5 Tips to Integrate Your Martech

Most people deal with some technology integration woes in their daily lives. Maybe your phone doesn’t always seamlessly hook up with your car’s Bluetooth. Maybe your smart TV always seems to log you out of your favorite streaming app. To some degree, all of us know the pain that comes with unintegrated tech.

Perhaps no one feels that more deeply than the modern marketer, though. As the marketing field explodes with tech tools that are supposed to drive better outcomes with less work, a lack of integration between those tools often leaves us with the opposite: more work and mismatched outputs.

It’s reached a point where the majority of marketers say their #1 martech selection criteria is integration. Let’s say it again: marketers care less about what a specific technology can do than about how it can fit into their stack. Cleary, integration matters.

Martech integration isn’t easy, but these five tips can help.

Identify your needs

You’ll see this tip come up a lot in conversations about martech in general. And that’s because it’s an excellent way to combat a common problem. For many years, marketing orgs got enticed by shiny new solutions with flashy features. They added them to their stack, not fully fleshing out how they would work, let alone integrate, with their day-to-day needs.

To get your martech integration dialed in, take a step back first. Before you start troubleshooting individual bottlenecks, think about how your team functions. Identify where you need martech to integrate, and how you need those integrations to work. Clarifying those must-haves helps you establish a successful framework for your stack.

Envision your ideal data flow

This goes hand-in-hand with the needs identification exercise. As you’re planning to improve integration, map out how data should flow. If someone makes a purchase from you, their information shouldn’t just go into your CRM, most likely. But similarly, someone’s info can’t just idle in your email automation tool; it should get updated as you get more information about their preferences and behaviors.

Mapping out your ideal data flow helps to identify what, exactly, you need to integrate and how those integrations need to function to power your marketing efforts.

Customize your tools

All too often, people get drawn in by the promise of turnkey martech. Turnkey solutions might make things easier at first, but they almost always cause bottlenecks over time.

As you refine your integration, don’t be afraid to put in the work to move away from out-of-the-box interfaces and functionalities. Tailoring your tools and the way they work together can make life significantly easier for your team, driving productivity and results.

If you want help making changes to your stack or training your team up on them, our enablement specialists can help.

Work across departments

A lot of martech integration issues stem from a lack of flow with other departments. Data might not reach you from sales, or requests might bottleneck heading into IT. As an all-too-common example, product data might not be up to date in the marketing materials.

A truly integrated stack should support your entire company, not just your marketing organization. Get other departments involved to ensure your stack can fire on all cylinders across departments.

Keep analytics visible

A seamlessly integrated marketing technology landscape can deliver deeper, more insightful analytics. You might decide to integrate an analytics-focused solution, but you may want to keep your stack as-is. In that case, identify which solutions have the analytics visualizations that are most useful to your team. Then, ensure that data flow to those analytics tools is part of your integration planning.

Clearly, there’s a lot to think about when it comes to building a truly integrated martech stack. And that’s doubly true because your stack is probably shifting all the time. We can help.

Our team of integration experts can work with you to build a stack that delivers high-quality data, seamless collaboration, and empowered teams. Ready to get started? Let’s talk about your stack.