Marketers keep replacing major martech apps, integration #1 factor for replacements

My buddies at MarTech.org recently produced their hottest Martech Replacement Survey 2022, the place entrepreneurs shared which apps they’ve changed about the earlier 18 months, what their principal enthusiasm was in executing so, and what had been their most essential elements in choosing the substitute answer.

Marketing automation (24%), CRM (23%), Seo (23%), email promoting (22%), and function/undertaking management (19%) apps had been the most regularly replaced.

As I highlighted in blue in the chart higher than, the #1 most usually cited issue in choosing their substitution option was integration capabilities/open API — selected by 56% respondents, up 13% details from the similar survey in 2021.

It’s a major 5 concept of this ten years in martech: platforms, networks & marketplaces.

Of program, this isn’t to say that the other things — value, assistance, safety, and so forth. — weren’t crucial much too. But the aspect that most entrepreneurs agreed on was integration. If it won’t integrate with the rest of the tech stack, every little thing else is moot. It is the tree that falls in the forest without anyone close to to listen to it.

The 2nd most typical component was details centralization/info abilities (preferred by 50% of respondents), which is carefully tied to integration. Just after all, information is the foundational layer of integrations.

Tied in next also with 50% was “ability to evaluate ROI” — which is heading to be on the leading of everyone’s minds in our tighter overall economy. But to measure ROI, you need to have the knowledge. And to get the facts, you have to have integrations. These a few factors are bound collectively by atomic forces.

But what enthusiastic marketers to seek out a substitute remedy in the 1st location?

When wanting to change a professional application (the survey addresses substitute of homegrown applications independently), the #1 drive was much better characteristics (53%). Of course, this makes sense. Entrepreneurs glance to martech to give them the capabilities needed to perform in regularly shifting and evolving markets. What you can do matters.

Even so, I would have expected the #2 inspiration to be expense — looking for an different alternative to lower fees. That was the survey consequence in 2021.

But in 2022, far better/less difficult integration was the 2nd most popular commitment (24%, up 5% points from 2021) to look for a substitution application. Effectively, a drive for superior integration activated 1 out of each and every 4 martech application replacement tasks.

That is pretty extraordinary.

I have said this lots of occasions just before to martech products teams: the industry is speaking to you with a excellent booming voice in the sky, “Treat integration as a first-class feature!”

Increasingly, the martech sector — and the SaaS universe additional broadly — have taken this to coronary heart. A new research report from Pandium on the Condition of Integrations and APIs at 400 SaaS Organizations reveals that 86% of the Leading 100 SaaS businesses in the planet now have a general public integration marketplace. (73% of them have an in-application market.)

That’s spectacular and a robust testomony to the value of application ecosystems for major SaaS providers.

But what is even extra telling is that 31% of seed-phase SaaS startups now feature a general public integration market also. Almost 1 out 3 SaaS startups — which are specially strapped for time and methods, pressured to make pretty tricky selections about what to prioritize — have preferred to prioritize producing both integrations and a market to make it easy for prospects to uncover and use them.

It’s heartening to see martech potential buyers and sellers agree: integration is essential.

We continue to have more to go on this journey of martech platforms and ecosystems. But as an sector, at least’s we’re all marching in the exact route with a considerably more seamlessly and powerfully built-in future on the horizon ahead.