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


My friends at MarTech.org not long ago released their most current Martech Substitute Study 2022, in which entrepreneurs shared which apps they’ve changed around the previous 18 months, what their most important motivation was in doing so, and what were being their most essential factors in picking out the replacement resolution.
Advertising and marketing automation (24%), CRM (23%), Website positioning (23%), e-mail advertising and marketing (22%), and function/job management (19%) apps were being the most usually changed.
As I highlighted in blue in the chart above, the #1 most typically cited factor in picking out their replacement resolution was integration capabilities/open API — picked by 56% respondents, up 13% points from the similar study in 2021.
It’s a prime 5 topic of this ten years in martech: platforms, networks & marketplaces.
Of training course, this is not to say that the other elements — price, assistance, stability, and so on. — weren’t critical too. But the element that most marketers agreed on was integration. If it will not combine with the relaxation of the tech stack, anything else is moot. It is the tree that falls in the forest with no any one all around to hear it.
The 2nd most prevalent issue was information centralization/data abilities (picked out by 50% of respondents), which is intently tied to integration. Soon after all, details is the foundational layer of integrations.
Tied in next also with 50% was “ability to evaluate ROI” — which is likely to be on the best of everyone’s minds in our tighter economic climate. But to evaluate ROI, you have to have the facts. And to get the info, you have to have integrations. These a few elements are bound with each other by atomic forces.
But what enthusiastic marketers to find out a replacement answer in the initially put?

When looking to substitute a industrial application (the study addresses replacement of homegrown applications independently), the #1 inspiration was better options (53%). Of system, this would make feeling. Marketers search to martech to give them the abilities needed to complete in regularly shifting and evolving marketplaces. What you can do matters.
Even so, I would have envisioned the #2 enthusiasm to be value — searching for an substitute alternative to lower fees. That was the survey end result in 2021.
But in 2022, superior/less complicated integration was the second most widespread enthusiasm (24%, up 5% details from 2021) to find a replacement app. Fundamentally, a need for much better integration triggered 1 out of every 4 martech application replacement tasks.
That is quite extraordinary.
I’ve claimed this numerous periods ahead of to martech item teams: the industry is speaking to you with a great booming voice in the sky, “Treat integration as a very first-class aspect!”
Increasingly, the martech field — and the SaaS universe much more broadly — have taken this to heart. A new research report from Pandium on the State of Integrations and APIs at 400 SaaS Organizations exhibits that 86% of the Leading 100 SaaS firms in the environment now have a public integration market. (73% of them have an in-app market.)

That’s amazing and a robust testomony to the worth of app ecosystems for big SaaS companies.
But what is even much more telling is that 31% of seed-stage SaaS startups now function a public integration marketplace much too. Practically 1 out 3 SaaS startups — which are specifically strapped for time and means, forced to make very difficult selections about what to prioritize — have picked to prioritize establishing both of those integrations and a market to make it simple for customers to learn and use them.
It is heartening to see martech customers and sellers concur: integration is critical.
We continue to have further to go on this journey of martech platforms and ecosystems. But as an market, at least’s we’re all marching in the same direction with a considerably extra seamlessly and powerfully integrated upcoming on the horizon in advance.