Most small businesses think they have a marketing strategy. What they actually have is a pile of tools, duct tape, and wishful thinking.
It looks like this:
- A Facebook ad launched at midnight because “we need leads now.”
- Three different email platforms running at once because no one wanted to migrate.
- Dashboards that don’t line up when one says 200 leads, another says 20.
- A credit card bill full of $29-$99 tools no one remembers buying.
That’s not strategy. That’s Random Acts of Marketing.
And if you’re in that cycle, you’re not failing because you’re lazy. You’re failing because the system is broken.
Why Random Acts of Marketing Happen
The dirty secret no one tells you: small businesses are set up to fail at marketing. The SaaS industry survives on your chaos.
Every week, a new tool promises “plug and play growth.” You sign up, slap it onto the mess, and hope. Then the next shiny tool drops, and you repeat. Before long, your “strategy” is a Franken-stack built on hype and half-finished experiments.
The problem isn’t effort. It’s that you’re solving for tools instead of solving for outcomes.
The Real Cost of a Messy Stack
A bad stack isn’t just annoying. It’s expensive.
- Money leaks: I once audited a scaling SaaS company paying $2,800 a month for tools that overlapped in features. No one even knew who owned the subscriptions. We cut $1,500 a month without losing functionality.
- Time drains: A coach I worked with had her VA copy-pasting leads from one system into another because “the integration was too hard.” That was 10 wasted hours a week, ALL gone the second we set up one workflow.
- Data decay: If your attribution is broken, your strategy is broken. An e-commerce client thought Facebook ads were killing it. When we fixed their tracking, it turned out 70% of the revenue was coming from email. Imagine the wasted budget if we hadn’t cleaned that up.
- Burnout: Marketing chaos isn’t just costly. It demoralizes teams. Nothing kills momentum faster than running hard and realizing the numbers don’t add up.
Here’s the kicker: most leaders know the stack is broken. They just don’t believe fixing it can be simple.
How Everyone Else Teaches Stack Building (and Why It’s Wrong)
The common advice you’ll hear is: “Pick the best-in-class tool for every category.”
That’s how you end up with 15 tools, 15 logins, and zero clarity. “Best-in-class” means nothing if the tools don’t play together.
Another classic: “Automate everything.” Wrong. Automating chaos just makes the chaos faster.
Here’s my unpopular opinion: The best stack is the smallest stack. Every tool you add should earn its place, like a player on an elite sports team. If it’s not pulling its weight, it’s benched.
My Framework: Audience → Process → Stack
Here’s the order everyone else gets backward.
- Audience first. Who are you talking to, and how do they actually buy? Example: If your buyers spend all day on LinkedIn, why are you burning cash on TikTok ads just because it’s trendy?
- Process second. What’s the journey you want them to take? Map the path: discover → engage → convert → repeat. Example: For one consultant client, we rebuilt her funnel so leads went from a free workshop → nurture email sequence → call booking. Conversion rates doubled.
- Stack last. Only after you know your audience and process do you pick tools. And here’s the test: does this tool make the process smoother, faster, or smarter? If not, cut it.
- Friction less-ness. Reality is we will never be able to remove ALL the friction in the systems flow but we should constantly be looking to lessen it.
A Quick Stack Audit You Can Do Right Now
Grab your credit card statement. List every tool you’re paying for. Next to each one, write:
- What it’s actually doing for us (not what it could do).
- How often we actually use it.
- Who on the team is using it – by role.
- What would break if we cut it tomorrow.
I’ve never seen a client do this without discovering at least 20–30% of their stack is dead weight.
One founder I worked with discovered she was paying for four separate landing page builders. We kept one, consolidated everything, and not only did she save money, her team finally knew where to build pages, which cut project time in half.
The Bottom Line
Random acts of marketing feel busy, but they don’t build businesses. A clean, audience-first stack gives you clarity, saves you money, and makes every campaign pull its weight.
The next time you’re tempted to sign up for another shiny tool, stop and ask:
- Does this serve my audience?
- Does it support my process?
- Or is it just adding to the chaos?
If it’s not a yes, it’s a no.
Ready to Untangle Your Stack?
- One giant mess? Book a Done Day Intensive and we’ll clean it up in 7 hours flat.
- Need a roadmap, not duct tape? An AI Audit shows you exactly where your stack is leaking and how to fix it.
- Scaling so fast your team is breaking? That’s when you call in the Fractional Fix.
No more Franken-stacks. No more random acts of marketing. Let’s build a system that actually works.