Seamless MarTech Stack Integration is one of the most crucial considerations that chief marketing officers must consider while choosing the right marketing technology for their MarTech Stack.
Marketing leaders exploring business-driven marketing tools should evaluate integration capabilities with the existing tools in their MarTech stack.
Seamless integration of marketing technology tools has always been challenging for businesses. Modern-day marketers can make the most out of best-of-breed tools but find it difficult to make them work together efficiently.
The article shares effective and practical strategies for marketing leaders to ensure seamless MarTech stack integration.
Key Considerations for MarTech Stack Integration
Various marketing technology providers have inbuilt integrations to one or more systems. The presales decision makers must determine the use cases of these integrations’ support before making a purchase decision.
CMOs should evaluate the vendor to analyze whether they have proven use cases for these integrations. Do these proven use cases match the organization’s needs, or is there a need for unique scenarios that are impossible to achieve or negatively hamper the native integration? Decision makers should clarify if the inbuilt integration can be tailor-made to fit the organization’s needs. Businesses must understand whether the integration can migrate all the required data to and from the designated systems and execute the necessary functions.
Also Read: Benefits of Incorporating Marketing Technology in Businesses
In addition, CMOs also need to consider the extension of the system to customize tools to achieve the desired results. Businesses must seamlessly integrate customer relationship management (CRM) software and marketing automation platform (MAP) to streamline presales operations. A few enterprises have opportunity management protocols that require them to personalize the data frameworks and capabilities in their CRMs.
MarTech Integrations in Cloud-First World
Legacy solutions have become obsolete, especially while ensuring the seamless integration of marketing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) systems. Businesses that do not invest time, money, and effort cannot achieve seamless integration marketing tools in their MarTech stack. Organizations can leverage commercial integration tools like Integration-Platform-as-a-Service (iPaaS) to streamline the MarTech stack integration. Most vendors offer built-in connectors that eliminate the complexities of communication with the API of the target system. There are various factors that CMOs need to consider while ensuring a seamless MarTech integration in a cloud-native environment.
MarTech Integration Approaches
Here are a few MarTech integration specifics that CMOs can consider to ensure seamless integration:
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Manual or Automated Integration
Many businesses might still have resources that accomplish the integration task manually by migrating the attendee’s list from the event management platform and into the MAP. Embracing automation in the integration process will allow businesses to eliminate the human factor and automatically schedule data synchronization. CMOs that embrace automation to ensure seamless MarTech integration will help save field mappings, modify data, allow data transfer at scale, and reduce human errors.
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Web Services or Flat-File Integration
Web services integration utilizes features that expose the system to the Internet for other tools to interact with. Moreover, other than migrating data, web services can influence action in the systems, like allowing another system to control a MAP to execute a batch email campaign without the need to log into the MAP and execute that task. Embracing a Web services MarTech integration approach can find various possibilities for system interactions, but with this approach, clients face restrictions to the functionalities provided by every vendor.
Adopting a Flat-file MarTech stack integration includes leveraging flat files in CSV or text format to share data. The best systems have inbuilt functionalities that export and import flat files from the servers automatically.
CMOs can choose either of the MarTech stack integration approaches. Regardless of the preferred approach, all systems in the MarTech stack should have inbuilt capabilities because businesses cannot add functionalities directly into the platform.
Also Read: Budget Optimization Strategies for MarTech Leaders Amid Economic Uncertainty
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REST or SOAP API
The approach helps marketers to understand how one system interacts with another through the Internet for its web services. The debate about whether REST or SOAP is better, will never end, but decision-makers need to understand that REST is the latest approach to SOAP. Various vendors in the market are expanding their REST web services and pausing SOAP web services.
JSON is the data format for REST, and XML is the data format for SOAP which is used for interacting with web services.
Key Take Away
There has been a tremendous evolution in marketing tools over the past few years; however, making them work together has always been a challenge for marketers. The MarTech integration challenges make it even more difficult for CMOs to ensure seamless integration. If organizations do not have skilled resources to accomplish the Integration goals, they can consult an experienced professional to guide them.
