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 tools and data in a way that can provide actionable insights. And, if you're a small or midsize business (SMB), you'll need a partner who can both deliver a smooth integration and carry out some of the work for you.

Native integrations are a game-changer because they offload the burden of pairing together otherwise incompatible solutions. In the end, if the task of integration becomes too great, it will negate the ROI on a new solution.

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Marketing Technology: Navigating the Shift From All-in-One to Best-of-Breed Solutions

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

image of Jason VandeBoom

Jason VandeBoom is the founder and CEO of ActiveCampaign, an integrated marketing automation platform that helps growing businesses find the perfect blend of automation and human touch.

LinkedIn: Jason VandeBoom

Twitter: @jvandeboom