The number of products on the market indicates that most of them aren't suites incorporating multiple solutions but, rather, point solutions designed to fill individual needs. Marketers need a way to weave all of their solutions together and make the most of their tools without a ton of work on the back end. For marketers faced with the daunting prospect of building out their own flexible marketing stack, there are steps they can take to make the process much less of a headache. When choosing solutions, don't overlook integrations When you're shopping for new solutions, integrations should be top of mind. They are key to building out your marketing stack: They can make or break implementation. In the end, if the task of integration becomes too great, it will negate the ROI on a new solution. The point of automation is to free up your team's time while providing tangible insights and results. That means solutions that go beyond "if this, then that" logic—combining data-based triggers, actions, and logic to create automated workflows. It's better to start with the basics and then scale as your company's individual needs and goals evolve. But as the company grows and its needs become more complex, it will want to bring all of the above systems into the fold to deliver more personalized customer experiences.
Welcome to the new age of marketing tech—the era of distributed platforms, microservices, and modularization.
The number of available solutions has grown rapidly over the past several years, and marketing channels have been multiplying faster than marketers can keep up. Last year alone, the number of marketing-tech offerings—everything from all-in-one solutions to individual best-of-breed platforms—increased 40%.
The number of products on the market indicates that most of them aren’t suites incorporating multiple solutions but, rather, point solutions designed to fill individual needs.
As companies grow and evolve, their needs also evolve. As a result, marketers are now relying less on bundled enterprise suites and more on homegrown stacks composed of best-of-breed solutions.
But it’s not always clear what’s to be done. Marketers need a way to weave all of their solutions together and make the most of their tools without a ton of work on the back end. And it’s no surprise that best-of-breed solutions are superior only when they can work in lockstep as if they were an all-in-one solution.
That brings us to one of marketers’ biggest challenges: choosing the right solutions.
For marketers faced with the daunting prospect of building out their own flexible marketing stack, there are steps they can take to make the process much less of a headache.
When choosing solutions, don’t overlook integrations
When you’re shopping for new solutions, integrations should be top of mind. They are key to building out your marketing stack: They can make or break implementation.
Regardless of your company’s size, cumbersome or poorly executed integrations can do more harm than good. Clunky third-party integrations can hobble otherwise powerful marketing solutions and make it difficult to maintain a smoothly operating stack and to iterate when needed.
The bottom line: the more work required on the back end, the less nimble and scalable your stack becomes.
With that in mind, look for tools with built-in integrations or, at the very least, use third parties with connector technologies and applications that can group together…
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