Against this background, Gartner principal analyst Tia Smart described how to build the kind of efficient, focused martech function that can get much more out of the technology.

1. Getting prepped

The three first steps to getting your martech function on track are:

• Identify the product owners (with overall responsibility for a particular solution) and the solution’s daily users.
• Audit the stack (find out what’s there and what is and isn’t being used).
• Assess the results of the above and proceed to the next steps.

Smart believes it’s crucial to define staff roles clearly. “Is this person a daily user, so they can give you candid feedback; or is this the product owner, based on a specific product like Salesforce or Adobe; or is this person the leader of a category of products like advertising solutions or direct marketing channels?”

It’s also important to align the audit with business use cases. “Is this tool meeting specific use cases it was intended for, or is it not? That will start informing the next steps you’re able to take,” she told us.

2. Developing a robust roadmap

Times have changed. Just in the last year, the pendulum has swung from a preference for best-of-breed stacks to a preference for integrated suites (60% to 25%).

There remain challenges with both approaches. Paradoxically, marketers find integration and configuration challenges within the integrated suites themselves, especially those built from a series of independent acquisitions. On the other hand, it’s difficult to recruit and retain the talent to handle a wide range of point solutions.

DIg deeper: Marketers need a unified platform, not more standalone tools

“The biggest driver of the shift to integrated suites,” said Smart, “is that marketers don’t have the right talent in place, they have difficulty integrating their current martech ecosystems; I think there’s a perception that an integrated suite is going to solve for some of those challenges and complexities.”

A decision has to be made whether to be integrated suite-first or best-of-breed-first. Then take steps to build the roadmap:

• Identify business needs and the marketing tech needs that align with them.
• Develop a roadmap aimed at filling gaps (and eliminating duplication and waste).
• Communicate the roadmap to stakeholders.
• Continue to evolve it (this isn’t “one and done”).

The truth is, Smart explained, that at the end of the day the martech function is not going to commit fully to an integrated suite approach or a best-of-breed approach. “It’s understanding that it’s going to be a balance,” she said. “You’re going to need a blend, it’s just what is going to be your primary focus?”

3. Making sure you fill the talent gaps

There are four possibilities to evaluate here:

• Develop and utilize existing talent that understands the business and its needs.
• Get support from IT.
• Outsource elements to consultancies or agencies.
• Hire new talent.

Of course, challenges exist with these approaches. IT may have limited capacity, outsourcing can be expensive and there’s a widely recognized talent shortage.

Finally, pay attention to the actual users. “Sometimes marketers focus so much on the technology that they forget about the people who are planning to utilize the tools. If we think about the reason for the talent shortage, burnout is a large push for wanting to leave a company. Being sure that your team is not frustrated with the tools will help to overcome some of these challenges.”

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take the 2023 MarTech Replacement Survey

The post 3 steps to building a three-star marketing technology function appeared first on MarTech.

Gartner cites recessionary fears, inflation and a talent gap as stoking concerns in the enterprise that have knock-on effects on marketing and marketing technology investments. Perhaps unexpectedly, although media allocation is flat, spending on digital channels actually showed a slight decline.

The state of martech spend. The bad news for the martech space is that no less than 75% of CMOs feel under pressure from other parts of the enterprise to cut their technology spending. The consolation is that 63% plan to resist the pressure, to some degree at least, and grow their martech spending. But almost one quarter, 23%, do expect to make cuts.

CMOs do propose to increase social advertising spend, but among the categories likely to take a hit are search advertising, SEO and digital OOH.

It’s necessary to “make a clear value case for martech investment,” said Ewan McIntyre, chief of research for the Gartner for Marketers Practice, presenting the survey’s findings. He also said, using the analogy of a voyage, that what was needed was “not a bigger boat, but a more efficient boat.”

Dig deeper: Digital ad spend growth drops to 7.8% this year

Catalytic marketing. His comments reflected the prominent theme of the Gartner keynote delivered by Lizzy Foo Kune, VP analyst and Carlos Guerrero, VP advisory in the Gartner Marketing Practice. They insisted that, despite pressures to realize growth in an uncertain environment, CMOs should not take the familiar route of increasing activity and taking on more projects.

