From bundles to best-in-class: Revolutionizing your Martech stack
Running a marketing department is like running your own small company. The disciplines of marketing are specialized and broad, ranging from the technical, under-the-hood skills needed for marketing operations and digital marketing to the creative and communication skills required for brand and product marketing. All of these roles are supported by and dependent on dozens of software products.
In my CMO network, “What marketing tools to choose” is one of the most frequently posted questions, as marketing leaders look to their peer group for recommendations and advice. New martech products seem to launch daily (over 3000 in 2024 alone!). Software onboarding, training, and adoption can be a serious distraction from a marketing team’s primary job: building awareness and driving demand.
The most effective marketing teams I know use a specific strategy to design their martech stack: an integrated ecosystem of best-in-class tools connected via APIs. Leaning into specialized tools that hone in on one problem and solve it flawlessly gives companies the flexibility to keep up with rapidly evolving customer and audience demands.
Understanding your interconnected solution space
The modern marketing technology stack comprises dozens of different applications, and your team needs to interact with them weekly, if not daily, to accomplish their varied responsibilities. Combined with increased competition for customer attention, connecting with an audience is more challenging than ever.
The shift toward all-in-one platforms evolved from the rapid growth of marketing technology. According to the 2024 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic, these tools have grown by 41.8% compounded annually over the past 13 years. As the number of available options increased, so did confusion and competition throughout the industry, leading to a concerted effort to bundle these disparate applications into a single access tool.
But all-in-one platforms have grown too fast in their effort to become the one tool to rule them all. When companies focus on becoming everything for their users, specific features and functionality suffer. Time and resources just can’t keep up with the various requirements of a rapidly evolving marketing industry. Updates outside the core product offering, when available, don’t provide the best-in-class functionality you need to excel.
That basic functionality makes it significantly more challenging if you need to perform specific actions across multiple campaigns. For example, if you’re running SMS campaigns, you probably can’t use the SMS tool built into your all-in-one marketing automation platform to do real-time personalization; you would need a specialized tool on top of your expensive “solution.”
Working with a suite of integrated, best-in-class tools helps ensure visibility into every step of the customer journey and the ability to adjust any part of that journey as it occurs. Flexibility and specificity help you design a user experience that gives customers everything they need to achieve their goals while strengthening the relationship between your user base and your company.
Looking towards an integrated future
Customer behavior shifts and changes faster than ever nowadays. Understanding how different tools work together via APIs and third-party connectors allows you to create a more cohesive technology strategy for your team. It gives you the power to build a scalable Martech stack that fully helps you service customer needs.
As you design your Martech stack, focus on tools that perform critical functions for your team. The future of marketing tech stacks will be API-based tools that can interact with each other easily and perform critical functions flawlessly. When you’re strategic with your choices for new additions, it’s easy to integrate those tools with your existing infrastructure and scale more efficiently. Having best-in-class tools also helps your team deliver results quicker without drastically increasing input costs or resources.
Integrated technology stacks also benefit your business goals. Tools designed to work together from the start make it significantly easier to scale as organizational needs and requirements evolve. If you have new strategic goals or desired outcomes or your users’ needs change, you can easily integrate new technology with the confidence that it won’t impact your ability to achieve these goals.
Tools like Zapier have created dedicated platforms for building custom connections across hundreds of different applications. You can use their tools to streamline the integration process, ensure that every part of your stack passes information to others, and ensure users’ experience with your product or service helps them achieve their goals.
Building your ecosystem of complementary tools
Understanding how to build a system of complementary tools is the first step toward solidifying your Martech stack. API integrations can help you create a more cohesive technology strategy that scales with your company’s needs while also providing your team with the capabilities they need to make a tangible impact on your customers. All you need to do is start looking at tools that foster this kind of connection and lean into the network effects of an integrated technology stack.
Consider tools that can easily integrate into your Martech ecosystem. Rebrandly’s market-leading API, for example, has over a hundred integrations with companies like Bird, Active Campaign, and more. By focusing on creating a suite of complementary tools and applications, we can help marketers make link management a central aspect of their tool stack.
While designing your integrated Martech stack requires additional input and training considerations, your team will thank you in the long run when every tool provides them with the functionality they need to excel. With the continued expansion of the marketing technology landscape and an increased focus on API and interconnectivity, it’s easy to see how this strategy will continue to support your company as it evolves.
On my team, we look for solutions that solve deep and complex problems, for example, streamlining the customer experience with tools like ZoomInfo that append data and minimize form fills. We use Ahrefs along with a newly adopted tool, Surfer SEO, to understand our SEO footprint and opportunity. And, we use our own product in every marketing project and campaign to create powerful smart links that we can track, manage, and optimize, making use of our API integrations with HubSpot, HootSuite, and built-in UTM parameters.
How Rebrandly’s link management platform supports connection
Links are arguably one of the most pivotal points in the customer and user journey. They’re the gateway to everything your company offers and a singular conversion point. Your link infrastructure must connect with every other part of your Martech stack. It guarantees a seamless click experience for your audience, whether reacting to a post on social media, accessing their account details, or sharing data on a recent campaign.
Most all-in-one platforms aren’t going to build the extended functionality into their product that provides this kind of oversight. That’s what makes an integrated Martech tool stack so appealing—it gives your team the power of a best-in-class tool with the flexibility of an ecosystem that scales with your needs.
Strategic link management is essential to your integrated tools ecosystem. With Rebrandly’s agile link infrastructure, you have more control over the various moments in the customer journey and the tools that support them. This helps you create a solid framework for scaling your Martech stack while maintaining a cohesive experience for your audience.
As the marketing technology landscape continues to grow and evolve, we’re committed to creating a space where link management is central to your strategic marketing goals. Learn more about how Rebrandly can integrate into your diverse martech stack.
