No one MAP (Marketing Automation Platform) vendor can hope to be the best at everything, so integration is imperative. “Playing nice” increases the chance that customers will be able to effectively use your platform in conjunction with other tools, or their home built tools.
Even if you have a legion of developers, you need to make choices about what you’re going to have them work on. A MAP is like a house. Adding functionality means expanding the house. That also means that from now on, you have to continue to take care of that part of the house.
So MAP vendors are faced with a choice: try and do everything (create a huge house) or do a couple of things better than the rest (small but more advanced house).
At Net-Results Marketing Automation, our take on it is that we want to make sure we offer all the functionality our customers need on a frequent basis. We prioritize based on customer feedback and our vision on the market. Whatever we don’t have, we strive to offer an integration for. Those are ultimately things our customers tend to need less often.
At the end of the day, the best marketing automation platform is the one you’ll actually use. I believe integration is key to that.
