Marketing Software

I’m used to getting a lot ribbing pushback on the scale of the marketing technology landscape. “7,000 martech vendors is way too much!” My gut-level, defensive reaction is to reply, “Hey, it’s not my fault. I’m just counting them.” Of course, one could argue with the work I do with HubSpot’s platform ecosystem, we are enabling and encouraging more martech ecosystem entrepreneurs. Which is true (see the 4 layers of app integrations with SaaS platforms). …

The average enterprise uses 1,295 cloud services Continue Reading »

The good folks at Ascend2, a marketing industry research firm, recently released a study on Martech Stack Optimization. It’s the kind of report that I open with the enthusiasm of that kid from the movie A Christmas Story opening the present of his dreams. (I’ll try not to shoot my eye out.) Lots of good data points, such as 71% of participants report that they will continue to invest moderately to significantly in their martech …

The top 3 things marketers want martech vendors to improve Continue Reading »

As you know, we’re in the middle of awards season. Oscars. Grammys. Golden Globes. All fine trophies to be had. But my favorite kudos, of course, are The 2020 Stackies: Marketing Tech Stack Awards. Marketers send in a single 16×9 slide that illustrates the way they think of their marketing stack. We share them all with the community. And then we celebrate the winners of the five best (where “best” is a function of how …

Check out Red Hat’s customer journey marketing stack Continue Reading »

Back in September 2017, Toronto-based ScribbleLive acquired ion interactive, the interactive content SaaS company I had co-founded and served as president and CTO. Scribble had raised $50 million (Canadian dollars?) from a bunch of VCs and had executed a string of acquisitions — including the content talent marketplace Visual.ly — to build out an enterprise content marketing suite. Scribble was right in the center of the first golden age of martech, with its corresponding challenges …

A cool (and personal) example of a “2nd Golden Age of Martech” company Continue Reading »

It’s a new decade — and time for a new approach to the marketing technology landscape. Contribute a new or updated martech vendor here. Report an acquired or defunct martech vendor here. Download the 2019 Excel spreadsheet here. Those are the TL;DR links above. Here’s the story of what we’re doing and where it’s headed… When I started that exercise back in 2011, it was a bit of work to research and catalog ~150 martech …

We’re crowdsourcing the 2020 marketing technology landscape — and will make all the data available to everyone Continue Reading »

Tom Wentworth, a pioneering engineer-turned-CMO in the marketing technology space whom I’ve long admired, recently commented on a LinkedIn thread, “Martech is about to face its ‘dot-com’ moment. How many pet stores did we really need in 2000?” I think he’s right — but possibly not in the way he (or you) might think. The remark was a reference to the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, when hundreds of first-generation Internet companies went …

Is martech headed for its “dot-com moment” in 2020? Continue Reading »

I’ve said many times that change is at the heart of modern marketing operations. It is at the very center of the “4 forces” diagram of The New Rules of Marketing Technology & Operations because it’s the dominant variable of our profession. And what’s the most common and concrete change in martech? Why changing martech applications, of course. This well-known yet not well-quantified phenomenon was the motivation for Chris Elwell and Jennifer Cannon of MarTech …

83% of marketers rip-and-replace a martech app each year — here’s why Continue Reading »

UPDATE: Due to the coronavirus pandemic, we have postponed The Stackies Awards Ceremony until October 6, when we’ll do a virtual event. As a result, we are extending the deadline for entries through September 18, 2020. We will also double the number of awards given — from five to ten — to provide one set of awards to those who submitted by the original deadline and a second set for those who submit by the …

Enter The Stackie Awards 2020: Share your marketing stack with the martech community Continue Reading »

The following is a guest post by Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group and popular speaker and workshop leader at the MarTech conference series. The above graphic is Real Story Group’s Omnichannel Stack Reference Model. Earlier this autumn, Real Story Group convened two-dozen martech/CX stack owners from among our larger subscribers for two days of confidential discussions around what’s working well (and less well) within their enterprises. Although the conversations were private, we were …

Two themes for martech stack leaders: collaboration and integration Continue Reading »

The editorial staff here at chiefmartec.com (looking in the mirror) are rather obsessed with martech stacks. What’s in them? How much is controlled by IT or marketing operations? How do marketers think of them? How many apps in them support self-service users? How big are they? Blissfully recently published their SaaS Trends: IT & Compliance Edition 2019 report, and it was chock full of interesting insights into the current state of tech stacks. Not just …

Your martech stack is probably 2X as big as you think it is Continue Reading »