The majority of marketers are facing the same issues with today’s tech stack landscape: seemingly endless questions around where to start, how to expand, how to optimize, and which solutions to choose.
When CMS Wire’s Dom Nicastro asked Swrve Director of Demand Generation Mary Bruce what the top tech challenges are for today’s marketers, she spoke candidly on the subject. Here are the three common challenges Mary spoke about, along with tips for how to address and solve them for your team.
1. “There are so many options for your marketing stack. It’s so hard to choose one that’s right for you.”
The understatement of the year is, “the marketing technology landscape is packed.” The word ‘packed’ no longer covers it—not when there are a total of 7,040 solutions reported in Scott Brinker’s landscape infographic this year. So when you’ve started looking at vendors, what’s to stop your head from spinning right from the beginning?
Our advice: identify the problems you’re trying to solve for first. Use what inspired your search in the first place to guide your assessment. Do some research on what others are doing to solve those issues. And we know you’re on a budget, but start your search with industry-leading solutions. Top-rated solutions are going to solve those core problems directly without giving you new ones to worry about.
To help in your search for mobile marketing solutions, explore Build vs. Buy: The 2019 Mobile Marketing Buyer’s Guide. It includes all the answers, insights, and details you need to make an informed decision in today’s crowded landscape, and save a costly headache down the line.
2. “You don’t want to grow your stack too large to where you’re not even using all of your tools.”
Buyer’s remorse sucks. Especially when the solutions you regret are draining your budget and creating giant gaps in your strategies.
Marketing technology should be an investment into the growth, agility, and reach of your brand and it’s campaigns. The best marketing tools will be an active element of your entire technology stack, working in tandem with other solutions to help you easily manage, take action, and advance opportunities that will fulfill your core KPIs.
When it comes to mobile marketing and customer engagement, it’s critical for your chosen solution to integrate easily and work well with existing cloud technologies, business development systems, and more. If this isn’t the case, you’ll create (more) data silos that will prevent your engagement from being relevant to individual customers in real time.
For this reason, the Swrve platform is built to be integrated into an existing enterprise technology stack and/or all major marketing clouds (including Salesforce, Oracle, etc). In other words, Swrve doesn't seek to replace your existing technologies—we work with them to ensure that you’re maximizing the potential of all data, tools, and systems that are part of your stack.
3. “Figuring out how to keep your solutions all in one place is a challenge.”
Convenience is key. Marketers don’t have the time to search through programs, sift through data, and explore how one platform works with another. We’re too busy chasing wins.
That said, most of us expect solutions to have the flexibility to connect and extend to other platforms for true ease-of-use. A great example of this is Swrve’s ability to embed many of its enterprise-grade targeting and triggering tools directly into the Salesforce Journey Builder dashboard. Swrve can also be embedded directly into Oracle Eloqua and Oracle Responsys, too. This is made possible by Swrve’s extensive integration and partnership network, along with our open, bi-directional data architecture, allowing for unrivaled connectivity and all-in-one experiences.
Many platforms present themselves as be-all, end-all solutions, only proving themselves to be hard-to-reach, rigid, and inconvenient in the long run. Our experienced implementation team can produce custom integrations for almost any proprietary or off-the-shelf system.
Learn more about the Swrve platform: join one of our upcoming live demos for more details.
