On its surface, the martech landscape graphic I’ve produced for the past decade has limited insights to offer. If you observe that (a) “there are a @&#$% of martech solutions” and (b) “the overall martech field is growing, not shrinking” you’ve pretty much got the main takeaways. See platform dynamics driving martech app expansion and […]

It’s been my opinion, expressed in numerous editorials — hey, that’s what op-ed means! — that business technology stacks (and martech within them) are expanding and that they are increasingly “best-of-breed,” incorporating more apps and services built by many different companies. (It’s also my opinion that those best-of-breed apps increasingly orbit foundational platforms. But that’s […]

Salestech is hot. Nancy Nardin of Smart Selling Tools has been tracking sales technologies the way I’ve been tracking the martech landscape. Her latest map of salestech reveals hundreds and hundreds of vendors in the space, organized into a couple of dozen categories. And as with my martech landscape, it’s not even complete. I personally […]

This is the 6th year that we have run The Stackies as an awards contest that invites marketers to send in a single slide illustrating their marketing stack — the collection of martech tools they use and the way they conceptualize them together as a whole. Although we award trophies for a few winning entries […]

The CDP Institute released their latest State of Customer Data report last week, and it revealed an important milestone in the martech industry: For the first time ever, the majority of participants (52%) described their martech stack as an integrated, multi-system architecture. In others words, most marketers reported having a best-of-breed stack — with many […]

I’ve been on the trail of “no code” martech these past couple of weeks, covering event-triggered marketing automation as a no code programming paradigm and mapping a partial taxonomy of over 75 no code tools. I also ran an impromptu survey of no code usage with readers, the results of which I’m sharing here. Given […]

I’ve been fascinated with the rise of citizen developers in marketing empowered by a rapidly expanding landscape of “no code” tools for several years now. Momentum is growing, and while there’s some philosophical debate to be had around what is or isn’t a “no code” tool — versus any app that lets you create things […]

Last week, I shared some interesting stats on trigger-based marketing from a benchmark report by Blueshift. A couple of eye-popping, high-level findings: Email triggers are 497% more effective than batch emails Mobile push triggers are 1,490% more effective than batch push notifications Directionally, this isn’t surprising, although the magnitude of the difference is remarkable. Marketing […]

After three and a half months of working out of my basement, I was in desperate need of a change of scenery. Preferably somewhere with a lot of outdoor space for hiking and frisbee throwing (a lost art!). No crowds. Lots of nature. Fresh air. The answer? Renting a small cottage on the sparsely populated […]

As Forrest Gump might say, “Platform is as platform does.” Pandium, a fascinating kind of app-marketplace-as-a-service company, released a State of Product Integrations at the SaaS 1000 report this week. They examined integrations, public APIs, and “app centers” offered by the 1,000 fastest growing SaaS companies from 2019. Their analysis provides empirical evidence for two […]