On this week’s Dear Katie, I was asked, “What is your recommended tech stack when it comes to marketing?”

Annual reviews of your marketing tech stack are crucial to keep your firm at the top of its game. I’m always looking for ways to push the limits and make life a little easier at the same time. 

While there are a lot of options for your marketing stack, these are the tools we’re personally using at Leaders Online.

The 2025 Marketing Tech Stack I’m Using

My personal favorite tools this year – and I do review them all the time – are:

Social Media Management

Social posting takes a lot of time, and batching content is something I recommend for anyone trying to stay on track with their social growth. I’m torn here.

We used to find that posting organically worked the best, but now we’re finding Metricool to work great for scheduling.

But there are always concerns that if you schedule content, you’ll lose engagement, and you will stop engaging yourself. 

If you’re going to schedule your content, what I recommend you do is track engagement to see if it makes a difference.

My favorite monitoring tool on LinkedIn is Shield.

Scheduling your posts out will help you “show up” even on those hectic days when the last thing you’re thinking about is your social media. BUT don’t forget to get on and engage when you have time. 

Email Marketing

I’ve used a lot of email marketing tools over the years, and two that I come back to always help me with:

• Client communication
• Drip campaigns
• Reminders

HubSpot and the Leaders Online App are what I recommend for scheduling campaigns. Do not send cold emails with HubSpot or any tools like that because people need to opt in to to receive mail from these platforms.

If you’re cold mailing, you definitely want to check out Woodpecker since it’s built for all of your cold emailing activities.

Graphic Creation

For us, Canva has been the go-to graphic creation tool. We use Canva for:

• Graphics
• Social media posts
• Presentations
• Really anything graphic related

Client Relationship Management (CRM)

Marketing is all about targeting your ideal clients, but you need to make sense of all of this data, too. Client relationship management platforms keep your data all in one centralized location so that you can ditch Excel, Sheets and the “old way” of doing things.

I recommend using HubSpot or the Leaders Online App to manage your leaders and prospects all in one place. Let this be your single source of truth for all the client information. 

As part of this process, look at ways to make it easy to get information into your CRM. For example, can you use Zapier to pass contact information from your scheduling link into your CRM?

Project Management

Although Asana is my favorite PM software I’ve used (and I’ve tried quite a few), we stopped using it two years ago and adopted ClickUp to get more powerful automation. 

ClickUp gets the job done for what we need, but if Asana could deliver the automation we need, we’d switch back in a heartbeat.

SEO and Analytics

Although there are endless SEO and analytics tools out there, we rely on two key solutions:

• Ahrefs: We use this tool to analyze backlinks, find high-value keywords and identify content gaps to improve search engine rankings.
• Google Analytics: A staple in SEO and marketing tech stacks. We use Analytics to understand traffic – who’s visiting the site, how they engage and what actions they take. The end goal is to use this data to optimize for conversions.

Ahrefs helps you attract visitors; Google Analytics helps you convert them to clients. 

Video Editing

For basic edits, Desecript is a great choice. Adobe Premiere Pro is the better option if you want more advanced editing options.

To transform long-form clips into short-form, I recommend OpusClips. If you’re not already using this app, you absolutely should be! It’s great at pulling out insightful pieces to use in shortform content. 

Website Management

All of our websites are built on WordPress. But if you plan to DIY your site, it’s worth looking into Squarespace. Their website builder is easy to use, and they have a large library of professional templates that make it easy to get your site up and running.

File Sharing and Collaboration

There are so many solutions for collaboration and file sharing, but our two preferred apps are:

• Google Workspace
• ClickUp

These two solutions make it easy to share content, presentations, marketing materials and resources with the team.

Ad Management

For ad management, we rely on either:

• Meta Ads Manager, or
• Google Ads
• LinkedIn Ads Manager

Overwhelmed with apps? 

I know this may seem like a lot, but the truth is that marketing really is a full-time job. By no means do you have to implement all of the apps above, though. 

Start by looking at your biggest roadblock. 

For example, maybe you struggle with holding yourself accountable for creating content. Implement PM software into your tech stack and create a task for this to keep yourself on track. 

Do you have all of your leads in your head and haven’t followed up in a while? Get a CRM.

Look for apps that solve your biggest problems and continue building out your tech stack from there.

And, that’s a wrap on this Dear Katie question.

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Now I want to hear from you. Do you have a question? 

Submit it here

Until next time, cheers to your success!

Katie