Marketing Software

Early in March, Blissfully released their 2020 SaaS Trends Report. As with previous data they’ve shared, the report is full of highly interesting findings based on actual SaaS usage — not just what people claim they’re using when asked (which is usually underreported by half). I was just getting ready to excitedly write a story about it when, well, the coronavirus pandemic escalated. The whole world started falling apart. Suddenly, a report on year-over-year growth …

SaaS adoption trends at the start of 2020 (yes, before all hell broke loose) Continue Reading »

TL;DR If you think the world of martech software has shrunk, take a tour of Europe. Everybody needs a hobby. Golf. Fishing. Home brewing. For some of us, it’s collecting logos of martech companies and carefully categorizing them into little boxes on slides, to the delight or dismay of marketers at conferences worldwide. I say “us,” not in the editorial “we” sense, but as a legitimate plurality. There’s a bunch of us, following in the …

An epic landscape of 2,427 European martech solutions Continue Reading »

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 »