Share Your Marketing Stack: Beachhead Marketing’s lean and clean stack

Today’s featured marketing stack (above) comes from Steven Moody, founding partner of Beachhead Marketing (beachhead.io), a consulting firm that helps SaaS (software as a service) marketers grow with leaner martech stacks and clever growth hacks. Bigger doesn’t always mean better; one client added $12M in the pipeline in just two weeks.

Guiding principles for building a lean marketing stack

Beachhead Marketing’s philosophy of building marketing stacks is based on the principle of YAGNI: “you aren’t going to need it.” It’s not uncommon for marketers (approximately 59 percent) to invest in more tools and products than they can use efficiently.

In fact, Moody argues that marketers are more likely to be slowed down by fixating on how to increase efficiency in their marketing stacks rather than finding the most effective tactics.

The framework of this marketing stack

At a minimum, Moody says every company should have these three pieces of the stack in place:

• CMS to host a website and blog;
• tags to track what users do; and
• an analytics tool to learn.

Respectively, the three main components in Beachhead’s internal stack are WordPress, Segment.io and BigQuery. With those in place as the foundation of the stack, the next step is layering on tools to execute the most effective marketing tactics.

Content management

With WordPress being the CMS, Beachhead utilizes WPEngine to host their website. “This is an overlooked step for most companies: hosting and CDN isn’t as sexy as a 200-percent improvement in CTR from A/B testing. But the last time I checked, one of the top factors for ranking on SERPs is page speed, and a high-quality host matters for this,” explains Moody.

Marketing operations and automation

With your content assets in place, you need to find your traction channels and optimize for those. Beachhead Marketing’s key channels are content marketing (Medium), email marketing (MailChimp and Drip) and social media (Buffer.)

Data management & CRM

Finally, managing customer data and the sales pipeline closes the marketing loop. “Of course you need a CRM, but with a separate data management system in place, it doesn’t need to be *the* CRM. My first choice is Pipedrive but there are many good options here.”

Steven Moody will be speaking at The MarTech Conference 1–2 November in London. To see his complete presentation and other marketing tech stack examples, follow @MarTechConf on Slideshare.

Submit your marketing stack

Want to share your marketing stack with fellow martech professionals? Here’s how:

• Design a 16:9 (minimum 1920 x 1080 pixels) visual representation of your organization’s marketing stack, and submit it in a high-resolution PPTX, PDF or  JPEG format.
• Please include the following details as applicable:
  • Include a paragraph or two that describes the rationale behind the way you’ve organized your stack and any guiding principles that you feel are important in its architecture.
  • Explicitly name as many tools and commercial products as possible. You may use some generic placeholders (e.g., CRM, DMP) for products that you do not wish to disclose, but fully detailed stacks offer more tangible visualizations for the martech industry.
  • Include a brief sentence for each key product that explains how or why your organization uses those tools.
  • Name and note the roles of key managers and/or departments involved with managing various components of your marketing stack.
• Email your marketing stack and brief description to: [email protected].

As an extra incentive, every submitted stack will be automatically considered in the 2017 Stackie Awards competition, presented by Scott Brinker at the MarTech USA marketing technology conference in San Francisco, May 9–11, 2017. (We’ll be sharing additional information about the Stackie Awards in the coming weeks.)

By submitting your stack for consideration, you grant Third Door Media and its partners permission to republish and distribute the contents.