Migrating Your MarTech Stack — Benjamin Shapiro & Todd Hines // MarTech Podcast

Quotes

• “One of the big things we did this year was when we decided to migrate our content management system and we also updated our website, a big portion of the backend, and the content for our show.” -- Ben “MIgrating from one technology to another? I wouldn’t do it for fun on the weekend. It was definitely an exercise, that’s for sure. Tedious, frustrating at times, we had our reasons for doing so and I’m sure we’ll get into it but let’s say it’s good to have finished now and have our new martech hub operating smoothly.” -- Todd “The first thing we also did is we decided that we are going to move the MarTech website off of my consulting podcast domain to its own domain. So we also had a little SEO migration.” -- Ben “Here’s the hard part. You can’t migrate from one Squarespace site to another and we didn’t want to change the platform because our team didn’t know another platform. So, knowing that you can’t copy a Squarespace site what we had to do was export our content from the Squarespace site, upload it to a WordPress site then export it from the WordPress site into a new Squarespace site so we had to workaround not being able to just copy an existing site.” -- Ben “It was a lot of fun. We were able to get all the content from the pages there and then it became a truly manual process of reorganizing and redesigning the pages and making sure that our site was up.” -- Ben “The hardest part was in the beginning. It’s just getting every page on the site looking great and really where the tediousness happens was in our episode pages. Every one of our guests has a custom page, and spend a lot of time on that to make sure it has a lot of value to the guest and looks great on our site. To come up with that initial template and to rethink how we want to present the guest pages was harder than actually duplicating once we have the template we can copy within Squarespace and it is a lot of copy paste work. It was incredibly tedious as it was very manual. But getting the templates figured out upfront, once that was finished it was a cruise control situation.” -- Todd “This project could have easily sunk both of us. The big learning here was, something that we have very well in developing content was, ‘Hey, we’re going to figure out what we wanted to look like, we’re going to document how we want the pages to be built, and we’re going to hand it off to somebody else and use the freelance army to go build the pages so then all we are really responsible for is evaluating, editing, and making sure that the pages were right before we publish.” -- Ben “Making the decision to migrate from Airtable to Monday.com was because we wanted to have a better synchronicity of our content with our goals, our strategy, and our day-to-day, week-to-week to-dos. Task management essentially. So combining task management and content in one place.” -- Todd “One of the things that we were challenged with is that we have our content management in Airtable, we have a separate service where we are evaluating our marketing efforts, a separate platform for tracking our business development, our sales efforts and a separate place where we are managing our sponsorship relationship. We wanted to pull in everything together and also be able to automate the process so when a task and a status has changed, it assigns someone else as responsible but also to create a task list. That’s the really big feature of why we used Monday.” -- Ben “I’m a firm believer that you can’t just look at a calendar and understand what you’re supposed to do easily. It’s better to have a single source of task list where all of your tasks are combined so you could focus on prioritizing and executing.” -- Ben “An analogy that comes to mind is being used to eating with your right hand and if you have to switch over and eat with your left, everyone can do it but it feels unnatural and it’s going to be frustrating and may not be as enjoyable to eat if you’re forcing through it with your opposite hand.” -- Todd“Monday was a similar thing and humans are incredibly adaptable. It’s just that transition phase and getting used to something that you’re not quite used to. Another thing is when the tool is a lot more robust and in some ways has a lot of great functionality for some of the things like the task management we need to be mindful of not letting complexity get in the way of execution.” -- Todd “One of the reasons I moved from Airtable to Monday.com is that I came back from paternity leave and didn’t sleep for three months because I had a newborn baby and everything I looked at just felt disorganized. As the leader of the organization, or maybe because I was a parent for the second time, I felt the need to nest and I wanted to clean up the house and make sure that everything function in an optimal way because we just didn’t have time to fuck around anymore.” -- Ben “The beauty of moving towards a platform like Monday is it wasn’t just a content management system, it is also on some level a marketing automation service where it got tie-ins to some of the outreach campaigns that we do, we could pull in data from our sales efforts and it keeps the team organized, it just felt like it’s able to tie in all of the data and serve as a central repository.” -- Ben “Don’t get me wrong. Monday has got its problems. It’s not the easiest tool to use and it’s not the worst. I think we’re happy with it. It doesn’t matter what tool you’re using, what we were faced with is I’ve got a marketing point solution that is useful for something but I want to have a higher ceiling and I want to be able to integrate all the platforms, and we kind of went through essentially a martech consolidation.” -- Ben “We were able to generate more efficiency for our workforce, we’re able to give them a better understanding of what tasks they were able to do.” -- Ben “Going back to the assembly line analogy, when there is that handoff and when one person in the team completes their task, by simply adjusting the production status in Monday.com, we have an automation set up that then tags the next person responsible for their piece.” -- Todd  “Moral of the story is we went through this really painful process of moving into a platform that had an additional feature set, and it sucked. It was hard. We all had to re-learn, we had to learn to eat with our left hand and the reason why we want to learn how to do that is now our right hand is free. So there were efficiency gains.” -- Ben