Mark Geene, Founder & CEO at Cloud Elements states that as businesses become more digital, they must address the critical challenge of making sense of the magnitude of customer data flowing in and out of marketing automation apps. This can be made all the more difficult with the wrong approach
The growth of marketing technologies in the past year alone brought an 87 percent increase in the number of available digital tools. With this, it is now the businesses’ marketing teams that are responsible for choosing and implementing the technology to use on a daily basis to meet their bottom line objectives. In today’s growing universe of cloud applications, which drives massive amounts of data, a main challenge business teams face is how to introduce new applications and integrate them to work in their ecosystem of CRMs and automation systems.
Tackling Digital Modernization with APIs
Facing the challenge of digital modernization, average business users – not IT – must revamp their approach to data management. The end goal should be establishing a more connected, automated data ecosystem that will optimize internal processes and also integrate with critical external systems to enable customers to be the masters of their unique programs with seamlessly coordinated data. The keys to this are APIs (application programming interfaces).
The Learning Curve on API Integrations
As the application software market fragments, with more and more options out there, the demand for apps that work together automatically, communicating and sharing data in real time, is taking off. Enter APIs, the foundations of modern software architectures.
When approaching a new API integration strategy, the task of building each integration can be costly and time consuming for developers. Even IT pros need to commit substantial time to plan, execute and test an integration before it can be utilized. Integrating systems is such a demanding process, which is why having a solid API integration strategy in place is so important, from quality testing to ongoing maintenance. It comes down to companies deciding how to approach their API management: build, or buy.
Marketing teams that choose to build on their own, without working with an outside technology provider, will often encounter unforeseen roadblocks that bog them down. That’s a hard but true fact that must be taken into account. Organizations must be cognizant that, even after prioritizing, scoping, planning, developing, testing and deploying the first integration, it is difficult to keep supporting each integration, and even more difficult when it comes to supporting other providers and accommodating legacy APIs. The ongoing maintenance of these integrations, coupled with a growing list of priority integrations that customers needed, can feel insurmountable.
Influitive’s Use Case
To highlight a real-world example, one business team that underwent this transformation was the product management team at Influitive, an advocate marketing platform. As the demand for integrations grew and became the focal point for the team members, they set their sight on connecting with the leaders in marketing automation that their customers were asking for, like Marketo and HubSpot.
Influitive’s initial decision was to build on their own, with a supposedly simple connection to Marketo, a leader in the marketing automation space. But the learning curve was steep, and the team soon was overwhelmed with the full scope of managing the API integration. The team wound up using a purpose-built API technology platform, Cloud Elements’ Marketing Hub, to implement a cloud-based marketing tool which ended up letting the team save time in every step during the integration process. Influitive was able to build and implement API integrations 10 times faster than ever before, and released three integrations in less than two weeks, versus previously creating just one integration every few months. Influitive created an integration library and an interactive app for users. The first new marketing app powered by Cloud Elements in the library was HubSpot, followed by Salesforce, Pardot and Eloqua.
Laying out the Roadmap of Digital Business Success
Using the right technology to tackle API management and integration for marketing automation systems makes all the difference. So, marketers, don’t integrate alone. With purpose-built solutions, teams can roll out integrations with the major marketing automation vendors and achieve faster time-to-market, while avoiding many of the risks of building and maintaining all the application code. The integrations that companies invest in today will define their digital business roadmap this decade and beyond.