They also questioned the value of “customer obsession.” “Customer obsession goes too far,” said Guerrero, “to unprofitable extremes that customers find intrusive.” Rather than trying to meet customers in every conceivable channel, leveraging customer data to deliver countless relevant messages, the keynote speakers introduced the concept of “catalytic marketing.” Gartner data shows, they said, that more important than quantity of engagement are experiences that bring about some change in the customer.

Are you getting the most from your stack? Take the 2023 MarTech Replacement Survey

In essence, catalytic marketing is not about “more.” “Progressive CMOs are breaking free from the cycle of more by embracing catalytic marketing and, in the process, shifting from growing marketing’s scope to growing marketing’s success,” said Guerrero.

Why we care. The pressures on marketing and martech investment are clearly real. It’s an environment that demands efficiency and demonstrable ROI. The catalytic marketing concept needs to be fleshed out (an example they cited was L’Oreal’s Skin Genius experience); that’s the positive part of the Gartner message.

The part that might be perceived as negative is the sense that attempting to develop a 360 degree view of the customer and apply it to engagement on countless channels, might be counter-productive, despite everything we’ve heard over the past few years.

About the survey. 410 CMOs and marketing leaders were surveyed in March and April 2023. Respondents were based in North America and Europe, representing various industries and company sizes, with most reporting annual revenue exceeding $1 billion.

The post Marketers under pressure to cut martech spend appeared first on MarTech.

Here are the updates relevant for managers: 

• Book meetings on behalf of other users (beta).
• New HubSpot embed for Salesforce (beta).
• Payments:
  • Edit subscriptions (beta).
  • Edit the next payment date for subscriptions.
  • Create and send payment links from contact, company and deal records.
  • Improved payouts experience.
  • Include multiple payment links in forms.
  • Payments Revenue Reporting Dashboard available in Starter.
• Add conditional logic to the ‘Create record’ form (beta).
• Manage your marketing emails from mobile.
• Automatically associate calls with deals through HubSpot AI (beta).
• Forms reporting moved to the Forms Analyze tab.
• Saved views for website pages and blog posts.

Book meetings on behalf of other users (beta)

Save time and enable call-scheduling team members by using the new release to book meetings on behalf of other users directly on the deal, ticket, company, or contact record. 

The release enables you to report on who scheduled a meeting and who was assigned the meeting. For example, you can now report on which business or sales development representatives (BDRs or SDRs) booked meetings for which account executives (AEs).

HubSpot embed for Salesforce (beta)

Save yourself and your team’s time from switching between HubSpot and Salesforce to see the complete view of the data using the new Salesforce HubSpot embed as part of HubSpot’s Salesforce integration. 

Previously, only the five most recent HubSpot timeline activities and a limited number of properties were viewable in Salesforce.

HubSpot Payments receive many long-awaited improvements

If you have been unable to derive the benefits of using Payments, such as seeing and using payment data in the same system as your other reporting, the latest releases from HubSpot may eliminate that barrier to adoption.

• To make it easier to upsell and retain customers who need to make changes to their subscriptions, you can change products, prices, quantities and discounts without canceling and restarting the subscription.
• To improve the customer- and financial-team experience, you can edit the next payment date for subscriptions instead of canceling and restarting the subscription. This feature is especially useful for businesses where the first payment is made immediately to reserve services for upcoming months. Regular billing occurs on one particular date for all customers.
• To help your team save time and make it easier to get paid, you can create and send payment links from contact, company and deal records. It now takes 10 seconds to create the link, compared to 3 minutes before this release. 
• To quickly and easily reconcile bank deposits with HubSpot Payments transactions, the payouts experience in Payment Settings now shows:
  • The estimated date the payment will arrive in your bank account.
  • Failed payments to take action on.
  • The customer’s email address.
  • A link to the Payment record to more easily identify the payment source.
• To allow customers to select which product they want to purchase within one form, you can include multiple payment links on forms.
• To save time creating reporting, the out-of-the-box Payment revenue reporting dashboard is now available in the Dashboard Library for HubSpot Starter customers, in addition to the current availability for Enterprise and Pro levels. 

Add conditional logic to the ‘Create record’ form (beta)

Ensure your team is gathering complete, relevant and accurate data for reporting and insights by utilizing the new release to add conditional logic to properties with defined options inside the form that creates records in HubSpot. Once a selection is made on the first field, the following fields are customized for the previous option chosen.

