If your team plans to focus on video, email marketing or email segmentation tools may not be the right choice for you at this time. Also, if your team does traditional (offline) marketing, like experiential events or trade shows, many digital marketing tools may not be of use to you right now.
In terms of team size, this is a consideration, as even automation tools require staff to set up and monitor them. For very small teams, you risk overloading your team by adding too many tools (or channels).
Are there tasks your team does manually that you’d like to automate? Think about your team and the channels they use (or want to use) the most, then think about their current workload. Are there any things that are done manually that would make sense to automate? This could include things like reporting, scheduling social media posts, collecting links for content marketing like internal newsletters, and even lead generation. There are many marketing automation tools on the market, and you can choose which one to use depending on your team’s needs.
A popular topic on the Sales Tech Stack page that also applies to marketing technology is integration. Choosing tools that work well together can save your team time and money. Merging sources into a report or dashboard instead of combining data sources, which takes more time to work with data than simply compiling it, can save you time and effort. For example, having data from Google Analytics and social listening tools automatically pull into Data Studio reports can save you time and effort by eliminating the need to create reports every week or month. This gives you more time to take action. There are several free marketing report templates you can use to streamline performance tracking.
So, when thinking about expanding your stack, think about what you have and what you need. For example, integrating your customer relationship management (CRM) system with your quoting software can save you time and reduce duplicate entry. That’s why Qwilr is designed to integrate with popular CRMs like Hubspot and Salesforce. How much time and money will you need to invest in adding or updating your tools? Advanced social media management or account-based marketing tools can take time to learn, implement, and manage. So if your team is already stretched thin, this may not be the right use of your budget, even if you have the money for it.
Think about your team’s time, too. If you don’t have the time to run the tool (if you can’t call in support), it won’t do you much good. So before you invest, think about your execution plan. Who will set up and manage your new tool? How long will it take to get it running properly and see a return on investment? How will you measure the success of your marketing program, and what metrics will be used to achieve this?Finally, think about how you and your leadership team evaluate the success of your marketing team. Are you measuring lead generation volume?If this is the case, improving your B2B lead generation tools could make a lot of sense. In a small business or startup environment, the metrics are quite different than in a large enterprise. For the former, website traffic may be a key success metric, while for the latter, it may not be as important.
