The Buzz on Best-of-Breed

Cast your mind back to the dark ages when marketers had only a few tools in their belt. Microsoft Word was good, as was the fax machine! You wouldn't have considered a marketing tech stack at all. In fact, technology was controlled by the IT department (if there was one) and would largely be a one vendor suite. A company might select a vendor for one area and that would cover the entire lot of tools that everyone used (and you were stuck with it).

Aren't you glad to be in marketing now? There's never been more tools at our disposable and the range of tech solutions is endless! This is where the best-of-breed martech stack fits in.

What is Best-of-Breed?

Let’s break down what a best-of-breed martech stack means. The plain english definition of this would be: an integrated set of tools that help you do your job!

Rather than going with one vendor, you choose the best tool or platform in the chosen area. The CMS you want, the data tool you want, the marketing automation, and so on. You use each of these ‘best-of-breed’ tools to create the set (stack) of tools for your organisation.

Building your Best-of-Breed stack

Building your stack with open source software that integrates with other tools means you are in the power position. What tools do you want to add to your stack? With an integrated option you get to choose what works best for your company and more importantly, your customers.

The beauty of a best-of-breed solution is that every company's will be different! Your stack will depend on your type of organisation, size, and priorities. You could have a few integrated key tools and gradually add to them or set up something much more advanced.

Core tools are often:

• content management

• data tracking

• marketing automation

• customer relationship management

• social tools.

What does a stack look like?

Simple Stack

At SilverStripe, we use the integrated stack approach. One of the key benefits of a best-of-breed solution is that this approach allows us to keep agile and fast in an ever-changing marketing landscape. Today’s new social platforms and tools are popping up faster than ever! We love knowing that we can adapt to change fast and easily add to our stack without being locked in to a one vendor war.  

Here's a simple martech stack that shows some of the tools we use in the marketing team at SilverStripe.

Next Level Stacks!

It turns out that more marketers are moving towards integrated best-of-breed stacks. The 2017 State of Marketing Report showed that half of the marketers were using best-of-breed stacks, with only 21% opting for a single vendor suite. What's more, they love them!

Marketers using best-of-breed stacks report a range of benefits including greater value for money, flexibility, customisation, and choice. These stacks are some of the more complex examples from 'the Stackies', awards which chiefmartech.com run each year.

You can find other examples of these complex best-of-breed solutions here: 2017 Hackies Winners.

"Marketers with best-of-breed marketing technology stacks would never trade them for an all-in-one solution. Almost all of them (95%) believe it provides greater value for money than a mega-vendor marketing cloud." - Campaign Monitor Technology Report

Now that you’ve got the buzz on some best-of-breed solutions, why not find out more? Check out our content guide about martech stacks here.