow with the business.
Link Building Tool Optimization
Link building is acquiring hyperlinks from other websites or businesses to help a business reach a wider audience. It’s an important part of marketing efforts. The chosen stack of marketing tools should have a tool to optimise business visibility in the online space.
Many marketing agencies like the Seeders Agency provide link-building tools that optimise marketing efforts. As a business looks into its stack of marketing software, it has to ensure the marketing technologies have a tool for link building.
Tool Categories Deep Dive
The stack of marketing technologies has various tools that can be put into different categories:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools: These marketing technologies manage communications with customers and potential customers. Examples would include software solutions like Salesforce and HubSpot CRM.
- Marketing Campaigns Automation: These tools execute repetitive marketing tasks for efficient product and services marketing. They are ideal for email marketing.
- Content Management Systems (CMS): These tools are good for creating content about the business. Tools like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla can create and manage digital content about the business.
- SEO Tools: These tools help the business to become more visible on the internet. The tools use industry-specific keywords and backlinks to lead more visitors to the business website. Excellent examples of SEO tools include Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz Pro.
Integration Efficiency Analysis
A business needs all the tools above in its stack of marketing technologies. However, the tools should have seamless communication with each other for easy and efficient management. Even more important, the tools should maintain the same data across all platforms for consistency.
Cost Optimization Strategies
Since the main reason for a business to stack marketing tools is to cut costs while increasing profits, it’s essential for the business to take steps that reduce operations costs. Conducting regular audits of the tools is important to eliminate redundant tools.
Adopting multifunctional marketing tools remains the best option to cut costs while increasing marketing efforts. The business can also consider automating some functions of these marketing technologies.
Implementation Plan
Before opting for particular options, the business needs to define the marketing objectives. With clear objectives in mind, the business will constitute a team comprising marketing, IT, and finance department representatives. These people will work together for an efficient marketing campaign.
Measuring Success
The success of each marketing tool depends on a few factors. The business will look if a particular tool has increased customer acquisition while remaining cost-effective.
The business can also take feedback from various departments like IT and marketing to gauge the success of each marketing tool, among other things.
Conclusion
Marketing a business is important for its growth. The business can stack various marketing tools like CRM, CMS, and SEO tools for effective marketing. However, the business will assess the efficiency of each software in its stack to eliminate redundant ones thereby saving marketing costs.
An audit of all software solutions in a stack of marketing technologies helps the business eliminate not-frequently used technologies thereby saving up to $100k.
