Recently, we highlighted that there are over 7,000 different digital marketing tools to choose from…and growing!

It’s no wonder so many people feel inundated and overwhelmed by all this.

Unfortunately, ignoring it is not an option – unless you want you and your business to be left behind.

So, what can you do? What’s your coping strategy?

Well, most people don’t have one. They may as well be playing pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey when choosing their marketing tech stack.

They get pulled towards shiny objects, bells, and whistles, and don’t think about how these objects fit into their big picture of marketing.

Very soon they have a tangled mess of tech spaghetti on their hands, and no way to connect the pieces together.

They end up having to manually move data between different programs and platforms or even worse, they don’t connect the data and have no way of actually tracking their marketing efforts, or their leads’ responses.

How can you know what campaign, promotion or advertising channel is working if you can’t track your lead’s actions and conversions to the source?  And be able to take appropriate actions based on that information.

It doesn’t take long for small business marketers to feel like they are stuck in a tightening web.

So, What Do They Do?

They throw out and replace apps, hacking away at the web, hoping that they can tame it. Sometimes they even add MORE apps to the mix.

According to The Winterberry Group, 40% of marketers use between 11 to 30 + tools in their marketing technology stack.

That’s a lot to juggle!

The Most Common Frustrations Reported by Small Business Marketers Are:

• Desire better integration of existing tools
• Want better ways to share data among various tools
• Are looking for better ways to align these tools with the internal organization processes
• Despite all these tools, marketers feel they still don’t have relevant actionable data available to them
• Having to ‘make do’ with second rate solutions, because the fully-featured ideal solution is too expensive
• Having to pay for lots of different subscriptions – which quickly add up to a hefty sum

It seems that small businesses and marketers know what they want, yet only 13% feel their marketing technologies are doing what they want them to do. So why is there such a big gap?

The #1 Reason for Frustration

I feel a big reason behind this is that most digital marketers or small business owners are self-taught.

While there’s nothing wrong with this – (In fact, this resourceful tenacity is essential in a constantly shifting digital environment) – it doesn’t seem fair when the odds are so against you.

There is a lot of ‘free education’ available on the internet – but how do you know it’s unbiased? Some of the best solutions available are often lesser-known and don’t get much airtime like others.

When vendors or affiliates promote a particular technology, they are often fuzzy on the details on how it connects with other third-party technologies.

As a result, it’s extremely difficult to understand the ins and outs of different technologies, and how they work together before using them.

Based on our experience, there are two things you need to get this right:

• Knowing what capabilities and functions you need from technology to meet your marketing needs.
• Identifying which technologies meet those needs, and which ones are deeply cross-compatible with each other.

Unfortunately, most people are left to figure this out on your own. Hopefully with enough trial and error eventually a workable solution can be found. But at what cost?

Wouldn’t it be great if someone could fast forward you through that process – saving all that wasted time and money – and tell you what will work with everything else?

What if you could find a way to manage your entire marketing stack from just TWO platforms? And see all of your data in one location?

And what if this was able to align your marketing tactics in a strategic way that gives you full visibility?

Sounds amazing right?

Possibly too good to be true? Well, hold the phone!

We’ve been in this game for almost a decade and have tried and tested hundreds of different platforms and apps to find what works best for small to medium businesses – and today you can get all of the lessons we learned summarized in one small handy guide.

Claim your free Marketing in a Nutshell guide and learn how to avoid tech headaches, streamline your digital marketing and bring all the pieces together….including your website, online store, content marketing, lead generation, email marketing, marketing automation, analytics, and much more!