How to Spring-Clean Your Marketing Stack

Hi hi hiiii! 👋🏽

I’m Aelia, your friendly (unless-you’ve-stolen-my-pizza-slice) marketing Bob-the-Builder from Ignore No More.

I’m taking over Sophia’s mic this week to gush over what I love; tips and worksheets to keep your marketing tech stack spotless.

And that you can do even if you:

• don’t know where to start (step-by-step instructions coming up!), or

• have much time (this will be a repeatable process once you set it up, so only 5-10 minutes for the audit + decision per month!)

This post is NOT going to be a listicle of tools you should keep, but more of a framework on how to filter out what’s important for you.

It’s going to cover:

• how to create a single source of truth for your entire tech stack

• how to use the audit worksheet (included below!) to simplify and accelerate decision-making

• how to maintain and keep the process working

And when you're done laying down your tools to rest, you’ll be left with a clean marketing tech stack that doesn’t sit and gather mold or leak much-needed cashflow.

And this list left would look widely different for everyone (as it should!).

Let’s dive in!

A little throwback.
You know that big cleaning your mom forced you to do before every big holiday/dreaded-visitor-arrivals?

Scrubbing baseboards, tossing expired spices, and discovering 3 mismatched socks under the couch?

Turns out, she was onto something.

Let’s face it: Your martech stack is the underwear drawer of your business.

And no shame—we’ve all been guilty of a little tool-hoarding (even here at INM!).
But now it’s time to ditch the holey pairs, so roll up your sleeves and get ready to Marie Kondo this chaos.

And if you don’t, it’s highly likely you’ll:

• continue getting charged for what you don’t need/use

• end up overwhelmed with the amount of tools that do the same dang thing

• miss out on better opportunities (workarounds or better, low-cost alternatives)

Better tackle the chaos monster now. 🧌 

The Big Dump

If you don’t already have a list, create one for all the tools you’re using.
Here’s a template for the one we use (and regularly update) at INM.

This template works on two fronts:

• you get a handy shortcut when you (or your team members) are on the lookout for a tool that does a specific task

• you get to track what tools you have so you can easily filter the ones to go on the chopping block

Once you have this data, compile it in one place. No need to get fancy.

When you’re done, it’s time to prepare for your tool funerals.

(begins a dirge)

Killing Your Darlings (i.e., the Big Audit) with Your Tool Obituary Worksheet

I’m not gonna lie, if it’s the first time you’re auditing your tech stack, this bit will take you the longest.

This is your audit/tool obituary worksheet where your tools will live (and die):

Here’s how to use it:

Step 1: The Sorting Ceremony

Drop that list of your existing tools in the first column.
For each tool, choose a category from the dropdown list on the sheet:

Step 2: The “Dang-We-Pay-for-This?!” Reveal

For this step, you’ll need to put on your detective hat and do some fieldwork. If you’re not the person who buys the tools, find the person who’s name is the registered account holder when you login. Admin dashboard, here you come!

You’ll need to know:

• What each tool does (a one liner will suffice. (e.g., Canva=makes pretty slides)

• Monthly cost

• Last used (by anyone on your team) date

At this point, you might discover tools you’ve been paying for without anyone having used it for a while. Let’s take a moment of silence for all the lost bucks.

Annnd we shall adjust our tool belts and get back to worrrkkkk!

Step 3: The “Break Up” Test

Next up is the must have decision. Be ruthless.
Think, if this were an employee, would I fire them?

Here’s a quick filter question you can use to identify the “must-have-ness” of the tool:

Did the tool:

• drive revenue?

• save time?

• reduce stress?

This will help you break those tools into:

• Must have -Yes (the marketing breakers) = My business burns without you.

• Must have -No (nice-to-have tools) = We’re just friends.

Spoiler alert: If you’re marking something “Yes” and haven’t used it in three months, you’re just deluding yourself.

For the pain to remove column, calculate how difficult it would be to either stop using it or replacing it with a workaround, and give a rating on a scale of 1-5,

Where:

• 1 - Easiest: just need to end the subscription. and no one will miss it, because no one's been using it and it's integrated with literally nothing".

• 3 - Somewhat effort-consuming but doable: might need to export the tool data and pause billing, but no integrations to replace.

• 5- Excruciatingly time/resource consuming: there’s crucial data (think all your integrations/customer info that you don’t have anywhere else ) in the tool that would need to be exported if it ceased to exist. E.g., customer data in a CRM that’s integrated with your analytics.

Step 4: The Guillotine

Now that you have the itty bitty deets of all your tools in one place, it’s time to drive a bulldozer of truth through your stack.

Hardhats on, folks—this is a demolition zone.

Here’s a quick decision-making tree for you:

So, if your ‘fancy’ social scheduler ($50/month, used twice) hits ‘NO’ on the first two questions,

Bring in the demolition crew. 🚧

Step 5: How to keep the good times going

this past week I asked Marketing Directors and Ops Managers on LinkedIn, Slack, and Reddit what tools they’ve cut down and what they replaced it with. or if they replaced them at all.

The pattern? getting rid of expensive tools (specifically analytics-based) and replace with an already-existing tool in their martech stack or a low-cost alternative, like replacing Asana ($10.99/user/mo) + Confluence ($5.16/user/mo) + Airtable ($20/user/mo)

with just Notion ($20/user/mo).

But how do you make the choice to keep or kill?

For 5 days, replace one tool with manual workarounds, e.g., a CRM you barely use (cough, Hubspot, cough) for a Google Sheets (here’s a link to the one Sophia mentioned in a previous issue).

At the end of your work week, ask: did this actually hurt results, make your process too difficult, or simply made you wish you were using the original tool instead?

If you didn’t miss it, ditch it.

In the past year at INM, we’ve ditched tools like

• Narrative BI (we were getting the analytics we already needed),

• Docusign (switched to Mailtrack because it was a better deal! 🤑)

• and Mailchimp (RIP to your pre-enterprise version 🥲)

because we already had workarounds that worked better for us.

And better yet, after burying our bloatware (RIP ~$3K/year in zombie subscriptions 🥲 ), we did something wild.

We actually used that cash for things that matter. Like:

• Upgraded our real MVP tools: Sophia is our in-house ChatGPT Queen, and we upgraded it!

• Hired a human: We’re currently onboarding a VA who’s (officially) hired to assist with our marketing and (unofficially) to squee with us on our calls!

• Savings: Nothing like some financial margin while the world is burnin’

• Office supplies: jk, we’re all remote. we used it on coffee. #noregerts

Do this a few months, and you’ll find out that workarounds like Zapier + Google Sheets save you a lot more time and money than any of the shiny new tools that promised you so much.

And if you cut too quick?

You can always come back to the shiny tool once you actually have need of it and your manual processes aren't working well anymore!

See you in your inboxes next week!

Cheers!

Aelia ⚡🧕🏽 & Sophia 💜👩🏽‍💻

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