Marketing Software

Every year, when the entries to the Stackie Awards flow in, I feel like the kid in A Christmas Story, excitedly opening up that present he’d be dreaming of. I am always delighted and inspired by the creative ways marketing teams visually represent their stacks — and so immensely grateful that they were willing to share them with our community. This year, we had 29 beautifully illustrated martech stacks sent in. They included several returning …

29 visually striking martech stack illustrations from the 2021 Stackie Awards Continue Reading »

Last week, Y Combinator held their Demo Day(s) for their Summer 2021 cohort. This was a massive graduating class: 377 startups from 47 countries. You can read a quick overview of all 377 (!) on TechCrunch, split across part one and part two. I read through all 377 and discovered 47 that I would put on the martech landscape. Here’s the list: Cococart — online store builder Writesonic — AI-powered copywriting tools AppX — app …

47 new martech companies from latest Y Combinator cohort — the counter-consolidation narrative lives on Continue Reading »

My friends over at MarTech just released their 2021 Martech Replacement Survey, revealing insights into what and why companies switch from one martech application to another. The top-line finding: there’s a ton of martech swapping happening! 67% of the 374 marketers they surveyed, from SMBs to large enterprises, reported replacing a marketing technology application in the past year. About half of them attributed the switch to their response to the pandemic. But for the other …

Aggregation and integration: why 67% of marketers replaced a martech tool in the past year Continue Reading »

Last week, Forbes published the 2021 edition of The Cloud 100 — their “definitive ranking of the best, brightest, most valuable private companies in the cloud.” The selection process involved an unpublished editorial formula that considered growth, sales, valuation, culture, and a “reputation score derived in consultation with 34 CEO judges and executives from their public-cloud-company peers.” Or, in other words, don’t read too closely into the exact ranking of any one company — there’s …

35 of the Forbes Cloud 100 companies are in martech Continue Reading »

There’s a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where God appears in the clouds — in delightfully unsubtle Monty Python fashion — and commands Arthur and his knights to seek the Holy Grail. (Arthur: “Good idea, O Lord!” God: “‘Course it’s a good idea!”) I was reminded of that scene when reading the new Marketing Technology Overload? report released this week from the Tech Marketing Council. They asked senior marketing leaders — as …

The Quest for the Holy Grail: Martech Edition Continue Reading »

“Homegrown martech is like homemade pizza.” That’s the kind of quip I might have likely shot back a couple of years ago if someone asked me, “Should we build our own martech software or buy a packaged app from a martech vendor?” It’s not that you can’t make your own pizza at home. Anyone can. I have. But making great pizza at home? Eh. You need a combination of skills, ingredients, the right pizza dough, …

Should you build or buy martech? Yes Continue Reading »

Fair warning: this post is pretty wonkish, even relative to my usual style. (Yikes.) Robert Metcalfe, the godfather of computer networks, famously stated that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users connected. This became known as Metcalfe’s Law: The classic example is the telephone. When only two people had telephones, the telephone “network” had relatively little value. When 5 billion people have phones, however, the value of …

Metcalfe’s Mirror: Complexity in networks (P.S. your martech stack is a network) Continue Reading »

The phrase “system of record” has been bandied about in martech for years. In the absence of any other context, it’s usually assumed to mean the software that holds the authoritative (or “golden”) customer record. Most often in practice, this is a CRM. This is why illustrations of martech stacks often have a CRM product such as Salesforce, HubSpot, or Microsoft Dynamics visually placed at their center. (Speaking of which, the 2021 MarTech Stackies are …

A 2×2 view of systems of record in martech Continue Reading »

I recently wrote how martech stacks have arguably become virtual platforms. Even if you have a completely heterogeneous, “best-of-breed” stack, you likely have a set of products that work across your stack to provide cohesion, albeit each at a different layer of integration: Data: everything ultimately ends up in a “data lake” platform such as Snowflake Workflow: tools such as Workato and Zapier orchestrate processes across apps UI/UX: tools such as Slack provide a common …

Aggregation Theory applied to martech stacks Continue Reading »

Summer approaches! (Well, at least in the Northern hemisphere.) Fresh air, sunshine, and frolicking outdoors have never felt so viscerally appealing, after a seemingly infinite year indoors. I hope you get time to walk in the woods, roll in the grass, or dip your feet in the ocean. But there’s still work to be done! Marketing and martech continue to advance, adapting to the “new normal” of innovative digital customer experiences and digital business operations. …

Summer of Stacks: Opening the 2021 MarTech Stackie Awards Continue Reading »