Manage your marketing emails from mobile devices

Check the status of marketing emails from the convenience of your mobile device. This release lets you manage your marketing emails in the HubSpot mobile app. 

You can also delete and test emails from the app and see when the email was last updated and by whom, the email details, performance and other key metrics. 

Automatically associate calls with deals through HubSpot AI (beta)

Save your team time and gather more complete data by enrolling in the public beta for HubSpot AI that automatically associates calls with deals. Previously, associating calls with deals was a manual process, which meant many calls were not attached, and the relevant information was difficult for your reps to find and hard for you to report on.

Forms reporting moved to the Forms Analyze tab

You can now find the forms reporting more easily by clicking on the new Analyze tab in the Forms tool. Previously, form analytics were challenging to find within the Reports menu in the Analytics tools. 

Saved views for website pages and blog posts

If you view a specific website page or blog post regularly, you can save time using the new Saved Views. Similar to the Saved Views in HubSpot’s other tools, the views can be shared to enable other HubSpot users to check these same pages or posts quickly.

The post HubSpot’s April 2023 releases: The manager’s guide appeared first on MarTech.

Newest jobs in Martech:

Marketing Technologies Director @ Midan Marketing (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $105,000 – $133,000 (est.)
• Provides functional management and leadership to the MarTech team. Provides vital cross-functional contributions and serves as team leader.
• Work with Human Resources in the recruiting process of new team members. Provide new hire overview of creative functions.

Marketing Engagement Lead @ Humana (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $55,000 – $80,000 (est.)
• Engage with business stakeholders to gather, analyze requirements and map them to solutions that leverage Marketing Technology capabilities – primarily Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
• Maintain a good understanding of Marketing Technology landscape and take advantage of emerging capabilities.

Marketing Manager @ Fastpath (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $65,000 – $75,000 (est.)
• Driving accelerated growth through the design, creation and execution of high-quality lead generation programs, and customer advocacy through effective nurture programs, including content development, launch, measurement, and optimization.
• Collaborate with creative partners, SME’s and Product Management to write marketing content that advances the Fastpath brand and directly impacts pipeline/ROI goals.

Director of Marketing Operations @ R1 RCM, Inc. (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $115,000 – $130,000 (est.)
• Shepherd the adoption, management, and ongoing review of operational processes in pursuit of efficiency.
• Support the marketing team’s planning, budget management, project management, and platform/tools management.

Director roles:

Head of Go-To-Market @ KeyBank  (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $135,000 – $200,000 (est.)
• Lead baseline industry and competitive research to develop comprehensive view of target markets and marketing strategies. 
• Develop and manage a yearly marketing and external communications plan that supports and informs KeyBank’s Payments product and revenue goals.

VP of Marketing @ Zaelab (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $130,000 – $160,000 (est.)
• Define and implement a marketing strategy that results in increased brand awareness and increased demand.
• Identify and define Zaelab’s ICP and industry trends to ensure Zaelab is appropriately positioned and communicating to the marketplace. Maintain and improve messaging across all channels.

Senior roles:

Senior Data Product Manager @ Home Depot (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $190,000 (est.)
• Seeks to empathize with and understand the end user deeply and use that knowledge to determine the fastest path to deliver value.
• Translates business goals and end user needs into product strategy; communicates direction and product priorities to the development team, other matrixed teams, and third-party partners.

Sr. Manager of Digital Analytics @ 85SIXTY (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $105,000 – $120,000 (est.)
• Maintain accountability for the overall data quality, conduct audits and troubleshoot tracking gaps to maintain data confidence and implement data standardization.
• Establish and maintain best-practices for tag management including design strategy, technical documentation, approvals workflows, and quality assurance

Product Marketing Manager – Europe @ Radancy (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $104,000 – $132,000 (est.)
• Creating and delivering internal and external communications for product / enhancement releases to EU markets. This includes:
• Understanding each global release; and then modifying materials and delivering to each local EU market to ensure they are optimal/appropriate (in terms of message, language and product capabilities) 
• Ensuring messaging separates our solutions from competitors in EU markets

Demand Generation Manager @ Verato Inc. (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $85,000 – $108,000
• Help plan and drive execution of the digital lead gen strategy and end-to-end campaigns that clearly demonstrate and articulate value and achieve business objectives.
• Cross collaboration with marketing operations, content, product marketing, sales and other departments to deploy and optimize campaigns across the U.S.

