Voice: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neal Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neal Patel: And I'm Neal Patel.

Eric Siu: And today, we're going to talk about how to consolidate your marketing. So, Neal what do you think the problem is today, given that we have all these different marketing solutions?

Neal Patel: It's just overwhelming. When you look at any person in marketing these days, and they're trying to grow a company, whether it's from traffic, paid perspective, organic, all the tools out there, it's just so overwhelming.
A, they don't know what to do first. B, they don't know how to do half these things because these tools are hard to use. They're complicated, and these marketing channels, new ones are continually popping up. There's not a ton of resources on how they work or how to get the most out of them either.

Eric Siu: Yeah, it's crazy. I look at all our stack right now, and I think in our marketing stack, we probably have like 40 tools or so, and we've consolidated that down from like 65, and it's still way too much. It's overwhelming. I hear that from the team.
It's a lot of stuff, and my operations guy tells me all the time, and we need to continue to prune out our tools. But it's also difficult because it's like, well, with this tool, we're hooked in with Zapier, and we have like five web hooks to this one, and then all this.
And then, so what happens when we shut that tool down? We lose like five different things, and it starts just to compound over time, and Neal and I, we talk about technical debt sometimes from a coding perspective, but this is also debt too. You can call it your marketing stack debt or your stack debt. I know I'm just-

Neal Patel: Wait. How the heck do you still have 40 tools?

Eric Siu: Because we're like, "We need this. We need this. Well, we use it for that."

Neal Patel: Wait. No, no, what are some of them that you need that are really random?

Eric Siu: So we shut down MeetEdgar, right, the one that keeps repeating social posts.

Neal Patel: Yeah, it doesn't get you much traffic.

Eric Siu: It doesn't. And then, all of a sudden, it just ... Yesterday, I was like "Dude, how are we getting billed again," and there's someone from my team's like, "Oh, yeah, we all want to test it again." And I'm just like, these tools, some of them resurfaced, like the ones I shut down.

Neal Patel: Why do you let them test it again? I would just be like, "No."

Eric Siu: [crosstalk 00:02:10], they have my card, so now, it's like I need a ... See, that's another thing.

Neal Patel: I get pissy when people charge my card for shit. Those monthly subscriptions, I get so angry with that.

Eric Siu: Because you start to ... It's like death by a thousand cuts. You're getting $9 here, $5 here, and that's just so overwhelming, but-

Neal Patel: Okay, what's another random tool that you guys still use and pay for? I believe that you're at 40. Don't get me wrong. I'm not doubting that. I'm just like, what does your team really need that's growing traffic?

Eric Siu: Yeah, what else are we paying for that's ... Okay, there's another tool that popped up. It was this link cloaking tool for 10 bucks a month. I'm like, "Yeah, we don't need that." You know what I mean?

Neal Patel: So with the problem with marketing is is everyone wants to try to latest and greatest. I'm a big believer is you don't need much. Go back to the basics. I just focus on content marketing, SEO, paid ads, and that's pretty much it, and I don't do much more than that.
For social media, I post shit manually. I don't even use Buffer or Hootsuite. I know I can use them, and I should, but I just do it manually. You just take them whenever you have a link, and you just share it.

Eric Siu: So the agency, how many tools are you guys using, you think? 15, 20?

Neal Patel: No, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, HubSpot for sales, the reps. We have a project management solution to deal with clients.

Eric Siu: Actually, to Neal's point, that you are consolidating there because when you use a tool like HubSpot, it's got so many solutions. We were talking about before we started recording today how HubSpot is getting into chat, how they are getting into, what, help desk as well.
They're consolidating everything into one, and this is why people like using SAP. This is why they like using Oracle. To a lot of people, it's just like, well, they're so old, they're like dinosaurs. But it's simple for enterprises because they're all consolidated, right?

Neal Patel: Yeah, and I actually think that on that four tools, I think we only have two more, SEMrush, and we have what's the other one? It's some reporting tool like AgencyAnalytics.

Eric Siu: Yeah, so anyway-

Neal Patel: That's it.

Eric Siu: We're trying to get better at this. Neal's got it down already because Neal's more kind of OCD about this stuff. Me, I just like trying everything, but I've realized that that's causing a lot of problems now, so we're trying to cut down more and more and more.

Neal Patel: No, no, think about it this way. When your team starts trying all this stuff, they're wasting time instead of focusing on the basics that they know that work. And then, you'll start seeing a lot of inefficiencies. If you cut it off, you'll get more for your money.

Eric Siu: A hundred percent. This is why we're consolidating a lot of our CRMs, our emails and all this different stuff into one thing, so we don't have to try six tools at once. You don't have to go to all these different spots because every single thing, every single thought is a decision, and it can confuse and screw people's days up.
What I'll also say is a solution we talked about a couple of episodes ago. Using Segment.io is going to allow you to basically consolidate a lot of your data, and then from there, you're able to consolidate it into one, two or three different, like a HubSpot, for example.
So you can consolidate your marketing stack. You can also consolidate your data too using a tool like Segment.io. And I think you need to prune, perhaps every quarter or so. If you're like me, you have too many tools. We're trying to ruthlessly prune until we get down to maybe four tools like what Neal has. Probably not going to be as low as that, but yeah.

Neal Patel: Just think of one thing. Whenever you have a lot of shit that your team is doing, look at what's driving results, and even if people are like, "Aw, this is really cool. It drives 1%," cut it off.
Have them focus on the stuff that's really moving the needle because when they have more time to focus, you'll notice that the results from those things that are working will actually increase. And I'd rather have my guys twiddle their thumbs than focusing on stuff that's going to move the need by maybe 1%.

Eric Siu: I think it's Google decision fatigue. That's the last thing I'll have to add. Google decision fatigue, you don't want your team members, your valuable team members who are smart, you're paying great salaries.
You don't want them to be focusing on this stuff. You want to make their life easier, make it simpler for them. So that's it for today, but before we go, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to check out our marketing tools to grow your business, and we'll see you tomorrow.

Voice: This session of marketing school has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on Marketing School.