Where Can Marketing Technology Grow From Here?

The news was deafening: the "super" marketing technology landscape now includes over 11,000 solutions. If you've never seen this organizational marvel before, a chart is produced every year that aims to summarize, categorize, and make sense of the MarTech landscape. And every year it grows like a hungry amoeba. Back in 2020, when the 8000's graphics had only modest resolution, they looked more like a playing card featuring warring clans ready to take on once unsuspecting allied nations.

To be honest, the landscape of 2020 looked like a million pound elephant sitting in marketing like a job pushing away life and joy. It was the description of the Beast that follows us, a manifestation of Frankenstein requiring promising experimentation but offering confusion and complexity.

If you told me that after three years and a pandemic, over 11,000 solutions seemingly organized like a DNA sequencing card would be the "new normal" in marketing, I would be laughing. I would also understand that these were personal achievements from random technologies that needed to grow no matter how many tools were added.

Let's first talk a little about the scene itself:

• Categories change, but not completely. Between 2022 and 2023, 689 companies left the scene (the remaining 7%), some due to acquisitions and others due to company closures. However, the 7% decline is not the category consolidation expected by many in the space market. While standardization is yet to come , it happens by changing the underlying constructs, not by completely eliminating classes and solutions.
• The brakes pumped up, but not much. Space growth slowed to 10% year on year. For comparison: in 2020, the growth rate of new market participants was 24.5%, with a decline rate of 8.7%. While the recession has given weary traders some time for endless advertising campaigns, don't expect the downturn to last long. After all, AI has yet to win in its category.
• Unicorns abound, but some strong players have gone unnoticed. A total of 11,038 products are included, however some omissions inevitably occur. For example, Oracle Unity is an unclassified CDP. It lacks the Salesforce CDP or even mentions Genie or Data Cloud. Brightspot is listed as a Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution, but not a CMS. HCL offers a DAM offering included with the DX solution. Should it be included or not because it is not sold separately? She is holding. It is safe to assume that this number is indeed higher; Just take a look at the summary list in Vendor Analysis and Management.

While it can be overwhelming to look at the numbers in the broader landscape, the continued growth is understandable. Customer retention, and in particular how our most profitable customers choose to interact with the business, is becoming increasingly complex. While we need data to provide an environmental experience, we also need traditional investment in events and indelible moments in a client's life.

The point of this year's milestone is that this world we call marketing hasn't gotten any simpler. We have not yet reached the violent and possibly catastrophic unification of technological classes. For every crest that disappears, there are eight angry gremlins that look like drowning in water. Expect an exponential explosion of gremlins when the water known as KI falls into this category!

On the other hand, AI can change the landscape in many ways. AI can greatly enhance checkpointing tools by extracting data from these fragmented systems and enhancing the efficiency of intelligent processes in new ways. The link between AI's ability to analyze machine data and human action is undeniable. Combining AI insights with automated workflows promises to usher in a new era of near-real-time customer journey optimization. Instead of collaboration tools that bring people together in conversations, expect AI-powered collaboration and collaboration tools that start with how people work with AI and end up with how devices work with other AI-powered devices. .

The MarTech chart is just a reflection of the marketing itself. As the role has evolved from an intense, creative, ad-driven exercise of awareness and acceptance, to a growth practice that fosters experience and engagement to build lasting (and hopefully profitable). The creation of larger customers, partners and ecosystems is necessary to expand the group to bring new skills and capabilities. Automation, workflows, markup, content, collaboration, data, and more are on the list of must-have technologies. We cannot do without any of them. On the contrary, no frontline job can transfer experience. The market needs to prepare for this consolidation.

As the core customer experience functions unify and work in an interconnected and holistic way, technology platforms and tools should follow suit. True CX Stacks will understand that marketing, sales, and service can and should evolve in any function that is primarily defined by customer interaction, not brand organizational structure. Instead of data platforms that segment customer data based on the department that collected it, CX stacks centralize all customer data, insights, and workflows into a single center.

The MarTech stack will not be the preserve of marketers alone. The strength of a group is measured not by the effectiveness and efficiency of the marketing itself, but by the growth and profitability of the systems and strategies involved. The customer experience needs to move beyond the hypergraph into a mega-paragraph that brings together shared services and tools such as path optimization, data, or assets that link sales, service, and marketing, and allows us to delve deeper into the functional drivers that accelerate results.

My best advice, since we're afraid of landscapes that can easily contain up to 12,000 solutions: catalog and discover now. We have officially reached the point of commercialization and experimentation in operations where we must step back and accept that we cannot know what we do not know.

Dive into web stack building tools. Try to build the mounds of your dreams. Come back to reality and mark your current set with all the old bumps and bruises. Collect a bunch of animal tokens only.

Take the time to make a list of materials to submit experiments. Start with MarTech, but push the boundaries of marketing to include all solutions that touch customers or provide experience, data and intelligence to disseminate and implement. Even if you think you've chosen a vendor, chances are you have a hidden implementation of something lurking around the corner, and now is the time to find it.

With that landscape cleared, if you can come up with a call to action, here it is: put on your muddy boots and dive into the obscurity and fame of all the gunfights. Shoot everything to set it on fire. Get fellow IT managers involved. Let this be a combined exercise in radical technology and data transparency. But do it now. Choice drives innovation and change. This also does damage. It's time to tame the chaos.

Liz Miller is the Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, focusing on a wide range of customer engagement strategies and technologies.

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