In today’s post, I’ll pull the lid back on what’s powering Doug Digital, uncovering the digital marketing techstack — the tools, platforms and services that I love and use every day.

What do I use to run my blog in 2024?

It’s a classic: WordPress

Despite the hate that it often receives, I continue to stand by WordPress as a reliable, versatile CMS that features an extraordinary amount of plugins to transform the experience.

The notable plugins that you may see on the site include:

• Folders Pro: I love neat and tidy assets on any CMS, and Folders fits that box nicely.
• Rank Math SEO Pro: Sure, Yoast SEO gets the lion’s share of SEO love but I’ve found Rank Math easy to setup and the inbuilt reporting that I see when I open my dashboard is great.
• Presto Player Pro: For video assets, I use Presto Player as it allows me to have excellent control over the look and feel of the video player and there’s some extra functionality for gating assets — particularly useful if you’re running closed-group video walkthroughs or course material.
• ActiveCampaign: With ActiveCampaign as my primary email marketing platform and contact database, it’s great to easily bring ActiveCampaign forms and lead generation into WordPress; this is a newer plugin to the roster (only introduced this week, so more to come on that!)
• LeadConnector: This allows me to host Funnel pages and chat bots from my main CRM, GoHighLevel.

Other honourable mentions include Bunny.net (CDN) and Site Kit by Google.

I am experimenting with the likes of Medium, Ghost and Substack, but for now, the integration with my existing tools, and the customisability has me sticking with WordPress.

What do I use to run my email marketing campaigns in 2024?

This is an odd one, and part of a wider review I’m taking on my tech stack.

I currently use GoHighLevel to do almost everything marketing related: social media scheduling, workflow automations, lead scoring, lead capture forms, email marketing, funnel building, website building. But it’s very much a tool for agencies looking to offer a full-stack, whitelabel service to clients.

On that front, it does bring anything together. But I can’t shake this nagging feeling of vendor lock-in; I have a tool that does everything, and arguably at a more affordable cost, but it doesn’t do any single thing to a standard that I would feel is industry-leading or even close to that. I’m paying for the convenience.

To that end, I’ve started going back to my old faithful: ActiveCampaign. It’s extremely well integrated to other service providers, has an excellent email builder and I find that my workflow to build emails, segment my audience (another standout feature) and report on the performance of these activities is better than most tools on the market.

So, in short, I have been using GoHighLevel to run my email marketing campaigns but I am looking to migrate to ActiveCampaign.

What do I use to run my marketing automations in 2024?

Frankly, the answer is nearly identical to the above, in that I predominantly use GoHighLevel and am experimenting with ActiveCampaign. The difference here is really where GoHighLevel shines; the automation builder in GoHighLevel is great but, crucially for me, it has a better connection to the other assets that are built into the CRM.

For example, GoHighLevel allows me to trigger automations when someone replies positively or negatively to a text; when someone sends a specific message to me via Social Media direct messages; when someone progresses through a certain pipeline stage of my deal funnel. In a live example, I am adding opt-ins to a Custom audience in Facebook after they register for a lead magnet, so that I can exclude them from future targeting.

I’m sure someone could tell me that all of this could still be done in ActiveCampaign but for now, I’m sticking with GoHighLevel until I find the ceiling with ActiveCampaign.

What do I use to handle payments in 2024?

Stripe, all day!

No matter whether I’m sending invoices, setting up sales pages, or I need to send a quick payment link, it’s all handled through Stripe.

I touched on my usage of Stripe in greater detail in my most recent blog article, in which I pointed out that Stripe has a wealth of features that I’ll likely never have need of, but I find that it’s ideal for now.

One quick special mention: I still swear by Hello Bonsai for sending invoices, since I absolutely love how easy it is to generate on-brand invoices that are tracked and managed seamlessly. (Someone did mention to me recently that Stripe also does this, so there’s something for me to check out another time)

What do I use to schedule Social Media Content in 2024?

