Each year Scott Brinker's amazing work tracking and mapping the changing marketing technology landscape reminds us of just how much the discipline and function of marketing is changing. Last year's survey mapped more than 5,000 separate martech solutions and you would have been forgiven for believing then that the market must surely have reached its peak. Yet this year's survey is just out and Scott has charted no less than 6,829 marketing technology solutions from 6,242 unique martech vendors.
This explosion in marketing technology demonstrates a quite fundamental change in the discipline, and just how far marketing has broadened in scope and scale. As recently as 2011, when the survey started, there were only 150 vendors.
But in amongst the startling headline numbers, there were a few interesting points that Scott noted in his write up. As you might expect, ranking the vendors by valuation reveals a classic long-tail of thousands of smaller solutions providers but its notable that this long tail is also evident in the technology stacks that marketers are building (shown by an analysis of martech stacks from 'The Stackies', the awards that Scott runs).
So it's clear that marketers are becoming adept at augmenting larger CRM, marketing automation, social and CMS systems with more niche services that can integrate well. And as Scott notes, it demonstrates an interesting dynamic in the market - the very low barriers to entry on the supply side (cheap infrastructure, readily available open source resources, on-demand global talent) combined with this expansion of marketing scope and scale into customer experience, content, and an explosion of channels and touchpoints.
It was also interesting that predictive analytics which was represented as a separate classification in last years survey has now been integrated into multiple areas, reflecting how machine learning capability has now been integrated into multiple different services. The burgeoning category of Salestech is also represented on the graphic showing how deeply entwined sales now is with marketing - this widening scope to encompass what might be called customer experience or go-to-market technology where there is little differentiation between the old classifications of marketing and sales is what Scott calls the 'new reality of marketing'.
IT is no longer the singular channel for technology acquisition and orchestration. Whilst marketing may have one of the largest tech stacks in a business it's clear that multiple functions are now spending big on technology with the average enterprise using over 1,000 cloud services.
Combined with a renewed focus on data quality (not least due to GDPR), marketing functions are becoming more sophisticated every year in the adept combination and application of a broad range of technology solutions to 'evolve from fragmented silos to a more holistic digital architecture'.
This is no small change.
Marketing is changing forever.
And it's not going back.
