Marketing technology (martech) lies at the heart of B2B digital marketing, and excellent digital marketing relies on effective marketing technology integration. With integration, an agile, data-driven and customer-centric marketing strategy is possible.
In this blog, we’ll explain best practices and tips for unifying your marketing tools, ensuring they work together to improve your marketing performance and operational efficiency.
Understanding marketing technology integration
Martech defined: Marketing technology involves the software, tools and platforms your sales and marketing teams use to plan, execute and measure their marketing campaigns. This includes your customer relations management (CRM) software, content management systems (CMS), customer data platforms (CDPs), marketing automation and tools for email marketing, social media management, search engine optimization (SEO), advertising, and analyzing data.
On average, today’s marketing teams use 35 tools in their martech stacks. That’s a lot of different tools to juggle!
Martech integration defined: Integration is the practice of connecting marketing systems to ensure each tool works with the others, simplifying data transfer and enabling the full capabilities of your stack.
Consequences of siloed martech systems
There are more than 11,000 martech solutions on the market. Unfortunately, they’re not all designed to work together. Different programming languages and data formats create compatibility issues that impede effective martech integrations.
The consequences of siloed marketing technology include:
- Incomplete, inaccurate or duplicated customer data, which leads to
- Ineffective targeting and personalization
- Increased chance of error and duplication
- Inconsistent customer experiences across channels
- Difficulty tracking and measuring campaign performance, which leads to
- Inability to optimize campaigns based on performance
- Inefficient campaign spending
- Limited ability to automate and scale marketing efforts
- Delays in launching campaigns
- Lack of trust in data to inform decision-making
- Increased reliance on manual processes and workarounds
- Challenges in lead management and nurturing
- Decreased marketing agility, innovation and competitiveness
- Inefficient lead tracking and scoring, which leads to
- Inefficient lead tracking and scoring, which leads to
- Poor alignment between sales and marketing
Siloed martech can also frustrate your marketers and contribute to costly staff attrition. It doesn’t help that when companies can’t get the expected functionality from their B2B martech stack, they tend to overspend on martech tools, overlapping tech capabilities. In fact, as today’s businesses increase their martech investments, utilization of martech capabilities has been decreasing.
Unfortunately, adding more tools to existing technologies is an ineffective and expensive approach that perpetuates the challenge, adding to the complexity of the existing martech stack and lack of integration. The answer lies in effective marketing technology integrations.
Advantages of marketing technology integration
Martech integrations facilitate key aspects of B2B digital marketing, including:
- Unified customer view: It enables the consolidation of data from various martech tools into a single customer view, which is vital for understanding the customer journey across touchpoints and channels.
- Enhanced data analysis and decision-making: It enables companies to aggregate and analyze data more effectively, providing advanced analytics for accurate performance analysis and allowing marketers to develop actionable insights.
- Streamlined operations and increased efficiency: It allows marketers to automate manual processes and reduce redundancies in technology, data and processes, producing smoother workflows and better resource allocation, which in turn improves employee satisfaction and reduces attrition, adding to the cost savings.
- Improved customer experiences: It enables a cohesive customer experience (CX) through consistent messaging and interactions across all channels, aids in segmenting and targeting, and facilitates a cohesive personalized customer experience.
- Greater scalability: An integrated martech stack can be scaled up or down, enabling B2Bs to add or eliminate tools without disrupting operations, which is essential for adapting marketing strategies without a complete tech overhaul.
- Increased cost-effectiveness: It optimizes the use of existing tools and enables the elimination of redundant technologies, reducing software costs. Additionally, the increased campaign efficiency and effectiveness drive a higher return on investment (ROI).
The challenges of effective marketing technology integration
The integration of marketing technologies introduces challenges for B2B organizations due to the complexity and diversity of the tools involved. This complexity is compounded by the need for marketing and IT teams to have a thorough understanding of each tool’s functionalities and processes. Without this understanding, aligning marketing tools to work cohesively can become a formidable task.
Let’s take a deeper look into the issues that impede successful integration:
- Technical complexity of integration: Integrating diverse technologies, each with its own data formats, APIs and protocols, requires specialized knowledge and skills.
- Incompatibility: In addition to the incompatible data formats and standards we discussed earlier, tool compatibility is hindered by varying API offerings and capabilities, limited connectivity (especially in legacy systems), proprietary technologies or closed ecosystems, complex customizations and configurations, performance constraints and update challenges.
- Data integrity: Inaccurate, incomplete or duplicated data interferes with data quality and consistency across systems.
- Ineffective change management: To accommodate integration, staff must have the training and proficiency to adopt new technologies and adjust to new workflows.
- Privacy and security concerns: It’s both critical and challenging to ensure all integrated marketing systems comply with stringent data security and regulations.
- Resource constraints: Integration can be resource-intensive, requiring significant investments in time, budget and skilled personnel.
