At the start of the year, I predicted 2023 would be a chaotic year for martech — yet the start of a truly massive wave of growth for the industry. My inner critic argued that sounded a tad hyperbolic, which is not my usual schtick. But I assuaged my own skepticism by noting that such disruptive growth would ramp up over a period of several years. It wasn’t like this stuff was going to change …
We’re busy working on the 2023 edition of the martech landscape (interactive version at martechmap.com) that will be released on #MartechDay, May 2. Spoiler alert: if you were betting this would be the year the martech supernova collapses into a black hole… well, you might think of hedging that bet. The number of weekly martech-related product launches on Product Hunt and new funding announcements on TechCrunch continues unabated. Most recently, a ton are riding the …
The future of martech apps is happening in SMB and the mid-market. Here’s why. Continue Reading »
Martech software companies — and SaaS vendors in general — have several different ways they can charge for their products. The classic SaaS subscription models have used seat-based and tier-based pricing. As a buyer, you pay for the number of people (“seats”) using the product in your company. Or, you pay for bundles of functionality offered in “tiers” — with more features included at higher-priced tiers. Or both: you pay for seats, but the price …
Composability and usage-based pricing go hand-in-hand for martech applications Continue Reading »
I’m going to start the year with a controversial prediction: we are at the beginning of a massive wave of growth in martech. The next 7 years of expansion in our industry and profession will dwarf the past 7 years. I assume that’s a controversial claim because most people think this is going to be a rough year for the martech industry. Partly due to macroeconomic factors — small recession? big recession? And partly due …
In today’s virtual event Martech for 2023: The (Really) Big Picture — full video will be shared tomorrow — Frans Riemersma and I released a major update to the interactive martech landscape on martechmap.com. We know: the martech landscape is overwhelming. In our latest update to the database, even after removing a number of solutions that were either acquired or shut down over the past six months, we ended up with more than 10,000 products …
At many companies — but not all — their martech stack has become too complex. Aside from the anecdotal evidence that I frequently hear on LinkedIn and Twitter threads, Gartner’s most recent Marketing Technology Survey frames the problem quantitatively: on average, the 324 enterprise marketing technology leaders they surveyed reported that only 42% of their martech capabilities are being used. That’s down from 58% utilization in 2020. You only need two points to draw a …
One of the perennial criticisms of the martech landscape is that “most of these products all do the same thing.” Send an email. Render a web page. Analyze some data. This criticism has grown louder in proportion to the growth of the landscape. With an increasingly exasperated tone, people ask, for example, “What’s the point of hundreds of CRMs or marketing automation tools? They’re all just storing the same customer fields and mail merging them …
Jay McBain, formerly of Forrester and now with tech analyst firm Canalys, is the world’s leading expert in partner, channel, and ecosystem technology. Where I’ve gone broad with the martech landscape, Jay has gone deep with his own ecosystem tech landscape. He recently released his 2022 Channels Ecosystem Landscape, shown in the image above but discussed in more detail in his accompanying release write-up. I first came across Jay’s work with his 2017 landscape, where …
In 2019, I hypothesized that we were on the cusp of a Second Golden Age of Martech. The defining characteristic of this new era was a shift from dichotomies to convergences: From suite vs. best-of-breed to integrated platform ecosystems From software vs. services to blended delivery models with both From build vs. buy to customization on top of commercial platforms Instead of being forced to choose between X or Y — which was never fun …
The 2nd Age of Martech has arrived, and it’s all about convergence in ecosystems Continue Reading »
Over the 11 years that I’ve been publishing the martech landscape, as it mushroomed from ~150 solutions to ~10,000, I’ve seen many people react to it as an anomaly. “What is it about marketing that spawns so many software apps? Surely no other profession has to deal with such sprawl!” To which software review site G2 responds in this article, “Hold my beer.” While there are certainly dynamics specific to marketing that feed the frenzy …
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