To schedule my social media content, I use GoHighLevel once again. This is one of those cases where it’s sorely lacking when compared to the likes of Sprout Social, Buffer or even HootSuite, but the fact that it’s bundled as a feature set with all the other perks of GoHighLevel makes it hard to justify moving away.

I’m not massive on social media — maybe there’s something for me to work on in 2024, so having a dedicated SMMT doesn’t really float my boat for now.

One handy feature that I do like is that I can ‘group’ accounts, which comes in very handy when managing multiple accounts for one business vertical or client in a given post.

There is an overwhelming oversight on the Social Media front of GHL which relates to reporting: there is absolutely zero reporting on the social media posts and pages, which feels like a huge missed opportunity. I literally have no visibility of how content is performing.

Thankfully, the next tool can help with that…

What do I use to track marketing data in 2024?

This is a no-brainer: Databox

I adore Databox and am a Certified Level 2 Partner, having fallen in love with the platform’s ability to connect multiple integrations, build beautiful dashboards, and be truly ‘data driven’. For those that don’t know it, think of Databox as a direct competitor to LookerStudio with a couple of notable exceptions. But in short, databox allows you to connect the data from almost all of your common marketing tools and business reporting tools, to centralise these metrics into one space.

For Social Media, you may have a follower overview dashboard, that breaks down the performance of every channel on one page, with a custom metric to sum-up all of the channel followers to give you a holistic social audience view.

Or maybe you’re looking to optimise your inbound funnel, so you connect your Stripe funnel, ActiveCampaign and paid media to get a view on the leads that are coming through, how they’re converting, how much you’re paying for those leads and then how much is coming out the other end — in one dashboard.

The reason I keep coming back to Databox boils down to several key features:

• Goal Setting: I can select core metrics and set KPIs against them. I will then be notified when a goal is on/off track for a given period of time.
• Beautiful dashboards: There’s more flexibility with something like LookerStudio, but I find Databox’s dashboards much easier on the eyes and I can easily show them on screens and cycle them with native looped dashboards on a single URL.
• No extra plugins: I dropped LookerStudio because I then need to connect with SuperMetrics in order to pull in everything that isn’t a Google data source. Massive headache!
• Ease of integration: Expanding on the above, I find with LookerStudio that I need to spend time mapping each data source to templates or dashboards. In Databox, I connect it through the Data Sources panel and then it just works!

There are some premium features that tempt me, but I just can’t justify the additional membership fees yet, but the whitelabel service and forecasting is tremendously exciting. Imagine forecasting out 24 months of data from your favourite metrics, with a straightforward upper/middle/lower tier projection horizon. In seconds.

What do I use to write content in 2024?

The tool I use to write my blogs, emails and even some social posts is Ulysses.

It’s a clean, Mac-centric platform (which I believe has just launched for Windows?), that brings to life the idea of ‘distraction-free’ writing. The in-built grammar checker is excellent, and I love that I can set goals in terms of: minimum word count, maximum word count or even daily word count. Very handy for those writers that want to set themselves goals.

I have previously paired this with Hemmingway, Grammarly and even ChatGPT for copy-editing — but I tend to find that Ulysses’ out of the box editor does the job well enough for me.

I have also sampled IA Writer, which doesn’t use a properitary file format like Ulysses does, but I kept running away from IA Writer as I preferred the writing experience of Ulysses.

I have also dabbled with Notion’s AI content generation — but I’m still something of a copywriting snob. I’m no wordsmith by any stretch of the imagination, and I’m sure that you could find a few errors in this article, but there’s something rewarding about owning that copy and seeing it sink or swim purely based on the words you put to paper/to keyboard/ to parchment and not the whims of a third-party AI generation.

Writing in Ulysses makes me feel like the copy is truly my own words, and that’s something that I can’t feel with AI tools.

So, in summary:

• My top CMS tool for blogging: WordPress
• My top email marketing tool: ActiveCampaign
• My top payment handling tool: Stripe
• My top social media marketing tool: GoHighLevel
• My top data tracking tool: Databox
• My top writing tool: Ulysses

There are a few tools that I use in conjunction with these to truly power the engine but for now, these are the bread and butter that keep my digital marketing moving.