Making Your Martech Stack Work For You & Not Against You (An Optimization Guide For Agencies) 

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Your agency has one ultimate goal—bottom-line growth for both you and your clients. Acing your offering & implementation is mission-critical to achieving that goal, but as most marketers will attest, it’s no piece of cake. Funnel marketing requires a lot of moving parts. Agencies need form and page builders, automation, call tracking, etc. Having the right martech stack (and utilizing it optimally) is key to driving results and retaining clients for years instead of months.

According to a recent Gartner Marketing Technology Survey, marketers report only using 58% of their martech stack’s full breadth of capabilities. This underutilization is draining precious resources and agencies are now having to consider big budget cuts and marketing tech overhauls. In this same post, Benjamin Bloom, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, was quoted saying, 

“Low levels of utilization present a real risk for marketing organizations, particularly in light of looming budget cuts. The majority of marketing organizations facing budget cuts also struggle with utilization. That’s a real gut punch — one that demands attention to technology acquisition and usage.”

In this guide, we talk about a lead’s journey through the funnel, at which stage the underutilization problem becomes most apparent, and how you can address the challenge of underutilized martech stacks with HighLevel as well as its other related benefits. 

The Need For Great Reporting

Many agencies are not utilizing all of the tech they have because they lack the data insights needed to spotlight the relevancy of specific tools and their use. 

You need marketing technology that can compile lead gen data for you and put it in perspective with analytic tools. Then you can know what additional tech you need and what you don’t, and you can set up your campaigns accordingly. 

Extensive reporting is also an important factor in client retention. We already see a significant benefit for businesses to have access to both sales and marketing vantage points. Clients should be able to see reports showing revenue generation and not just lead acquisition so they can know the real ROI for their agency’s services.

Businesses don’t care about leads; they want sales, and whatever tech helps to convert leads is worth keeping.

Book Appointments With Your Martech Stack

Once you can visualize the client’s pipeline and see how leads are moving along the funnel, you can help them increase sales by using your martech stack to turn leads into bookings!

Most businesses need some sort of appointment before they can close a new customer/client (1st visit, qualifying call, consult, virtual consult, etc.). Your martech stack should have a tool that offers your clients a robust way of connecting with leads.

For instance, you should be able to set up automatic triggers within workflows for your clients as soon as a lead is generated. The automatic trigger can be set up as a two-way text or an attempt to connect your client and their customer over a call. 

Since the chance to connect with a lead drops 80% after the first five minutes having automation in place for immediate engagement is a smart and effective way to do marketing.

Use Marketing Automation For Nurturing Leads

Automation’s applicability isn’t limited to connecting first-time interactions. It’s a critical element of your marketing automation toolkit that can help your client nurture leads.

There’s a good chance that most of your clients are accustomed to referrals but feel puzzled about how to convert leads generated over the internet. As an agency, the onus is on you to help your clients nurture them.

Our internal studies show that leaving businesses on their own when it comes to nurturing leads can translate to an average of 60% churn.

Empowering your clients with the ability to track their leads through their pipeline and using automation for connecting them with their customers over email, SMS, or voicemail can significantly reduce your churn.

The Problem: An Underutilized Martech Stack

By the time you get to a stage where you’re helping your clients nurture their leads, you’re dealing with a basket of martech tools. Using a stack that holds a dozen tools is understandably overwhelming and translates to frustration and a low buy-in from your team.

You’ve probably faced this problem, researched, and learned about Zapier. The problem is that Zapier works as duct tape. Not only do Zapier automations often malfunction, but there’s also a lack of availability when it comes to integrating with many popular martech tools. 

Custom APIs aren’t the solution; they’re hard to create and maintain. More importantly, they don’t address the core issue that’s causing the underutilization. 

So, what’s the core issue?

The issue is really two-fold. 

First of all, effective marketing often requires client activities across a number of different applications (applying tags, leaving notes, moving opportunities within a pipeline, etc.). The likelihood of anyone logging in and out of all these tools is just unrealistic. Inactivity reduces tech value and ultimately leads to stack stagnation. This is why marketers have to audit these tools on a regular basis, which takes time. 

Second is the cumbersome task of having to relay information back and forth to the client with reports from various tools. Since clear, unified reporting isn’t in place and the tools are not synergized, most of their stack is just underused or neglected altogether. 

This is why according to the same Gartner report, marketers now prefer integrated-suite technologies rather than taking a “best-in-breed” approach. 

The Solution: A Consolidated Martech Stack

The problem leads agencies into a tough spot. At this point, you’re likely to consider building your own integrative software from scratch. But should you?

Not only is creating software unbelievably expensive, but it’s also costly to maintain and market. As an agency, building a software product most likely isn’t your core competency. Instead of taking on such a herculean challenge, how about focusing on what you do best?

If the problem for your agency is an underutilized, unoptimized martech stack, then HighLevel is definitely the answer.  

Enter HighLevel

HighLevel puts all your marketing technology in a single dashboard. Our features are constantly updated and fine-tuned based on agency feedback, so our agency clients and their customers know they are getting the best tool to help them be more efficient and agile. You will save time by bringing your entire martech stack to a single platform, and you’ll do a huge favor to your bottom line.

With HighLevel, you get clear reporting that is more thorough than its competition. You can see not just leads but sales and cost-per-sale. There are even categories for ROI calculations and overall revenue for each campaign! Plenty of data to assess your tech and its effectiveness. 

Agencies can white-label HighLevel and onboard their clients to coordinate marketing operations without the hassle of manual data migration. What’s even more impressive is you can white-label HighLevel and sell it to your clients! Since you’re offering SaaS, you can generate an additional source of revenue while still utilizing HighLevel for internal purposes.

The main benefit of HighLevel as it relates to this study is that it does improve the utilization of your martech stack by creating a platform designed specifically for agencies and the features they require to generate revenue for their clients and scale faster.

HighLevel “Snapshots” are a great way to gift wrap all the tech businesses will need and place them into your client’s accounts. Agencies can also clone them over and over for other clients. It takes onboarding and setup from taking hours to taking only minutes and elevates the chance of tech usage.

HighLevel also includes a mobile app that can also be white-labeled. Put your tech in the palm of your client’s hands it will not only increase tech availability and usage, but as research shows, it will also improve customer satisfaction by 38%

HighLevel is a great way to boost your martech usage and its capabilities. Another reason agencies who choose to use HighLevel are thriving.

As of April 2022: 

  • Over 12,000 agencies are driving success for nearly half a million small businesses with HighLevel.
  • Over 2,500 agencies earned more than $32 million on new software revenue by white-labeling HighLevel in 2021.
  • HighLevel agencies increased client retention from an average of 2.5 months to 9 months.
  • HighLevel agencies are typically able to save between $200 and $1,000 in monthly software subscriptions.

Are you an agency trying to optimize your martech utilization, trim the monthly stack expense, and offer your clients a white-labeled solution? Try HighLevel for free today!

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