To spend or not to spend

When it comes to MarTech, is it admirable to be thrifty? Is it reckless?

Kevan Lee
Crumbs
3 min readSep 12, 2017

--

Serendipitously, while putting together an early version of our 2018 marketing budget, I came across an ah-mazing SlideShare full of the software used by other marketing teams.

You can check out the full SlideShare here (major thanks to the MarTech conference for putting this together). A couple outstanding MarTech stacks, in my mind:

Allocadia

Bynder

Epiphan Video

Microsoft

These are fascinating to me a) because I love being a fly on the wall and b) because of the way these MarTech stacks support the customer’s journey. They aren’t just lists of software, they are entire customer ecosystems, supported at different points by different software.

Inspired by this, I put together a quick snapshot of the MarTech stack we have at Buffer.

In addition to the above, there are also tools that we share with the rest of our team, especially our planning tools like Slack, Zoom, etc. and our data tools like Looker. That being said, our MarTech stack for just the customer journey is quite lean. In 2017, we’ve budgeted $24,000 total for software expense, >75% of which comes from email and web hosting alone.

I’ve enjoyed wearing our thriftiness as a badge of honor. “Look at all we can do without spending any money!”

Yet as we evolve our positioning for Buffer more upmarket and more fully into the B2B space, I’ve found my spendthrift views evolving. “What more could we be doing if we spent more money, in the right places?”

I used to think it was reckless to spend too much money. But … maybe it’s reckless to not spend enough?

Would love to hear an of your thoughts and how this works at your company. 😊

--

--