4 Steps to Optimize Your Marketing Tech Stack [+ Audit Template]

As a marketer in the SaaS industry, you’re constantly under pressure to not just have a predictable funnel and deliver pipeline but to also showcase marketing attribution, all while staying under a tight budget. 

To maximize your budget to the best of your abilities, you must analyze and optimize each and every one of your marketing efforts’ spend. 

We must be nimble and precise when it comes to choosing the software and technology that will enable us to perform better and reach our ROI goals. Unfortunately, 65 percent of sales and marketing pros have up to five redundant tools in their stacks, and 82 percent of them lose up to an hour every day due to the time investment that managing all these tools requires.

Having the right marketing tech stack will leverage your business's way of operating, marketing itself, and selling to the right audience while enabling team alignment. Before we dive into the actual steps you need to take to optimize your marketing tech stack, let’s discuss the importance of doing so.

The Importance of Optimizing Your Marketing Tech Stack

Optimizing your martech stack will allow you to:

• Avoid tool overlap and, consequently, make decisions around tool deduplication
• Keep your entire database clean and accurate
• Leverage marketing and sales team alignment and overall team cohesion
• And, most importantly, stay in control of your software budget

With the ever-evolving marketing technology landscape and the thousands of tech solutions out there, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re just starting out and building up your tech stack or if you have several technologies at your disposal and are looking to consolidate capabilities; these four steps will help you optimize your marketing technology stack.

Step 1: Use Your Goals as a Starting Point

When we make a buying decision, we are typically motivated by a certain need that can be fulfilled by a specific product or service. We want to either achieve a goal or find a solution to a problem.

That is exactly what we do when we are looking for a tool to add to our marketing tech stack. Every tool you buy must fulfill a purpose and help you reach a goal. Knowing this will allow you to think strategically and avoid spending on tools that your team doesn’t need. 

During this first stage, list—or define—your team’s goals, as well as your strategies for achieving those goals, and identify the type of tool you need to conduct those strategies and, ultimately, reach your goals.

It’s helpful if you create a table like the one below:

In addition to using your goals to map out your decision-making process, you must also consider your team’s current capabilities at this first stage. Why would you buy a tool that nobody on your team knows how to use? Do you need to scale and hire new team members?

Step 2: Audit Your Current Stack

The next step is to conduct an audit. A tech stack audit should be done on a regular basis because technology is constantly evolving, and the platforms that we use integrate new features regularly. 

Run an audit at least twice a year. An audit will help you determine what tools are working and are imperative to your team’s success and which are not needed at all.

With an audit, you’ll be able to list all the tools that you have and make accurate decisions, whether those are to remove certain tools, replace the ones you have, or add a new one. 

Running an audit leads us to the next step, which is all about making decisions based on the insights you gathered from the audit.

Step 3: Assess

During this stage, you’ll have all the information you need to start making decisions. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Are there any gaps in your current tech stack? 
• Are there any gaps regarding your team’s ability to use your current tools?
• Are there any tools that are overlapping across teams? 
• Are there any tools that are overlapping in terms of functionality?
• Does tool x have the potential to meet more than one need for the company?

Once you know the answers to these questions, you’ll have a clear path to follow when it comes to securing the tools you need and properly allocating your software budget.

Step 4: Take Action

As a final step, you can now take action in relation to securing the tools you need, expanding your team's capabilities, and eliminating any tools that are redundant or unnecessary.

Following the steps above will ensure a clean marketing tech stack optimization for your company. Each of these steps needs to be taken if you want to maximize the use of your technology and leverage the marketing, sales, and operations teams within your company.

Auditing your tech stack will allow you to consolidate the apps you use and maintain a single source of truth for data. It will also help you make accurate decisions around the platforms your team needs instead of the platforms it wants, saving time and money and, most importantly, keeping it all under your given budget.