Associate roles:

Growth Marketing Strategist @ New Worth (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $120,000 (est.)
• Be the main point of contact for 5-10 CMO’s/marketing heads at B2B tech companies.
• Collaborate with marketing strategy specialists in those fields to ensure the success of New North’s clients.

Marketing Technology Specialist @ SmartAcre  (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $95,000
• Successfully execute auditing, consulting, and implementation tasks for clients using marketing automation (HubSpot, Pardot, Marketo). 
• Help clients execute major marketing automation tasks and implement best practices.

Marketing Technology Associate @ SmartAcre  (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $75,000 – $85,000
• Play a role in auditing marketing technology and sales technology platforms. Report results to the Director of Marketing Technology.
• Contribute to client communication, responding to MarTech questions within the same day.

The post The latest jobs in martech appeared first on MarTech.

Perhaps your company has undergone a merger or acquisition, and you have duplicate tools that perform the same function. Maybe other tools in your stack might have added functionality, making a tool redundant. Or the tool just is not utilized enough to justify the cost. 

Dig deeper: Are you getting the most from your stack? Take the 2023 MarTech Replacement Survey

Whatever the reason, identifying what tools can be retired is a critical part of a martech audit. But what happens after you’ve made that decision? How do you retire a tool without causing an uproar among users or breaking automations? 

Retiring martech software requires a thorough planning process and clean execution. Here are five steps to follow.

Step 1: Identify system integrations and process dependencies

To avoid disrupting your operations, it is critical to identify what other systems and processes depend on the tool you are planning to retire. If you work for a large organization and the tool has been in place for many years, this may be more difficult than it seems. If your organization hasn’t been thorough about documentation, other systems may use API calls or data exports from the tool without you knowing it. 

Even more challenging than identifying systemic integrations is specifying manual processes that exist outside the tool but are dependent on it. For example, a report gets sent out of the tool that a different team is manually copying/pasting into another system. These types of manual workarounds happen more often than you might think. 

Start talking to everyone and anyone in the organization who has a connection to the tool. If possible, find the individuals involved in the tool’s initial implementation. They may have the institutional knowledge you’ll need to understand the downstream impacts of the tool’s retirement fully.

Dig deeper: Why marketers are replacing foundational martech

Step 2: Assess data migration needs 

You may need to account for significant data migration as part of the retirement process. Heavily regulated industries such as financial services or healthcare have mandatory data retention periods (sometimes as long as seven years!).

Document what data needs to be migrated and determine where that data needs to go. If you are moving from one similar platform to another, for example, a marketing automation system, you may migrate the data from your old tool into the new one. Ask your new vendor how other clients have handled their data migration needs. They may be able to offer professional services or point your IT team to solid documentation for best practices they have seen with other clients.

But what happens if you are retiring a tool and not going to replace it? Where should that data go? Work with your IT partners to devise a plan. The data may be stored on a SharePoint site or in a new database. The best solution will consider how accessible that data needs to be and who needs to access it. 

If the data only needs to be accessed rarely, it may be sufficient to store it in a database that someone on the technology team can extract once in a blue moon. However, if non-technical users, such as marketers or salespeople, need to access the historical data regularly, you will need a more user-friendly solution.

Step 3: Identify the right time to retire and build a project plan

After assessing your martech stack, you must identify the right time to retire the tool. This could be based on several factors, such as the end of a contract, the completion of a project or the end of a fiscal year. Whatever the reason, ensure that the timing will not disrupt your operations. 

Once you’ve set the target retirement date, it’s time to build your project plan. Considering all of the downstream systems impacted and the data migration needs from Steps 1 and 2. You should have all the information you need to build a project plan working backward from your target retirement date.

What happens if the project work to decouple systems or migrate data will push you past your target date? If your target date was based on a contract, negotiate with the vendor to see if you can extend the contract month-to-month to give you the time you need to fully execute your plan rather than get locked into a full-year renewal.

