MarTech Replacement Survey: The top 5 solutions replaced

Mission-critical components of the martech stack were among the most replaced by marketing organizations over the last year.

MA and CRM lead the pack. That’s one of the standout findings of the 2022 MarTech Replacement Survey. Despite the implications of ripping out a solution likely at, or near, the center of your marketing operations, we found teams swapping out their marketing automation and CRM platforms at a higher rate than anything else, and at a rate comparable with the previous year’s survey.

In the 2021 and 2022 surveys, we see something like one in five respondents saying they installed new marketing automation or CRM tools — a remarkable figure, given the likely complexity of such projects.

SEO and email are runners up. SEO tools, easier to switch than MA or CRM, jumped to the third spot in 2022, with 23% saying they replaced these technologies compared to 16% in 2021. It’s important to recognize the difference between SEO tools and the other top tools like marketing automation and CRM. Many of these are sold on freemium or fairly inexpensive licenses, which makes the barrier to installing or replacing them fairly low. But those factors were always true and don’t explain the sudden jump in our survey. We’re betting on the increased importance of digital engagement with audiences.

Email distribution platforms rounded out the top four, with 21% saying they replaced these in 2022 versus 24% in 2021, when it topped the list.

Results by company size. The picture did not change much for large enterprises with more than $500 million in revenue. About 26% of marketers from those organizations replaced a CRM and 26% replaced marketing automation tools. However, e-commerce platforms were third for large enterprises, with 26% replacing those. That could suggest most of our enterprise respondents make the bulk of their money through online sales.

Small businesses with revenue under $25 million also replaced marketing automation platforms the most (30%), followed by CRM (26%) and SEO tools (26%).

Why we care. The mere idea of replacing our own marketing automation platform makes our operations team’s collective heads spin. It’s really intriguing, then, to find both enterprises and small businesses (not so much mid-sized business for some reason) making the change.

The reasons for the changes and much more data can be found in the full Survey, downloadable free and with no registration required here.

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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.