How To Get Marketing Tech Projects Done Quickly At Companies Large and Small

I’ve worked in the online marketing field for about eight years, both at very small businesses and at companies listed on the NYSE. There’s a theme that’s the same everywhere though:

• There’s never enough software development resources for all the projects the company wants to do.

• Marketing projects are inherently speculative, and thus are usually prioritized lower than other projects.

• The larger the company, the more red tape there is about doing new things, which makes the above two bullets worse. Since every new tech tool means another review from legal, security, QA, etc, you generally want to minimize the number of tools.

Luckily, there’s an answer to the above that really helps in most cases:

• Set-up flexible SaaS tools early that integrate with a lot of things and let you build experiments without programmer help.

• Almost never build custom software unless you really have to.

Most SaaS tools are really inexpensive compared to developer time. And the flexible ones means you can install once and avoid protracted QA processes after that. Below is my recommended tools to pre-set up in each category:

Tracking and Attribution

Time Saving SaaS Tools For Pixel Management:

Why use these?: Google Tag Manager and Tealium both allow you to install the tool once, and then place and remove pixel fires at your leisure. So you don’t need to have a programming commit every time you want to track something new or differently.

Time Saving SaaS Tools for B2B Tracking:

Why use these?: Pixel fires only tell you how many conversions happen, it doesn’t tell you which specific companies converted, which is important when you have high value conversions. Hubspot (as a CRM/funnel tool) has options to track this, and Segment works on top of whatever your existing stack is to track this.

Lead and Customer Information Flow

Time Saving SaaS Tool For Managing Leadflow

Why use these?: Zapier is best in class for moving customer information from one place to another. Want to move leads from a form on your website to Mailchimp? You can use Zapier. How about from Facebook Lead Ads to Salesforce? Zapier. Want to calculate lead scores? Do it on Zapier and then disseminate the info. The flow between apps is where so much developer frustration happens, and Zapier makes so many of those issues go away.

Conversion Rate Optimization / A/B testing

Time Saving SaaS Tools For Conversion Rate Optimization

Why use these?: Sumo is a specific app that builds out a few specific optimization tests that work really often in my experience — Welcome Mat, Scroll Box, and Smart Bar. And it’s cheap enough for anyone to use. Again, the only dev time needed is setting up the pixel.

BounceX is very expensive relative to other tools, but it’s a super flexible and secure platform for doing a huge variety of conversion tests without developer time. If you have 6 figures in monthly marketing spend or more, it makes a lot of sense to not have to rely on developer time to do tests than can increase performance by 10% here and there.

Microsite / Webpage Building

Time Saving SaaS Tools for Landing Pages

Why use these?: Modern day landing page/microsite tools are much better than they were 2–3 years ago.

I like Weebly for basic Sites and Instapage for Leadgen sites.

I’m sure there’s a lot of other SaaS tools that fit this category (Set-up once to ensure future marketing project flexibility) but I feel like this is a pretty good starting point.