Are your marketing apps working against you?

If you’re doing any kind of digital marketing, chances are you’re using a hodgepodge of separate apps—one for email marketing, another for collecting lead information from forms, another for your CRM, and others for social media, analytics and testing. If so, you’re not alone.

Recently, SharpSpring and Ascend2 surveyed 187 marketing professionals to learn how their current tools were serving them. They discovered:

• 44% of marketing teams are using four or more tools to execute their strategy.
  
  
• 92% of the most successful marketers agree that consolidating tools in their tech stacks would increase productivity and efficiency.
  
  
• 59% of marketers feel that they do not have the data they need to feel confident about which marketing campaigns are working.
  
  
• 79% of marketers feel they’re missing opportunities as a result of these challenges.

The Solution

There are three things you can do to make your marketing technology work for you instead of against you.

1. Consolidate

Streamlining all of your energy and data into one marketing tool will help you finally take control of your data so you use it to inform more effective marketing strategies. Consolidating your apps will also eliminate paying individual contracts and fees, having to learn and manage multiple apps, and having multiple numbers to call for customer support.

2. Align Marketing and Sales

The biggest frustration with separate technologies is that teams and departments are siloed, making it difficult for marketing and sales to work together. When both groups have a clear picture of where leads are coming from, what information leads are engaging with, and how that information is affecting lead scores, it gives everyone a leg up on making sales. Connecting these teams also gives both groups better access to the sales funnel, making it easier to set priorities and goals, tweak strategies and measure KPIs.

3. Measure

While the role of marketing is to generate leads for the sales funnel, it’s up to sales to convert those leads. With an integrated marketing stack it’s much easier to attribute revenue because you see how and where leads are being generated, nurtured, and converted. Giving both teams the tools to see the entire customer journey also improves communication and optimizes strategies. This naturally creates a better customer experience. And the value of that is immeasurable.

Marketing automation consolidates your apps.