75. The Marketing Technology Stack every Small Business Needs

With so many marketing tools and platforms out there, it's easy to feel overwhelmed on which ones to choose, and can quickly lead to overspending.

On this episode of the High Performance Marketing Podcast we'll review the marketing technology stack every entrepreneur and small business needs. From email marketing to social media management to analytics, the right marketing technology stack can simplify your efforts to connect with your ideal customer, help you make the best use of your time, and make sure you're not overwhelming your marketing budget.

Transcript

Welcome to The High Performance Marketing Podcast, a show focused on helping entrepreneurs and small business owners connect with their ideal customers using simple marketing and quality content. I'm your Marketing Guide, Ali Garbero.

Building your business with modern technology is both overwhelming and expensive. But entrepreneurs and small to medium-sized businesses like ours depend on digital marketing technology to reach a larger and targeted audience. How else are we going to increase brand awareness in a digital age?

It’s amazing what’s available to us not previously available in any other era of business. Technology acts like that magical genie in Aladdin, that proposes to grant your business its every wish. Technology is amazing in its ability to help automate processes, reach new customers and save you much needed and highly valuable time.

Did you know that in 2022, an annual study showed that there were 9,932 marketing technology solutions available? With so many tools and technologies vying for your attention, how do you know which are the must haves for your business so you only invest in what you need?

On today’s episode of the podcast let’s explore the 5 marketing technologies and tools I believe every entrepreneur and small business owner should invest in for optimizing online success.

First, your website.

This one’s a no-brainer. For nearly two decades, having a website has been a fundamental part of owning and operating a business. People are information consumers and are far more likely to do business with a business that has a well written and beautifully designed website. If your website isn’t making you money, it’s most likely that it isn’t optimized for conversion. Schedule time to talk to me about that, if that’s what’s happening on your end.

If you have the ability to hire a website designer who designs and hosts the site for you, great. Most of us will use a website builder like Wordpress, Squarespace or Wix. I personally use Kajabi. The reason I love Kajabi is, first not only do they have nice modern template designs, their templates are also really simple to use and edit, adding my own personal brand style and logo to it. There are limitations to editing their templates, but nothing that makes it enough of a con for me not to use them.

Kajabi has an amazing customer support team, so as you build your site out, if you get stuck, their chat feature is the best I’ve experienced in regards to quick response times, knowledgeability, and simple answers. Making updates to your site in Kajabi is simple.

Why I chose to use Kajabi as my website builder is because of how robust their technology is. For a monthly subscription of about $199, I can sell my products and services, they provide a check out page so I can capture online payment, you can build and sell digital courses, I can host my podcast on the site, create unlimited landing pages, their blog feature allows video options as well, and they have email marketing with simple to use templates and automations. This means I don’t have to pay for an additional email marketing provider like Mailchimp, Active Campaign, or Constant Contact.

Which leads me into the second marketing tool

...every business needs and that’s an email marketing platform. If you don’t use Kajabi, most likely your website builder won’t have email functionalities, so you’ll need a separate tool for delivering