Your marketing stack has more logins than your team has people
Somewhere along the way, “doing marketing” became “administering marketing software”. One tool writes the posts, another schedules them, a third sends the email, a fourth tells you nobody opened it. Each one was a reasonable purchase. Together they are a part-time job.
This is a short guide to working out which of them you actually need.
Count the hand-offs, not the tools
The cost of a stack is not the subscriptions. It is every time a person copies something out of one tool and into another. Write down each of those hand-offs for one ordinary week. Most teams find the list is longer than the list of things they shipped, which is not a great ratio for a department whose job is to ship things.
A hand-off is anything that needs a human to carry it: exporting a list, pasting a caption, rebuilding the same audience in a second place, taking a screenshot of a chart for a report. If you had to remember to do it, it counts.
A tool that saves time in one place can cost it in two
Every tool is sold on the time it saves at its own task, and most of them are telling the truth. The trouble is the time between tasks. A scheduler saves the minutes it takes to post and adds the job of getting the posts into the scheduler. A reporting tool saves an afternoon of charts and adds the job of connecting it to everything else.
So judge each tool by the whole trip, not the leg it handles. Ask what has to happen before it can start and what has to happen after it finishes. If the answer to both is “someone does it by hand”, the tool is a nice room with no doors.
Sort the stack into three piles
Take the list of tools and put each one in a pile.
- Keep. It does a job nothing else does, and the hand-offs around it are small.
- Merge. Two tools do overlapping jobs and somebody maintains both. Pick one. The feature you lose is almost always one you never used.
- Cut. Nobody has logged in for a month, or the only person who understood it has left. This pile is usually bigger than expected.
Be honest about the last pile. A subscription nobody uses is cheap. A subscription one person half-uses, and everyone else works around, is expensive.
Fewer joins beat better tools
When the stack feels slow, the instinct is to upgrade a piece of it. That rarely helps, because the pieces were not the problem. The gaps were. A faster email tool does not shorten the walk from the article to the email.
What does help is removing a join entirely: letting one thing do two neighboring jobs, even if it does each of them slightly less well than a specialist would. For a small team, “slightly less well and already in the same place” beats “best in class and three tabs away” nearly every time.
What to do on Monday
Pick one ordinary piece of marketing, a single post or a single email, and follow it from idea to result. Write down every tool it touches and every time a person carries it. Then remove one join. Only one. Do it again next month.
If the list of hand-offs is short, your stack is fine and you can stop reading articles like this one. If it is long, the fix is fewer joins, not better tools. That is the problem we built Ovrdrive for, and you can join our waitlist if you want to see it.