Update on the marketing technology landscape
In preparing for next week’s Geek Out on Marketing Technology event here in Atlanta, I started thinking more about how crazy the martech landscape has grown over the past few years. Five years ago we all shook our heads when Scott Brinker published his first marketing technology landscape visual. Packed with “must have” solutions from over 150 solution providers, we wondered how the market could sustain so many companies with solutions aimed strictly at Marketing.
Little did we know that, five years later, the landscape would swell to nearly 3,900 suppliers with no signs yet of a slowdown.
2011
2016
Source: Scott Brinker, Chief MarTech
What martech tools do we need?
So given this unabated arms race of marketing tech providers and sea of best of breed vs. integrated suite marketing tech tools, what do we REALLY need to power today’s lead-driven, results-oriented marketing operation? Well, just to get a debate started, here’s my top five list, with some justification for each. Would love to hear from you as to whether or not you agree with me, think I’ve missed something (or am totally off-base). Let me know what you think.
By the way, my top five list below assumes there’s a solid CRM solution in place that the Sales team actually uses. If not, that needs to be added to the list.
- Website Content Management Platform
We can’t all be coders and HTML developers. But that doesn’t give us a bye when it comes to having a flexible, easily updated website that ensures a strong visitor experience — on whatever platform the visitor chooses to use to engage us. A flexible CMS opens web management to us mere mortals and should offer the responsiveness mobile requires. - Marketing Automation Platform
Despite some market consolidation, there are still many to choose from and surely one that will meet the bulk of your needs. In today’s unforgiving environment you simply can’t run an effective marketing operation for long without one. With all of the technology options to slog through, it just makes sense to invest in a multi-function, capable platform to provide as many functions under a single code base as possible. - Social Media Management
Social has grown up and deserves a solid place in the everyday marketing mix. Today it’s all about participating in the conversation. And knowing which platforms to engage and how to maintain presence (hint: it’s much more than one or two tweets per month) can require help. The good news is there are now solid tools to help with the heavy lifting and provide the measurements you need to support the effort. - Search Management
If you’re not doing some type of Search Engine Optimization, either paid, organic, or both, stop reading this now and come back after you’ve done some keyword research. As hard as it is today to find prospects with more than a passing interest in our products and services, missing any opportunity to reach people actually searching for the services we provide is unforgivable. - Analytics
None of the above tools will be effective unless you have some framework to measure the impact your marketing activities are having on your company’s bottom line. While many individual tools offer their own metrics, here’s where an integrated platform can really pay off. Feeding the data about search, social, email and website traffic through a common platform to arrive at an easy to share dashboard of results will save much time and aggravation.
So that’s my list. What’s yours? And if you’d like to discuss or debate the selections, look me up at next Wednesday’s TAG Geek Out on Marketing Technology. Looks like a great event shaping up. Hope to see you there!
