Marketing Software

Most people suck at accurately predicting the future. I’m one of them. I took my shot at the prediction hall-of-fame last year, predicting that Microsoft would spend more than $1 billion on acqusition(s) in the marketing technology space in 2015. I thought it was a reasonably solid bet. And when they tried to buy Salesforce for $55 billion in the spring, I was feeling pretty cocky for about a week — that would have been …

7 not-quite-predictions for marketing technology in 2016 Continue Reading »

Al Ries and Jack Trout, who essentially invented the concept of “positioning” in marketing, wrote a terrific book in 1993 called The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. It’s a fantastic read, and even though it’s more than two decades old, I believe it’s as relevant today as ever. To discuss marketing technology consolidation, I’d like to call out six of their “immutable” laws related to positioning: #1 The Law of Leadership: It is better to …

The race for the #1 and #2 marketing technology brands Continue Reading »

This is the first of several articles leading up to my predictions for marketing technology in 2016. Because martech is a relatively complex space, I thought it would be helpful — at least for my own thinking — to break out a couple of foundational ideas, which we can then build upon. Let’s start with the illustration above, the 5 stages of maturity in marketing technology categories. While this certainly echoes Everett Roger’s famous diffusion …

5 stages of maturity in marketing technology categories Continue Reading »

The following is a guest post by the CEO of Sweetspot Intelligence, Sergio Maldonado. I had the pleasure of meeting Sergio at MarTech Europe last month where he shared a sketch of the above “marketing data technology” landscape with me. I found it very interesting and invited him to share his perspective with readers here. Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic has become a global reference for marketing executives, marketing technologists, digital strategists, IT executives, …

Marketing data technology: making sense of the puzzle Continue Reading »

As an enthusiastic proponent of interactive content — and, admittedly, I am biased — I was fascinated to see Twitter release an interactive content feature into its service last month. You can now add a 2-answer poll to any tweet of yours, and for the next 24 hours, people can place their votes. Okay, given its tiny footprint, perhaps we should call this interactive micro-content? This is a terrific example of what I would call …

Twitter jumps into interactive micro-content with new poll mechanism Continue Reading »

My friends, the above is an infographic of 547 human resource (HR) software products across 17 categories. It was created by the smart folks at Capterra, and you can click here to view a larger version on their site. So why am I posting it here? Two reasons. First, the overlap between marketing and HR is more important than ever — marketing, like software development, is a profession of acquiring, empowering, and inspiring talent. So …

Marketing isn’t alone — HR software landscape with 547 products Continue Reading »

Only 9% of marketers have all the marketing technology they need and fully utilize it. That remarkable statistic stood out to me from a new report on marketing technology strategy published by Ascend2 that reveals some interesting insights on the utilization and effectiveness of marketing technology today. Kudos to the 9% who seem to have their marketing tech situation fully baked! Of course, it’s possible that some percentage of those people may feel that way, …

Only 9% of marketers have a complete, fully utilized martech stack Continue Reading »

Let’s play a little game. The chart above shows the top 10 marketing analytics and automation companies, ranked by their 2014 revenue in this category. Well, actually, the revenue numbers are there, but I have cleverly hidden the company names. Can you guess who the companies are? For bonus points, can you name them in order of their revenue from last year? (These revenue numbers include broader “marketing cloud” offerings, and services as well as …

Who are the top 10 martech companies? It may surprise you Continue Reading »

Tony Ralph, the director of ad technology at Netflix, delivered one of the best talks at MarTech in San Francisco earlier this year. It’s truly a “graduate level” discussion about how Netflix’s adtech/martech team developed a build-and-buy strategy for their own technology stack for bringing programmatic advertising in-house. While not every marketing team has access to the level of engineering talent that Netflix has, Tony makes a compelling case for businesses to internally develop customized …

In marketing tech at Netflix, APIs are the new black Continue Reading »

For many years, we kept being promised that “the year of mobile” was upon us. When it failed to materialize, it was easy to become jaded and write off much of the discussion of that coming wave of innovation as hype. But somewhat suddenly, we now look around, with everyone reaching for their phones every other minute — or checking them on their Inspector Gadget watches — having integrated them into their soaring digital expectations …

Marketing and the Internet of Things, closer than you think Continue Reading »