Is Your Team Overwhelmed By Their Business Tools?

There are over 6,829 different marketing technology solutions available for 2018 (as of April 2018). Oh, is that all? In a study by Winterberry group back in 2015, an average company uses 12.4 tools, and that was back when there were only about ⅓ as many tools! A marketing staff with this many tools is no longer acting as a team, as your team is no longer putting out a consistent message. As a result, your customers are getting a mixed experience. If I filled out a website survey for an e-mailing list after buying product X, I don’t need to hear more about product X. If I indicated I am male, I don’t want to hear about female products and vice versa. Furthermore, your staff productivity drops because they are spending their time managing the tools instead of using them.

So how do you solve this problem? Here’s your 3-step action plan:

Identify Your Marketing Strategy and Goals

What is the overall message you want to portray to your customers, and prospective customers? And what are the specific goals you want to achieve under that overall message? Remember you need to incorporate SEO, Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, and Analytics (otherwise how do you know what’s working?).  

Conduct a Tool Audit and Tool Survey

What tools are you currently using for each of the areas mentioned? Do you need specialist tools or will a generalist tool do?  Are you using all of the features within the tools you have? What other similar tools can work for the niche? Which ones are more comprehensive? Consider your team’s KPIs and work backward. What tools do you need to help you and your team do the best work you can? I’m a shiny objects person like a lot of entrepreneurs, so this is one issue I am really conscious of!

One example in my company was a recent discussion about our communication tools. I wanted to roll out a very popular tool, called Slack, and tasked my Admin team to handle it. They conducted an audit of our current system, tested multiple platforms, and presented their findings to the whole company. It was eye-opening to see what my team thought was important and the pros and cons of other systems. We ended up fine tuning our internal communication strategy and sticking with a tool we all loved rather than adding a shiny object to our communication process.

Go All-in-One or Integrate

Preferably, you want a single tool to cover all areas. An all-in-one solution with a consistent interface and comprehensive functionalities not only simplifies management and boosts productivity, it minimizes duplicated effort and data. If you can’t find a single tool, trust me I know it’s often impossible, to fit all of your needs, at least minimize the number of tools needed, and use “integrators” such as Zapier to glue them together automatically.

What do you do to make sure everyone is on the same page when it comes to new tools and how do you avoid tool overload? I’d love to hear from you.