Marketing Automation 101: How to Build a Fully Automated Growth Stack

What Is a Growth Stack?

A growth stack is the collection of tools and automations that power your marketing engine. When built right, it captures leads, nurtures them, and converts them into customers — largely on autopilot.

The best growth stacks aren't the most complex. They're the ones where every tool talks to every other tool, and data flows seamlessly from first touch to closed deal.

The Core Components

Every growth stack needs these five layers:

1. Traffic Generation

How you get eyeballs on your content and offers.

Tools: SEO (Surfer SEO, Semrush), paid ads (Meta, Google), social media (Buffer, Hootsuite), content (Jasper, Surfer)

2. Lead Capture

How you turn visitors into contacts.

Tools: Landing pages (Webflow, Framer), forms (Typeform, Tally), popups (OptinMonster), chatbots (Intercom, Drift)

3. Lead Nurturing

How you build trust and move leads toward a purchase.

Tools: Email marketing (ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit), SMS (Twilio, Klaviyo), retargeting (Meta, Google)

4. Sales Conversion

How you close deals and process payments.

Tools: CRM (HubSpot, Pipedrive), proposals (PandaDoc), payments (Stripe)

5. Automation & Integration

The glue that connects everything.

Tools: Make, Zapier, n8n, Pabbly Connect

Building Your First Automation

Let's build a real automation that most businesses need: the new lead workflow.

The Trigger

A visitor fills out your contact form.

The Automation

1. Add to CRM — Create a new contact in HubSpot with all form data
2. Tag based on source — If they came from a blog post, tag with the topic
3. Send welcome email — Immediate confirmation with next steps
4. Start nurture sequence — 5-email series over 14 days
5. Notify sales — If the lead scores above threshold, alert your team in Slack
6. Add to retargeting — Push to Meta custom audience for ad retargeting

How to Build It in Make

Make's visual builder makes this straightforward:

1. Create a new scenario
2. Add a Webhook module as the trigger
3. Connect your form to the webhook URL
4. Add modules for each step (HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, Slack, Meta)
5. Add routers for conditional logic (high-value lead → sales alert)
6. Test with a real form submission
7. Turn it on and forget about it

Total setup time: 1-2 hours. Time saved per week: 5-10 hours.

Common Automation Recipes

Here are the automations we recommend every business sets up first:

Recipe 1: Blog Post → Social Media

When you publish a new blog post, automatically share it to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook with customized messaging for each platform.

Recipe 2: New Customer → Onboarding

When a payment is processed in Stripe, create an account, send onboarding emails, add to customer success CRM, and schedule a check-in for day 7.

Recipe 3: Support Ticket → Priority Routing

When a support ticket comes in, analyze the sentiment with AI, tag the priority level, and route to the right team member.

Recipe 4: Weekly Report

Every Monday at 9am, pull data from Google Analytics, your CRM, and your email platform. Compile into a summary and send to your team.

Choosing Your Stack

For solopreneurs ($50-100/month):

• Make (free plan) + ConvertKit (free up to 1K subs) + Tally (free forms) + Notion CRM (free)

For small teams ($200-500/month):

• Make ($9/mo) + ActiveCampaign ($29/mo) + HubSpot CRM (free) + Webflow ($14/mo)

For growing businesses ($500-1500/month):

• Make ($29/mo) + HubSpot Marketing ($800/mo) + Surfer SEO ($89/mo) + Jasper ($49/mo)

The #1 Mistake People Make

Building too much automation too fast. Start with one workflow. Perfect it. Then add the next.

Every automation you build is a system you need to maintain. If something breaks at 2am — and it will eventually — you need to know how to fix it.

Start simple. Scale smart.