- Choosing the right tools: With new technologies constantly emerging, choosing tools to fit business objectives and marketing goals can be difficult, especially when considering solutions that will scale and adapt to changing strategies.
- Measuring ROI: Quantifying the benefits of martech stack integration requires comprehensive tracking and analysis to determine the return on investment.
The marketing technology integration process: Step-by-step
While martech integration can be difficult, it’s not insurmountable. Challenges can be addressed with technical savvy and the right roadmap. Prepare to dive deep as we guide you through each phase of the martech integration process.
Step 1: Strategic planning to ensure tech stack supports goals
Strategic planning for martech stack integration lays a foundation that aligns your marketing investments with your business objectives. It’s a blueprint for how each tool will contribute to your marketing strategies, customer engagement efforts and revenue. Strategic planning involves many phases of planning to ensure your tech stack is a cohesive system that drives growth and efficiency.
- Aligning business and marketing goals with technology capabilities: Conduct a thorough review of your current and future marketing objectives and assess how each piece of technology can contribute to these goals. This phase may involve stakeholder interviews to understand departmental needs and map how the tools will address those needs. You should come out of this phase with a clear understanding of the role of each tool in your marketing strategy and meeting your business objectives.
- Setting objectives for integration efforts: Identify key performance indicators (KPIs) for integration success and establish measurable goals. This might involve specific improvements, such as increases in campaign engagement rates, reductions in manual processes, or decreases in lead response times. You should come out of this phase with a definition of what your integration will achieve and what successful integration looks like.
- Strategies to overcome compatibility issues with data formats and standards: Put a plan in place to address and resolve data compatibility issues that can hinder data utilization across platforms. This means implementing data standardization practices and establishing the efforts necessary for cleaning up existing data. Additionally, consider which middleware or integration platforms with data transformation capabilities you’ll need to establish a common data model for systems. You should come out of this phase with a clear plan for seamless data exchange.
- Mapping the customer journey to understand brand-customer interactions across multiple touchpoints and channels: Chart the customer journey from awareness to loyalty, identifying key touchpoints with your brand and the role of different technologies in facilitating these interactions. Consider the data required at each interaction and how integrated technologies can provide or use this data. You should come out of this phase with a comprehensive understanding of the customer path and an understanding of how each system improves the customer experience. This phase should also result in a detailed map that highlights opportunities for personalization, automation and engagement.
Step 2: Assessment of existing tools
This step ensures you have a clear understanding of the technologies your organization uses, how each tool performs and whether it meets your current and future marketing needs. It involves a martech audit, which enables you to make informed decisions about which systems to retain, retire or replace to create a more efficient and effective martech ecosystem.
- Auditing existing marketing tools: Conduct a comprehensive inventory of your current marketing tools, documenting primary functions, data they handle and how they are used. This audit should include any legacy systems being used and any manual processes. You should come out of this phase with a detailed overview of your martech ecosystem and clarity around tool capabilities.
- Evaluating the effectiveness and utilization of each tool: Analyze usage data, user feedback and performance metrics to evaluate tool effectiveness. Consider factors like user adoption, contribution to marketing ROI and compatibility with other systems. You should come out of this phase with insights into which tools are delivering value and which are underutilized, outdated or overly complex. This helps you to identify necessary improvements, replacements or additional staff training.
- Identify gaps and overlaps in existing tools: Map the tool functionalities and capabilities against your marketing needs and objectives. Look for areas of overlap in functionality, where processes are inefficient, and where you lack the tools to achieve specific marketing goals. You should come out of this phase with a clear identification of gaps that need to be filled and overlaps that can be streamlined or eliminated.
- Identify areas where integration can enhance functionality and efficiency: Explore how integration might solve issues in gaps and overlaps. Consider situations where integration may enhance data sharing, process automation and functionality. You should come out of this phase with an integration roadmap that targets enhancements in functionality and operational efficiency to maximize the value of your martech stack.
- Selecting additional martech tools (if necessary): Once you’ve identified gaps, overlaps and opportunities for tool optimization, it’s time to go shopping. This phase involves a thorough analysis of tools on the market that fill your martech gaps in terms of functionality, compatibility, scalability, usability, data formats and cost. It’s important to understand that adding new technologies to your stack can inadvertently increase complexity, create redundancies and dilute the effectiveness of existing tools. That’s why this is the last step of your martech assessment. The goal is to build a martech stack that is powerful and agile, with each tool aligned to your business and marketing goals. You should come out of this phase with a clear outline of specific tools (if any) required to maximize the effectiveness of your martech stack.
Step 3: Selecting the right integration platforms and API tools
Once you’ve identified your integration needs, the next step is to select the tools to seamlessly connect your marketing technologies. First, you need to understand the difference between integration platforms and application programming interface (API) tools.
