MarTech Replacement Survey: Which features are important to marketers?

The key reason for replacing both homegrown and commercial applications was the need for better features, according to the 2020 MarTech Replacement survey. But what features were marketing organizations looking for? Let’s take a deeper dive.

Integrations are key. There are three ways to go with your marketing technology stack.

1. Build a set of fully integrated solutions that can communicate with each other and readily share data.
2. Tolerate a stack where key solutions are integrated while others are not.
3. Permit a collection of siloed solutions where communication is minimal or non-existent.

We think most marketing teams are stuck with 2., but aspiring to 1., and the Replacement Survey tends to confirm that integration capabilities were at the forefront when considering replacements — and even motre so in the current survey than in 2021.

The importance of data remains consistent. Data drives marketing organizations. The need to centralize and manage data more effectively was cited as a factor in the decision to replace martech solutions by about half of respondents in each of the last three years. Interestingly, small businesses cited data centralization as their number one feature requirement — perhaps because integration is a less pressing problem for relatively smaller stacks.

The need to measure ROI. In the current survey, the ability to measure ROI tied data capabilities for second place as an important factor in choosing a replacement. Replacing martech — and especially mission-critical components like marketing automation and CRM — is costly, and can be time-consuming and disruptive.

Respondents to our survey were realistic about the need to justify such initiatives with hard numbers.

Why we care. Was cost a factor in choosing replacement technologies? Yes, of course it was. But it wasn’t the dominant factor; and neither was the much-discussed need to improve CX. What was key was making the stack work through integration and data management — plus being able to demonstrate that the changes were actually improvements.

Download the full survey here — free with no registration required.

About The Author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.