Listen up ,

Building the backend of your business can be super-confusing and overwhelming. Why?

• New tools and technology come out all the time
• Certain tech doesn't work well with each other
• If your business goals are fuzzy it's hard to figure out the right martech.

Oh - you might be asking, "what is martech, anyway?"

Martech is the marketing technology you use to marketing your business, and you have martech whether you know it or not!

Here's the deal - tech stack refers to all the technology you use to run your business (or your household, for that matter). Martech refers to the specific tech you use to market your business. It's a guy thing, making up all these little shortened words - like a little secret language. (I'm rolling my eyes.)

So you can sound all official and smart and say, "I'm decluttering my martech." And that means you are simplifying and streamlining how you marketing you business, in plain English.

Here are all the pieces of marketing technology you probably already have or maybe you need a few of these.

• ESP or Email Service Provider - you might be using SendFox, Aweber, Mailer Lite, Active Campaign, or any one of many other email service providers. I often call this your autoresponder system. Your ESP lets you contact existing customers and prospects in an organized manner, including pre-scheduling emails if you wish. It helps you build consistency in reaching out and gaining more sales.

• CMS or Content Marketing System - Since you are marketing digitally (using the internet) you must have some place to create, store, and display your digital content. Digital content could be blog posts, articles, podcasts, or videos. Usually, online based businesses will have a website which is where you can place your digital content (this is often a WordPress site). Basically, your business needs a place to store and manage all the digital content you create and distribute across the internet.

• Merchant card - You need a way to collect money digitally, a tool that takes a customer's credit card and transfers money into your bank account. I use Paypal and Stripe, but there are other merchant card tools you can use. Some businesses use Shopify.

• Website management tools - There are dozens of tools to help you run and manage your website more efficiently. You might have a page builder for your website that helps you create graphically pleasing pages that get more results for you. I personally use Beaver Builder templates and another tool called Swipe Pages. You might use Google Analytics to track traffic on your site. You might also use a tool to help you with SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your blog posts and pages, something like Yoast.

• Social media marketing system - If you use content marketing on social platforms you'll need a way to organize and schedule your content. My recommendations would be based on what type of social media and what type of content you are using. You might use tools like Canva (for content development) and a tool like Later or Publer or Hootsuite for scheduling - it really depends on your social media marketing plans.

There's an infinite number of website management tools and it's easy to get too many and then never use them. One I consider essential is Pretty Links, which takes a long, complicated web address and lets you customize it into something short and memorable.

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) - Many of the online business owners I know don't use a specific CRM to store customer information, vendor information about their purchases, customer support emails, and the like. It's definitely smart to keep your key information in one place. Lately, I've seen people keeping themselves organized on Trello boards! But if you do use a CRM it will help you keep everything in one place rather than stored all over the place, which is hard to keep up with. Some CRMs I hear about in the digital world are Hubspot and Salesforce.

I'm all for as few systems as possible and fairly simple systems unless you are pulling in well over $200K a year.

If you need help working through what to use for your martech (or for your tech stack for your business) you can hire me for a single hour and we'll go through what you have and what you might need. Use the coupon code MARTECH today through Wednesday, February 3rd to take $100 off my normal consulting fee.

I recommend that you review your marketing technology at least once a year, refresh it, and kick what you are not using - saves confusion and money, too!

To your sweet success,

Sue Painter