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Here’s a TL;DR for you:

What exactly is tech debt?

Tech debt is the accumulation of outdated or inefficient technology that can stall your growth and agility. But it’s more than just an engineering problem.

Ask yourself this: How many marketing dollars are going toward a tool that was brought in years ago and isn't serving its intended purpose?

Maybe you’ve felt it: that frustration when launching a new campaign takes a week instead of a day, or when your team is forced to work around a tool that no one remembers why they bought it.

Or maybe some tools were onboarded without a plan, and now you’ve ended up in a situation where they’re working against you. It happens.

But marketers want to move fast and stay ahead of the game. Being responsive just doesn't cut it.

Why should I care?

So, your tools or processes are a little slow. Does it really matter that much?

The hard truth is that tech debt can cost you in many different areas of marketing—even new campaign launches.

How many times have you heard something like this from your team: “I can't launch a new campaign on the website right now. I have to file a ticket and wait a week.”

And by the time you actually do launch? Your competitor is already out in the market.

This creates a process and innovation bottleneck.

A lot of this stems from short-term planning. Maybe you've got a very tight IT infrastructure and your marketers are allowed to purchase tools for the short-term. But really, what they needed all along was a more advanced tool.

This means your marketing team can't move fast enough or deliver on business goals and outcomes quickly. That means it’s time to reevaluate your tech stack.

When tech debt feeds into data debt

When you think about digital experiences, customers today demand a certain standard. They want to go on an app and have an AI agent help them instead of sorting through the entire site.

Content has to be quick for delivery, but in order to make these delivery choices, you need data as the foundation.

The tools necessary to capture customer information need to be connected to those digital experiences. Without proper tools, you can’t take action to improve these experiences.

That’s how tech debt can also cause issues on the data and reporting side.

The 2000s called—they want their tech back

When you think of the 2000s or even the 2010s, you had a system of website architecture that was very much locked in. Any new platform had to be built independently, and you had middleware connecting the data platforms.

Now, things are moving much faster with Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless (MACH) architecture (more on this later).

Brick and mortar business sites are still important for a B2C company, but digital is becoming increasingly essential—especially in the aftermath of COVID-19.

With D2C and B2C, digital teams are essentially IT-rebranded. They’re looking at the architecture and saying, ‘here's the security protocol in the wrapper, but we're keeping all systems available for integration with newer applications.’

Essentially, the mindset has changed from a waterfall approach to an agile approach.

Agile allows marketers to build campaigns and pages and manage website content just as easily as they were texting someone.

Why headless architecture matters in modern development

When you think of a website, historically, you had a database and a content platform that was integrated into the database. This also required you to set up a SQL server like a WordPress, with heavy reliance on the development team.

Headless architecture means splitting the content layer from the back end. By doing this, the content stays with the marketing team.

You can manage the content or build an A/B test on the website, and you don't need a developer to write a piece of code or launch it in production. It's all integrated and enabled.

This ultimately means more freedom for the marketers. And Leadpulse can build these systems ground up for our customers.

Trust us: your marketing team will love the freedom and power to experiment and build experiences out.

Your first step to reducing tech debt

Everyone knows that admitting you have a problem is the first step. But after that, it’s time to ask your team some tough questions.

Don’t fear change—lead with it

A lot of organizations are leading with digital-first. They’re not just responding to market changes but setting the standards.

That being said, there's always a fear about change management. What happens if you’re not able to build this green architecture?

But a lot of monolithic old architectures were built in a way that needed five developers from engineering dedicated for marketing teams.

By contrast, headless is very open architecture. It's also very easily adaptable to any future roadmap.

At Leadpulse, we often lead with these questions:

Unlocking deeper personalization and localization

Customers expect personal, fast experiences. Waiting weeks to launch isn’t an option.

Here’s a fun fact: every large organization that's excelling on personalization and localization is on an open, headless architecture.

When you compare an old platform with a modern aid CMS, the difference is how quickly they’re responding to customer choices.

All things considered, customers spend very little time on your product pages, deciding whether they like that product or not. You have seconds to grab their attention.

Content plays an important role, but the speed at which you deliver it is absolutely important, too. If the page doesn't load fast enough or if it doesn't have the right personalization, you'll never see that person coming back.

Headless platforms have the smarter systems that allow you to build multiple segments referencing multiple data systems and make that choice real time in milliseconds.

Marketers don't need developers to do that.

Back in the day, you would have a ticket with the developer that would take a month to go live and build with very locked-down features. By the time that experience went into production, your competitors were already moving faster.

Leadpulse helps your marketing team build and adapt quickly so growth never slows down.

AI tools can also help build those experiences which marketers can then go and validate. And none of that is possible if you don't have a headless architecture.

Remember to build a strong foundation first so that you're able to stack on any AI tools. You can't just build an AI agent if your tech stack is old and outdated.

Managing your tech debt moving forward

So, you implement a new system. How can you be sure you won’t be running into the same issues next year?

The idea is a continuous audit. Quarterly or semi-annually, you should be revisiting your architecture.

Surprisingly, very few organizations spend enough time to rethink or audit their process technology to find those underlying problems.

Every software as a service (SaaS) company out there will continue to try and sell you the entire suite of products. They have product A, product B and product C; all three integrate, everything works perfectly and this is apparently the dream you've always wanted.

But do you actually need that? Are you prepared to actually incorporate that into your architecture and keep it clean?

If a product isn't used and simply sitting there, then that creates duplications and process and communication issues. The hours lost on the project start to pile up.

It's very important that there is open-minded conversation around how that product is going to help you over the next couple months or year. What business outcomes is it going to deliver?

And if you do adopt a new product, make sure the adoption grows internally and it really supports your innovation.

Trends to look out for

We know AI is everywhere, but AI tools for marketers are especially exciting. AI tooling allows you to integrate multiple data sources, build those experiences at scale and help your business reach your outcomes very quickly. This applies to internal tools for employees or AI agents.

Every organization talks a lot about technology and AI, but very little on governance. How do you make AI tooling and its outcomes more accessible?

Also keep in mind how new audiences and new generations coming into the market have new expectations of customer experiences, websites and apps. This can take the form of AI summaries with generative engine optimization (GEO).

There’s going to be a mindset shift of how content is consumed. As marketers, we need to deliver that content quickly and keep pace with innovation.

Making sure that your architecture is ready for that shift is just one exciting step you can take.

How can Leadpulse help?

Leadpulse is an agency that helps modern teams simplify their websites, mobile applications and marketing tech. We help marketing teams break free from outdated systems by simplifying and modernizing your digital foundation.

Leadpulse builds scalable, headless websites that separate the frontend presentation layer from the back-end content management system (CMS) and repair broken infrastructure that slows down growth.

In simple terms? We build sites using reusable “Design systems” so your marketing teams can tweak pages without ever calling a developer.