“Technology stacks” are the buzzwords of the tech community, but have you ever considered the same concept applied to marketing? Read further on what a tech stack is and how it can be applied to marketing.
Back Up: What is a Tech Stack?
Essentially, those creating a tech stack treat their entire technology effort like a skyscraper. It starts with a good foundation. Everything built on top of that needs to be strong enough to hold the next layer. Customers will be in awe of said stack like they are of a skyscraper. They don’t necessarily need to know what goes into it, but they do know that it’s working and has earned their interest.
How Does This Apply to Marketing?
You can use the same idea for marketing. Start with a solid foundation and build upon that to create a marketing stack. Your customers may not understand everything that goes into it, but you’ve earned their attention.
The Foundation
So where do we start? Well first, you need to perfect the branding itself. Make sure to have the brand name, logo, brand colors, slogan, etc. in place. You can perfect your branding with the help of IDeas BIG.
It’s also important to have some sort of marketing plan. What are the goals of your marketing? How do you plan to achieve these goals? Who is the target audience? Again, the customer won’t see this, but it’s critical to the success of the entire marketing stack.
Lower Levels
Next, you’ll want to build off of your established brand. Create a website for your business. It’ll act as the main source for company information; it’ll also help to facilitate customer contact. A lot will go into the website that the customer won’t see, like security features, coding, etc.
You’ll also need to take steps improving your SEO. Customers won’t see all the work that goes into it. What they will (hopefully) see is you coming up when they search related keywords.
Further, you’ll need to set up your social pages. Platforms will vary based on your business’s needs. The most common platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Pinterest.
Finally, you need a place to store all the collected data about your customers and your marketing’s performance. This won’t be visible to the customer, but will help you improve on what is visible.
Upper Levels
What does the customer see? On your webpage, they’ll see all the provided content. On search engines, they’ll see links to your page. On social media, your content should come up on their feed.
Additionally, you can use the customer data you collected on the lower levels to create email campaigns. This will be visible to the customers and will hopefully lead to conversion.
Other levels may include any event or in-person marketing, direct mail, and more.
What Does Your Marketing Stack Look Like?
Are you proud of your marketing stack? Are you stable at each level? Or does it need a few repairs? It’s important to remember that all pieces of marketing must work together to be successful. If your branding or marketing plan isn’t solidified before focusing on the other marketing tasks, the whole stack will be shaky. Likewise, if your site isn’t working from the back-end, it won’t function on the front-end. Same goes for SEO: if you’re not doing what you need to do to end up in search listings, you won’t rank. And so on. Focus from the bottom-up; this way your marketing will work for you, rather than against.
