Why Small Business Owners Are Drowning in Marketing Tools (And What to Do About It)
Every day, our agency watches small business owners burn themselves out trying to keep up with modern marketing demands. They download app after app, subscribe to platform after platform, and before they know it, they’re spending more time managing their marketing tools than actually marketing their business. If you’re reading this, chances are you know exactly what this feels like.
Picture this familiar scene: Your morning starts by logging into your email marketing platform to check campaign metrics. Then you hop over to your SMS platform to schedule some texts. Next, you’re diving into Facebook Ads Manager, then Google Ads, then maybe LinkedIn Ads if you’re feeling ambitious. Don’t forget about checking the analytics, updating the CRM, and making sure all the automation flows are working correctly. By the time you’re done with the technical stuff, half the day is gone, and you haven’t even thought about your actual marketing strategy.
You may be in and out of all these platforms on a day-to-day basis:
HubSpot (CRM/Marketing Platform)
SMS Platform(s) — Emotive, Klaviyo, etc
Email Marketing Platform(s) — Klaviyo, MailChimp, Constant Contact
Ad Platforms — Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Spotify
Your Database Management Tools
Your Analytics/Reporting Tools
Here’s the reality check: Recent analysis shows that the average small business owner spends about 22 hours per week just managing their marketing tools. That’s more than half a work week! Add up the cost of all these separate platforms, and you’re looking at around $2,200 per month.
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That’s before we even talk about the mental overhead of learning and maintaining proficiency in all these different systems.
How many hours have you spent watching YouTube tutorials just to figure out how to set up a simple retargeting campaign?
The enterprise solution to this problem has traditionally been to throw money at it. Get a HubSpot subscription, hire a marketing team, and call it a day. But let’s be honest — most small and medium-sized businesses can’t afford to drop that kind of cash. And even if they could, do they really need all that complexity? What these businesses actually need is a way to do everything in one place, without having to become a technical marketing guru in the process.
This was the driving force behind creating a platform that can get all of the essential tasks for meaningful lead creation done in one place. Not to add another tool to the pile, but to subtract about a dozen of them.
The goal was simple: take all the essential marketing tools — database management, messaging, advertising, reporting — and put them under one roof.
But here’s what’s truly exciting: it’s not just about saving money (though that’s nice too). It’s about giving business owners their time back. Time to think creatively about their business. Time to actually analyze their results and make smart decisions. Time to try new marketing approaches instead of just maintaining the status quo.
Consider what your business could do with an extra 22 hours per week. Maybe you’d finally have time to write that series of blog posts you’ve been putting off. Or perhaps you’d dive deep into your customer data to uncover new opportunities. You might even — and here’s a wild thought — take a long lunch break without feeling guilty about all the marketing tasks piling up.
We’ve seen businesses transform once they get this time back. One client finally had the bandwidth to start a podcast, something they’d been wanting to do for years but never had the time for. Another used their freed-up hours to personally connect with their top customers, leading to several major account expansions. This is what happens when you stop spending all your energy just keeping the marketing machine running.
Perhaps the most valuable transformation we’ve witnessed is in our clients’ confidence levels. When you’re not constantly second-guessing whether you’re using each platform correctly, when you’re not wondering if you’re missing some crucial step in your marketing process, you can actually focus on what matters: connecting with your customers and growing your business.
This isn’t about having the fanciest marketing stack or the most sophisticated automation. It’s about having the time and mental space to be a better marketer and a better business owner. Because at the end of the day, time is the one resource that can’t be manufactured. Businesses can always make more money, create more content, or run more ads. But they can’t create more hours in the day. So perhaps it’s time to stop letting marketing tools consume so much of this precious resource.
The question for small business owners isn’t whether they need better marketing tools — it’s whether they need smarter, more integrated marketing tools that give them back their most valuable asset: time.
What would your business do with an extra 22 hours every week?
If you’d like to find out more, please reach out and schedule a discovery call with us here and let’s talk about your business needs.
Thanks for reading!
