If you’re new to marketing automation technology and don’t know where to begin your search, choosing a package deal might seem like the best way to go. After all, it seems like every marketing automation solution is partnering with a customer relationship management (CRM) system these days. And the fact that these solutions are sold as a package deal must mean they have everything you need to realize your marketing goals, right? Not necessarily.
Although the one-size-fits-all approach might work well for some organizations, being married to a specific set of tools might not be what’s best as your organizational and marketing goals continue to evolve. The last thing you want is to be stuck with a MarTech stack you’ve outgrown and incur the cost of having to go back to the drawing board to find a new set of solutions that work for you. Or, worse yet, you can try to patch up what you have and end up with a disconnected MarTech stack that creates more problems for your organization than it solves.
When it comes to marketing automation platforms, choosing a vendor with an open ecosystem (that is, multiple integration options) can empower you to adopt a MarTech stack that grows with your needs and goals. Open MarTech ecosystems give you the flexibility to shop around and make sure that every technology solution you choose has the tools and resources you need. Better yet, you can ensure that you have a way to connect your resources and gain a full view of how your marketing strategy is performing as a whole.
But this only begins to cover the perks of choosing a marketing automation platform with a wide selection of native integrations like Act-On. If you’re on the fence about whether investing in a marketing automation platform with an open ecosystem is the best option for you, these are a few other benefits to consider.
Improve Marketing Efficiency by Choosing Tools You Love and Need
Any person who has moved from one company to another knows that every marketing team has its own goals and way of doing things. In many cases, trying to adapt your work style to match the capabilities of the tools you’re working with can be more trouble than it’s worth. Not only that, it can be extremely frustrating to not be able to accomplish your objectives if the marketing tools you own don’t have all the features you need to get the job done.
Building a MarTech stack consisting of solutions that allow you to do what you want in a way that works for you improves your efficiency and empowers you to do better marketing. The time and resources you save in not having to do a workaround to get the job done allow you to get those creative juices flowing and focus your efforts on more pressing and impactful tasks.
Offer Your Audience a Personalized Experience Wherever They Go
Personalization is the key to attracting more and better leads and driving conversion rates. With brands like Amazon and Facebook offering customers personalized recommendations wherever they go online, your target audience has become accustomed to tailor-made content and product suggestions and expect all companies they interact with to follow suit.
Offering your target audience a tailored experience, however, becomes difficult when you’re dealing with a disconnected MarTech stack and don’t have a way of gauging what they want or seamlessly activating your marketing efforts. If your marketing automation platform does not support a wide array of integrations and allow you to handle everything from email and social to your website all in one place, you run the risk of delivering random and scattered messages to your customers. This does nothing to convey the value you bring to the table and leaves the door wide open for your competitors to step in and win over the leads you’ve worked so hard to attract.
An open ecosystem, in contrast, enables you to make sure that every single tool in your MarTech stack works well together. This improves your ability to launch cohesive and targeted campaigns and track customer engagement and behavior metrics that enable you to continuously improve the personalization of your marketing efforts.
Drive Marketing and Sales Alignment
One of the greatest benefits of marketing automation is that it can help drive marketing and sales alignment, giving your salespeople access to valuable insights that empower them to have more impactful and targeted conversations. To do that, however, you need to ensure everybody feels comfortable using the technology you’ve invested in. If the marketing automation and CRM pairing you choose doesn’t have the tools your sales team needs to be successful, chances are they won’t use these tools to their full potential.
A marketing automation platform that integrates with a wide array of CRMs provides you the flexibility to choose a tool that your sales team will leverage on a daily basis. Furthermore, ensuring your CRM and marketing automation are fully connected enables you to drive alignment by automatically delivering your salespeople the insights on customer engagement and behavior you’ve worked so hard to collect.
Transform Your Marketing Strategy with Improved Access to Insights and Analytics
Any seasoned marketer knows that marketing trends and customer needs are constantly evolving, and we have to be ready to adapt and deliver what they need if we want to continue to stand out. Enhancing your strategy, however, is only possible if you have a holistic view of your target audiences’ needs and the overall performance of your marketing efforts.
An open marketing automation platform that fully integrates with the tools and resources you need to measure and consolidate your insights makes that process much easier. Instead of pulling information from various places and spending countless hours trying to identify which efforts are driving the most revenue, you can see how all your efforts are performing in one central location. This allows you to more easily make adjustments to your marketing strategy and ensure you’re always putting your best efforts out into the world.
Choose a Vendor That Is Willing to Deliver the Integrations You Need
The right marketing automation vendor should have your best interests in mind and not limit you in what you can do with your marketing strategy. That means they should be willing to provide you with the tools, resources, and integrations you need to achieve your marketing goals.
At Act-On, our open ecosystem aligns with our mission to empower marketers to perform the best work of their careers. We have native integrations with the leading tools and CRMs (most recently adding Pipeliner CRM to the mix) so that our customers’ marketing and sales teams have the tools to identify, engage, and nurture hot opportunities coming through the door.
If you want to learn more about the benefits of choosing a marketing automation platform that integrates well with your CRM and MarTech stack, please download our eBook, “Got CRM? Here’s Why You Need Marketing Automation, Too,” (linked below).