The ideal marketing stack is minimalist

“Less is more” is about as cliché as it gets.

However, in a digital world overrun with new software, each seeming to add incremental features, things can quickly become convoluted.

Now, don’t get me wrong. If you have the capacity to build out your marketing stack with an array of tools and data, and delegate individual capacities or layers to specific teammates, go for it. It’s a challenge, but with enough resources it’s always doable.

But for the majority of companies that do not have fully-fledged marketing teams, falling into tool FOMO can be incredibly slippery: “This is exactly what we need!”

The majority of marketing software tools can be divided into the following categories:

1. Internal communication
2. Internal compute
3. External communication
4. External compute
5. Bridges between layers

A very basic marketing stack can, therefore, look something like this:

1. Slack / Google Suite
2. Clearbit / CRM
3. Customer.io / LinkedIn
4. Webflow / Canva
5. Zapier / API

With a stack like this, you are able to communicate, discover and use data, and centralize everything.

Now, by analyzing and dividing the tools we use into each of the categories, we can discover the leverages we need.

For example:

1. Internal communication: we leverage our knowledge and teammates
2. Internal & external compute: we leverage our data and workflows
3. External communication: we leverage our customers and the sales process
4. Bridges: we leverage our unused or undiscovered assets

The problem with adding just one tool to a stack is that it will inadvertently affect the other layers without you even noticing it.

At the minimum, every extra tool is going to require time not just for use, but also for installation and maintenance.

So before integrating another tool into your stack, ask yourself the following question:

What am I leveraging, and how can I create a similar effect with the tools I already have?

If you come up with nothing, you do the cost-benefit analysis of money, resources, time, and energy. If the ROI is positive, considering all factors, you could buy it.

But you may find that if the base of your marketing stack is already in place, you can discover untapped opportunities with what you already have.

Let’s say I want to add a tool that allows me to send custom videos together to my email leads (“John - check this out!”). After all, I read on LinkedIn how well this works for other people.

The extra tool you want in your stack has a purpose. Discover it first, or you might be buying medicine to treat undiagnosed symptoms.

Let’s analyze the custom video tool and go deeper under the hood with each bullet:

• I want the tool because I am confident it is going to generate more sales.
• This tool is right because people are not responding to my text emails.
• People are not responding to my text emails because they want videos instead.

Hmmm…

That doesn’t seem quite right. Let’s analyze the issue again:

• People are not responding to my text emails.
• My text emails lack the character, diversity, and fun aspect of videos.
• My text emails lack character, diversity, and fun.
• I need to improve the character, diversity, and fun of my text emails.

And your mind then goes:

• I can’t improve the character, diversity, and fun of my text emails.
• I should really A/B test them more.
• No! It already proved it didn’t work! Give me the band-aid!

The risk you run by adding the extra tool without diagnosing the original problem and making the local improvements is that you will not gain the lessons from making the iteration improvements.

We should consider any tool we add as another experiment, not a replacement for what we were already doing. We do not know if it will work for us.

So why have a minimalist marketing stack?

A minimalist marketing stack allows us to pinpoint more precisely the areas for growth and improvement.

Because minimalism is, in the words of painter Hans Hoffman:

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

If I want to become a great mechanic, on day one I am not going to have 20 different broken cars in my garage. I will begin with one, followed by two, and then three.