Master The Basics Before The Marketing Tech Stack

This is a post about keeping things simple - from someone who's built and supported some seriously complex tech stacks.

Because I'm all for a complex tech stack, when it's there for good reason. Big tech stacks are particularly good when you need to consume large amounts of data and pass it between systems, improving the operations of the business and the customer experience simultaneously.

But here's the thing: a big tech stack only pays off once the basics are working hard. If you're not yet using two tools to their full potential, adding a hundred more functionalities won't fix that - it just gives you more things to not quite use.

Let me give you an example. I won't name names.

A large food brand in the UK operated with one of the biggest POS (point of sale) systems globally. It combined that data with a custom-built website, app and ordering system, all feeding into one of the market-leading customer data platforms.

The customer data platform was insane - still one of my favourites to this day. The ability to see how, when, what and why people were ordering. Which ads made people click? Which ads were they clicking repeatedly? Where on the website were they signing up from? Which marketing initiatives were sparking interest - local, brand or in-store? Which push notifications made people order? Which offers drove people to store? What were they ordering as a result?

All of that. And more.

And the whole point of having all this data was to drive smarter marketing. More personalised marketing messages. More contextual ones. But what happened?

For over two years, the data sat at the bottom of the priority list while short-term sales sat at the top. And look - I completely understand it. Revenue targets are real, and the pressure to deliver this quarter is relentless. But it meant the very thing the tech stack was built for - smarter, more personal, more contextual marketing - never really got its turn.

Two to three emails a week. Blanket sends to a database of over one million. Very basic segmentation that never matured as the business grew.

Did the marketing work? It did - it definitely drove sales, and a lot of them. But could it have driven more, and left more of a mark on people's hearts (and inboxes)? Oh yes.

I'm not saying they didn't need a big tech stack. They did. But here's the lesson for any business, whatever your size: if you're going to market simply, you only need simple tools. The expensive stack is only worth it the day you're ready to actually use it.

Master the basics first. The complexity can wait - and when you're genuinely ready for it, it'll be worth every penny.