Marketing Software

For the past 7 years that I’ve been tracking the growth of the marketing technology landscape, I’ve been hearing prophecies of its consolidation. I’ve been quick to acknowledge that’s a possibility, probably an inevitable one. In fact, if you look at the distribution of revenue across martech companies today, you can argue it’s already happened. But I’ve found it ironically amusing that, at least in the short term, the more predictions of consolidation there have …

Is winter coming for martech? Or just for martech VCs? Continue Reading »

This past weekend, I caught up on Mary Meeker’s latest Internet Trends report for 2017. As always, it was jam-packed with incredible data and insights, and this year it ballooned to 353 pages worth of them. There’s a ton of topics in the report that are important to marketing — voice-based platforms, convergence of advertising and commerce, gaming-inspired innovation, the reinvention of media, and the spectacular Internet explosions in China and India — but I …

The average enterprise uses 91 marketing cloud services Continue Reading »

The following is a guest post by Tony Byrne, founder of Real Story Group, a research and advisory firm that evaluates digital workplace and marketing technology vendors. The past several years have seen growing attention to martech “stacks,” the ever-expanding set of tools involved in enterprise customer engagement and marketing. As just one indicator, the latest MarTech Conference saw a record number of submissions to its famous Stackies contest. Stack diagrams are useful at showing …

What anchors your martech mall? A marketing metaphor Continue Reading »

UPDATE: The 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape is now available. I’m delighted to release the 2017 edition of the marketing technology landscape, which we’ve nicknamed the Martech 5000, here at the MarTech conference in San Francisco. As you’ve probably guessed from that moniker: the landscape grew again this year, by about 40%, to a total of 5,381 solutions (from 4,891 unique companies). You can download higher-resolution versions of this graphic, which you’ll need to zoom into …

Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic (2017): Martech 5000 Continue Reading »

tl;dr — From 2016 to 2017, the marketing automation category of the marketing technology landscape grew yet again, by 36%, from 156 vendors to 212. If you predicted it was going to consolidate in the past six years, sorry, you were wrong. Marketing automation remains a bellwether of martech It’s become a bit of a tradition here at chiefmartec.com: as I’m working on my yearly marketing technology landscape graphic, I release the “marketing automation” category …

From 2016 to 2017, 5X more marketing automation vendors were added than removed Continue Reading »

You’ve surely seen those eye charts with hundreds of marketing technology vendor logos. There are the iconic LUMAscapes by Terence Kawaja. And there’s my own chiefmartec.com marketing technology landscape, which last year organized 3,874 martech solutions on a single slide. (Spoiler alert: the upcoming 2017 edition will have more.) These charts provoke a visceral reaction of shock (“how can there be so many?”) followed by fear, uncertainty, and doubt (“how do I pick the right …

Marketing technology may never consolidate (but that’s a good thing) Continue Reading »

The following is a follow-up guest post by Jeremy Epstein, CEO of Never Stop Marketing, to his previous articles on blockchain marketing, blockchain brand promises, and blockchain brand “logos”. Jeremy currently works with several of the leading companies in the blockchain and decentralization space. How do you measure “brand equity” today? Perhaps some analysis of awareness, recall, etc. Google it, and you’ll see plenty of suggestions. But unlike something such as Net Promoter Score, there’s not a clear definition …

Blockchains as a new kind of quantifiable brand equity? Continue Reading »

Would you agree that advertising is one facet of marketing? Yes? Okay, then advertising technology (adtech) is naturally one facet of marketing technology (martech). If you like diagrams, you can visualize adtech as a small circle contained entirely within a larger circle of martech. Adtech is a subset of martech. But for years, people have been propagating the notion that adtech is a field separate from martech. In diagram form: two circles that don’t even …

Why the false dichotomy between adtech and martech is dysfunctional Continue Reading »

The following is a guest article by Mike Sedzielewski, co-founder and CMO of Voucherify, a coupon and referral infastructure through API. 2016 was the year when the marketing technology mantra materialized. The predictions of turning every business into a connected system of digital services became real. The data-first approach and microservices are becoming a standard in the marketing and sales departments of forward-thinking companies. What makes this possible? APIs. The data speaks for itself. In …

An introduction to ecommerce APIs for non-developers Continue Reading »

The following is a follow-up guest post by Jeremy Epstein, CEO of Never Stop Marketing, to his previous articles on blockchain marketing and blockchain brand promises. Jeremy currently works with several of the leading companies in the blockchain and decentralization space including OpenBazaar. Previously, he was VP of marketing at Sprinklr. In a previous article, I introduced Bitcoin and blockchain, the technology that sits beneath it and provides a censorship-proof, distributed, immutable ledger based on a set of …

Blockchain-based digital tokens: the new brand logo? Continue Reading »