Commentary: Assessing Social Point Solutions vs. End-to-end Suites

Last week, independent technology and market research company Forrester Research, Inc. released The Forrester Wave™: Social Relationship Platforms, Q2 2015.

It made for interesting reading if, like everyone in the world of marketing technology, you find yourself thinking about the merits of integrated marketing clouds versus best-of-breed solutions.

We were excited to see our partners included in the report, including Spredfast, Hootsuite and Percolate, with the report stating, “clients love Spredfast’s onboarding and support and like the fact that it partners with other leading social vendors (e.g., Brandwatch and Kenshoo) rather than trying to build an end-to-end social suite.”

We found it heartening to see Forrester discussing the differences between point solutions and end-to-end social suites:

“More than two-thirds of avid social marketers believe it’s more effective for them to buy all their social tools from a single vendor than to buy social point solutions from several different vendors. But they couldn’t be more wrong.”

I have to admit it, I let out a little cheer at this point. Forgive me for my nerdy and biased enthusiasm.

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What makes marketers happy?

The report goes on to explain “in this Forrester Wave evaluation, we give credit to vendors whose goal is to integrate their social tools with leading nonsocial marketing and CRM solutions, not just with other social technologies” as well as giving credit to “vendors who help marketers use their SRPs alongside best-in-class tools from other vendors rather than trying to build their own end-to-end solutions.”

The research also found that “Marketers who buy point solutions are happier than those who buy social suites” revealing that, on average, clients of point solutions in the Social Relationship Platform ecosystem rate their satisfaction at 4.5/5, compared to clients of social suites, rating just 4.0 out of 5.

Just 64% of customers of social suites felt the functionality meets what they were promised (compared to 92% for point solutions!).

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Delivering what we promise

It has always been our aim to be the best at what we do: providing what we believe is the very best social monitoring and analytics technology offering, and to deliver on what we promise.

We’ve been developing our platform technology for over 8 years, building out one of the most complete deep social analytics platforms on the market, and continue to innovate constantly.

At the same time, we’ve worked to develop partnerships with other complementary platforms that we believe are best-in-breed to offer our users seamless integrations across multiple platforms, each of which provides incredible technology.

At Brandwatch we are regularly considering more and more ways we can help our customers combine the robust data they get through Brandwatch with other types of data, tying them together to get a complete business picture and better understand the ROI of all of their social activities.

When we look at what it takes to be the best just in our domain, we firmly believe that no one tool can fulfill every need, and be the best at everything – we’re all aware of those companies who spread themselves too thin and end up being the best at nothing.

It’s a huge compromise. There is no magic bullet. We value integrity and quality, and our laser-focused business strategy allows us to keep those qualities front of mind at all times; we’re not fans of ‘good enough’.

What does that all add up to? A better product for our customers – demonstrated by our extremely high customer satisfaction and a fervent dedication to providing the best social media listening and analytics platform.

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