Start Your Digital Marketing Transformation: 3 Essential Steps
e talked a lot on our blog about?what happens when you take on a marketing transformation . Companies that have tried to scale up marketing internally without success have shifted their way of thinking and realized the benefits of?building a scalable team with fractional marketing. ?From there, it’s easier to align marketing talent with strategy and flex as needed to fit a changing market.
But that’s only one part of the equation. True marketing transformation involves a digital marketing transformation as well, one that’s focused on having the right technologies at the foundation of your strategy for long-term growth and flexibility.
Here are the steps you should take to get your tech stack to be scalable, connected, and optimized for ease-of-use.
1) Choose established technologies for your foundational tech stack.
At Marketri, we’re all about innovation. It’s great to see new MarTech hitting the market every day—but if you’re a middle-market company that’s primed for growth, is it really worth the risk?
There are times to take a chance on a new marketing technology. But as you build your foundation for the future—especially if you’re in high-growth mode—a more established tech stack is the way to go (at least for the essentials).
New technology is buggy, feature-light, and not guaranteed to receive the continuous funding needed to improve. Instead, choose the technology you know will be there with you for your next step. Here are some of the essentials we recommend (and what you should avoid).
Marketing Automation Platform & Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Email marketing is the lifeblood of lead nurturing. When you get new leads, you want to keep in touch and stay top-of-mind, even if they’re not ready to buy. And a marketing automation platform is the best way to make that happen.
Many companies choose platforms like Constant Contact or Mailchimp for their email marketing. But these may not be the most?scalable?options for middle-market companies focused on getting new leads. These platforms don’t always allow for the complex automation you need to keep in touch with leads at different stages of the buyer journey via:
When choosing a marketing automation platform, it’s tempting to look solely at price, but a well-established platform like Hubspot ?(our favorite) is a great starting point with flexible pricing options that can grow with you. It’s also a CRM (customer relationship management) system, which means sales and marketing teams can work together in one place to manage their leads and customers.
CMS (Content Management System)
A CMS is just a fancy term for the back-end of your website. If you’re a founder, you’ve probably got many skills—but web developer likely isn’t one of them. As a result, there’s a good chance you’ll hire a developer to build your website. And if you’re like most people, you’ll trust that the developer will choose the right content management system to build it on.
More than likely, your website developer?will?choose the right CMS—for them. But whether or not it’s the right back-end for your ongoing needs is another story.
As your company grows and you have more people on board, it’s helpful to have the ability to update your website on demand. When services change, when new products are added, when you need to post a job opening—all of these things require website updates. And if those updates must go through your developer, it can quickly become costly and time-consuming.
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There are other options for backend development, but in our experience, WordPress + Elementor or Divi is the simplest and most user-friendly solution for small businesses. WordPress is the standard in web development, so there is plenty of help available for those who need tutorials on navigating its menus and settings. Elementor and Divi are both visual builders, tools added to WordPress that give you drag and drop capabilities so you can make changes to your website without having to touch any code.
So don’t let your developer build on an unfamiliar or custom CMS. Having your developer set up your website on WordPress with one of these visual builders in place will save you a ton of headache in the long term.
Project Management
Finally, an essential technology for marketing is undoubtedly project management. This includes tools like Asana, Teamwork, and Basecamp. They help you keep track of deadlines, to-dos, and progress on projects. They also make it easy for team members to communicate with each other and stay up-to-date on the status of a project. And many modern tools can even integrate with your tech to make it easy to manage everything in one place.
As a marketing firm, we use these tools every day to manage our campaigns and projects . And we’ve found them to be invaluable in helping us stay organized and on track. Running your marketing department like an agency can be a game-changer for your business. It allows you to focus on your core competencies and outsource the rest. And it gives you the structure and processes you need to run efficient, effective campaigns that drive results.
2) Get things connected.
Now that you’ve got your core technologies in place, it’s time to get them talking to one another. That way, you can start to automate some of your marketing tasks and free up your team to focus on more strategic initiatives.
This will look different for every company because not every company is using the same digital marketing channels and tools. However, here are a few of our recommendations that commonly come in handy for our clients:
3) Optimize your technologies for success.
Finally, whenever possible, you should try to set up your tech tools for optimal organization and scalability from the very beginning. This will make it much easier to keep your marketing strategy moving forward as you scale your business.
These are only a few of the most essential steps you can take to launch your digital marketing transformation and set up a foundational tech stack that’s primed for success. By following these steps, you’ll be well on your way to driving real results for your business.
Get in touch to learn more about how we can help you transform your marketing efforts —from strategy to content to digital marketing and your tech stack.
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