Building your Martech Stack: Best-in-Breed or Single Vendor?
When it comes to building your Martech stack, both the best-in-breed and single vendor approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. Ultimately, the requirements of your organisation will determine which approach will work best for you. But, as a CTO or CMO, you also need to make it a personal choice: one that is best suited to your management style and the implementation processes you are familiar with.
To help you decide, let’s take a closer look at the pros and cons of each approach.
The best-in-breed approach
Most marketers understand that the best-in-breed approach provides them with greater control over key areas. If you particularly want to track results and improvements in email marketing, for example, investing in a specialised product is a good use of budget. Or, if your business operates according to a model that is geared more for multi-solution vendor support, the best-in-breed approach is a good fit.
Best-in-breed solutions can be implemented as and when you need them. It’s a “plug and play” option which often involves a less aggressive implementation process and is less expensive than the alternative. By comparison, using a single vendor sometimes requires fast implementation of an entire suite of products, which can put pressure on your business.
On the downside, best-in-breed will require managing a number of different people and processes which can be challenging. Each vendor will offer something specific and, even with APIs and enhanced integration abilities, some features won’t necessarily complement each other. Another thing to consider is that the more products you stack together, the more necessary it is to run staff training sessions and build custom integrations for each product.
The single-vendor approach
The overarching benefit of the single-vendor approach is that you only have to manage one vendor relationship. As your vendor of choice, they’ll be able to get to know all your needs and gain a holistic view of your marketing strategy. And, you won’t have to say the same thing over and over again – one vendor, one message.
What’s more, if you work with a single vendor, your combination of tools is almost always fit better together. Should anything go wrong, you don’t need to work backwards and figure out which tool is causing issues, and thus which vendor to call – all your support comes from just one vendor.
Of course, they are some disadvantages to consider. The single vendor approach is better suited to a large enterprise with a big marketing budget, as opposed to start-ups and SMEs. Why? Because it’s costly, especially with regards to implementation and licensing.
You’re also putting all your eggs in one basket. With the right onboarding and implementation, one vendor is perfectly capable of doing everything well. But there’s no guarantee. Additionally, if your current operations require a number of different solutions, then transitioning to a single vendor will draw on your resources significantly.
Adobe Marketing Cloud – the Martech stack of choice?
The Adobe Marketing Cloud offers a complete marketing technology stack of applications to meet a diverse set of marketing needs. Its tightly integrated solutions include Adobe Campaign, Adobe Target, and Adobe Experience Manager, geared towards helping marketers manage their analytics, web and app experience, testing and targeting, advertising, audience management, video, social engagement and campaign orchestration, all on a single platform.
Download our whitepaper Why Adobe Campaign? Five Key Elements to Data-Driven Marketing here.
Author: Dirk Wybe de Jong, Lead Digital Consultant - Celerity