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Every year, Scott Brinker (you might know him as Chief MarTech) publishes a graphic designed to illustrate the size of the marketing technology landscape. And every year the sheer growth — some might call it oversaturation — is surprising.
Last year, there were nearly 950 vendors. This year, there are nearly 1,900.
There’s no question that marketing tech is a viable industry. The amount of investment and build out in recent years proves it. A more valuable question to ask is what the trends were that led us here.
My team did just that recently for an interactive project on the history and future of digital marketing tech, quizzing industry experts like Brinker, Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter, Mayur Gupta of Kimberly-Clark, and Meagen Eisenberg of DocuSign for their insights. As a result, we were able to define the path that brought us this far, and predict where the market is headed next.
Specifically, we found three key trends that sparked the need for marketing tech, and one trend that suggests there’s still a big hole for most marketers.
You could call this a macro trend that created a market. By the 1980’s, the rise of (relatively) affordable computing meant that customer contacts could be hosted and managed digitally. This was an important innovation because managing contacts manually was unwieldy, especially for large, global organizations.
The first real database marketing software, ACT!, was basically a digital rolodex. But unlike a physical rolodex, it could hold troves of customer and prospect data. This centralized and simplified the customer management process, minimizing costs and expanding opportunities for growth.
The shift to digital created an industry that would grow rapidly, then consolidate nearly as fast, paving the way for the next big trend that would remake the marketing landscape: cloud computing.
Lots of tinkering happened around database marketing and customer management through the 80’s and 90’s. But it was the birth of Salesforce in 1999 that really changed the game.
It wasn’t just the innovation within customer relationship management (CRM) that impacted sales and marketing, it was Salesforce’s entire model.
Hosted entirely online, Salesforce helped launch Software as a Service (SaaS) as a viable means for offering solutions. This shift, which took longer to solidify than most people remember it, is in many ways why marketing tech has been able to grow as a category.
Creating solutions that are built and delivered entirely “in the cloud” means ideas can be turned into products, delivered and expanded (or folded) cheaply and quickly. This new category for business is perhaps the most significant factor for the rise of marketing tech.
But it’s not just how products are delivered that led to the rise of marketing tech. The other huge development that gave marketers newfound respect and responsibility internally was the ability to collect, analyze, and respond to buying signals in real time online.
As buyers spent more time online, the majority of their path to purchase — commonly referred to as the buyer’s journey — took place online, too. Marketers needed a means for identifying these signals of interest and then respond so they could better steer buyers to their solution or service.
This need led to the birth of marketing automation, which not only tracked buyer behavior online, but also equipped marketers to respond appropriately and spark further engagement between the company and customers.
Vendors like Pardot proliferated, and the fierce competition resulted in substantial inventions in how marketers facilitated the buyer’s journey. Vitally, marketers began using sophisticated practices and techniques for engaging and nurturing prospects and customers.
As a result, by the early 2000s, marketers were commanding more respect and budget than ever. The combination of the ability to manage and nurture contacts digitally, using inexpensive cloud-based solutions, meant marketing was a prime target for investment from both the provider and buyer side.
But this has created yet another hole for marketers - one that is as much based in process as it is in tech.
Stitching the whole market together
Marketers have more tools to choose from than ever. That’s the good news. The tall order is stitching all these single-use and multi-use solutions together in a way that makes sense and operates smoothly.
This hasn’t been easy. With so many tools available, marketers struggle to connect them in a way that delivers a consistent experience for buyers, and for the disparate teams that use those tools internally.
Integrating different solutions is the key concern of many marketing leaders and teams. As Brinker puts it, “It’s just so easy for people to create specialized software so cheaply that you’ve got this explosion of innovation happening. And that’s been really challenging for marketing.”
So what’s the missing piece? Here’s my take: the content. If you consider all the tools and functions increasingly employed within marketing, the critical element is marketing content. It’s the blog posts that grab attention, the emails that nurture buyers, the webinars that inform prospects, the whitepapers that offer insights, the videos that break down complex issues, and the collateral sales needs to close deals.
In other words, content is what fuels all our marketing efforts. While this seems intuitive, marketing’s response has been counterintuitive. We’re buying more specialized tools that are designed to manage or optimize single channels or stages of the customer experience. Simultaneously, marketing departments have brought more functions and roles in house, many of which once were outsourced.
That’s led to greater internal complexity, and without a modernized process and set of workflows to manage the marketing content across all channels and functions, marketers struggle just to get stuff out the door. Consequently, most of the content that fuels our tools is created and distributed in silos, which explains why marketers are struggling to see the value from all these added tech investments.
The trend that will define the future of marketing tech is not just the integrations within the marketer’s ecosystem. It’s also technology and leadership that revitalizes the process and workflows marketing uses to plan, execute, distribute and optimize the content that fuels these investments, so they have a chance to actually succeed. And we’re just starting to get a peek into that future now.
Jesse Noyes is Senior Director of Content Marketing at Kapost. He got his start in the newsroom and today his goal is to ensure Kapost's content meets the best editorial standards, that Kapost tells the best stories and spreads the word through social media channels.
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