Integration platforms are comprehensive solutions designed to connect various software applications, systems and technologies within your tech stack. They often offer a user-friendly interface, pre-built connectors and drag-and-drop functionality, making it easier for non-technical users to configure and manage integration. Integration platforms are ideal for organizations looking for a streamlined way to connect multiple systems without custom coding.
However, integration platforms do have a few drawbacks, including high costs, limited customization, inefficient scaling, monitoring and management of updates and dependence on third-party providers, which can be a security risk. Additionally, despite the intuitive interface, integration platforms can still have steep learning curves and may require training.
API tools involve more granular, code-based martech integrations that facilitate direct communication between two or more systems. They require technical expertise to develop and maintain but offer more flexibility and customization options than integration platforms. API tools are suitable for organizations with specific integration needs that cannot be addressed by prebuilt connectors or those requiring custom data flows and functionalities.
Besides the technical complexity of API tools, the development of custom martech integrations can be time-consuming and expensive. API tools also raise similar concerns as integration platforms, involving scaling and updates. Additionally, each integration point potentially increases attack surfaces, raising security concerns.
Criteria for selecting suitable integration solutions:
- Compatibility
- Scalability
- Ease of use
- Customization
- Security and compliance
- Support
- Cost-effectiveness
Step 4: Integration plan
After determining the additional tools you’ll integrate into your platform and the tools you’ll use for the integration process, you’ll need to develop a comprehensive integration plan. This plan serves as a roadmap, outlining how and when each component of your martech stack will be integrated. A well-structured plan ensures that the integration process is aligned with business objectives, resource availability and technical capabilities. It minimizes disruptions to ongoing marketing activities and sets clear expectations for all individuals involved.
- Determine whether integration will be done in phases or all at once: Evaluate the complexity of the integration, the interdependencies between systems and the potential impact on marketing operations. A phased approach may be preferable for complex martech integrations, allowing for testing and adjustments with minimal disruption. An all-at-once approach may be more suited to simple martech integrations or when a rapid transition is necessary. Consider business needs, such as upcoming campaigns or reporting cycles that could influence your approach. You should come out of this phase with a documented decision on the approach you’ll take, along with the rationale, potential drawbacks and expected benefits.
- Establishing timelines, resources and sequences of action: Start by breaking down the integration process into separate tasks. This includes data cleanup, system configuration, testing and training. Assign realistic timelines to each task based on the complexity of the integration and the availability of financial resources. Identify the individuals responsible for each task, considering their expertise and other commitments. Lastly, establish a logical sequence of actions that aligns with your marketing priorities and minimizes operational disruptions. You should come out of this phase with a clear, actionable plan that outlines what needs to be done, by whom and by when. Your plan should also include contingencies for potential setbacks and benchmarks for measuring progress.
Step 5: Ensure data preparation and compatibility
A successful martech stack integration relies on the quality and compatibility of the data flowing through your systems. Data preparation reduces the risk of post-integration errors and inconsistencies. To prepare your data before integration, begin with data cleansing to correct inaccuracies, ensure data is complete and remove duplicates and outdated data from your databases. Next, standardize data formats, naming conventions and values across all systems to ensure uniformity. This may involve converting date formats, standardizing address fields and aligning terminology across different platforms. You should come out of this phase with high-quality, comprehensive, standardized data ready for integration.
Step 6: Establish security and compliance measures
As you integrate your martech stack, establishing security protocols and compliance measures is essential to protect your organization and your customer data. This step involves assessing the security features of each tool in your stack to identify any vulnerabilities that might arise from implementation. Implement encryption for data that is at rest (stored) and in transit (actively moving location), use secure authentication methods and ensure access controls are in place. Additionally, ensure your integration and data handling practices align with GDPR, CCPA and any applicable state or industry-specific compliance requirements. You should come out of this phase with data that is prepared for integration through stringent security and compliance frameworks.
Step 7: Post-integration activities
Unfortunately, integration isn’t complete, even when it’s complete. After integration, you’ll need to thoroughly test integrated systems and troubleshoot any issues that arise. To encourage adoption and ensure proficiency, sales, marketing and IT teams will require training for new tools and processes. Lastly, effective integration requires ongoing maintenance and optimization, to ensure systems remain connected through updates and data continues to flow smoothly. It requires maintenance to preserve agility as your marketing needs scale up or down. Lastly, it requires regular evaluations of martech stack security and compliance posture, to maintain high standards, identify new vulnerabilities and track compliance.
Ready to get started? Work with martech stack integration experts.
Effective martech integration is a game-changer for B2B marketing, enabling companies to streamline and automate marketing workflows, deliver more personalized and targeted messaging and measure their performance with greater accuracy. To navigate the complexities and challenges involved with integration, you must put a strategic integration plan in place. This requires a solid understanding of the martech ecosystem, including the different solutions available, the benefits and challenges of implementation and the key considerations involved in building a successful stack.
If you’re ready to get started, partner with an agency with digital marketing experience. Contact us to learn how Elevation Marketing can help.