Dig deeper: 4 steps to take before hitting go on your new martech platform

Step 4: Develop a communication plan 

Communication is vital when retiring a martech tool. Identify everyone who needs to be looped in, such as employees, agency partners and sometimes external customers. Give them sufficient notice and be transparent about the reasons for retiring the tool. You should also communicate your plan for migrating data to a new tool and what support will be available during the transition. 

If you are retiring one tool and replacing it with another, focus your communications on the benefits the new tool provides. Share the training plan so that users know they will be given support to help them learn the new tool.

Try and have the tools overlap for a specific period so that users are given a soft landing where they can start to learn the new tool while still having the safety net of doing things the old way if they are on a hard deadline and struggling with the new tool.

When retiring a tool that will not be replaced, talk to users to understand the features and functionality they depend on and work to build a plan that addresses how those needs can be met through other tools or processes.

Step 5: Retire the martech tool and sell the wins

Once you have migrated your data from your old tool and trained employees on using a new one, it is time for retirement. The period after the tool is retired is crucial for communication. Be sure to communicate to stakeholders the “wins” from retirement. 

What’s the adoption rate of users for the new tool? What sales wins or positive client experience feedback have you heard about the new tool? How many days has it been since the tool was retired that there have been no errors or disruptions to operations? What new investments have been made with the cost savings from retiring the tool?

These are all key questions that can be used as a jumping-off point to remind stakeholders of why the tool was retired in the first place.  

Retiring old tools for a more effective martech stack

Studies have shown that marketing organizations use as many as 91 marketing cloud services, and the bloat in tools can drag down productivity. For many marketers, “less is more” and retiring duplicative or underutilized tools can be a team’s secret weapon.

When done properly with a strong plan, retiring solutions will result in a leaner, cheaper and more effective martech stack.  

The post A 5-step guide to retiring martech tools without disrupting operations appeared first on MarTech.

Under budget constraints but also under pressure to generate growth, marketing and marketing ops leaders have been taking a close look at the ROI on martech solutions. We want to know what conclusions you have been reaching. Have you been consolidating your existing stack? Have you been gambling on promising new tools? Are you perhaps reducing your tech holdings?

The need for better features. The 2022 survey showed solutions being replaced in a quest for better features, in particular:

• Better integrations/open API.
• Improved data capabilities.
• Ability to measure ROI.
• Better customer experience.

Those were all higher on the list than cost. What, if anything, has changed? We’re in a very different place than we were just a year ago. The world opened for business again. Many people returned to the workplace. It was no longer necessary to do almost everything — from shopping to hanging out with friends — digitally.

That doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned our multi-faceted digital environments. We discovered that many virtual experiences worked just fine. There was, however, something of a deceleration in digital transformation (after the insane acceleration of 2020), arguably leading to the retrenchment we saw in a number of marketing tech companies that had perhaps grown too fast.

Taking the temperature. Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty, our hunch is that there’s still a thirst out there for innovation, for tech-enhanced efficiency, and for better-supported data-based decision making. After all, marketers have hardly hesitated to get their hands on generative AI.

But we need data too so see whether our hunch is right. So please take about three minutes or so to complete our Replacement Survey and let us know how your martech world is evolving.

The 2023 MarTech Replacement Survey is here.

The post Are you getting the most from your stack? Take the 2023 MarTech Replacement Survey appeared first on MarTech.

What is a martech stack? 

A marketing technology (or martech) stack is the collection of technology and software tools a company uses to manage and execute its marketing activities. Here’s a list of typical components. 

• Email service provider (ESP) 
• Customer relations management (CRM) 
• Marketing automation 
• Tools for A/B testing 
• Content management system (CMS) 
• Analytics 
• Social media tools 
• Adtech tools 
• Customer data platform (CDP) 
• Customer experience tools 
• Data visualization tools 

But I’m not starting from scratch

You probably already have some of these technologies unless you’re a start-up. But whether you’re starting from scratch or building on an existing system, components of your stack are likely to have overlapping functionality. An ESP might have marketing automation components or social media tools, and a CDP might have built-in analytics and its own ESP. 

So even if you did start from scratch, you’d still run into the problem of duplicative functionality. After all, nobody mandates the capabilities any marketing software provides. Just because a vendor calls their technology a customer data platform doesn’t mean it has the functions you want or expect in a CDP. 

Creating your map

One way to navigate this confusion is to map what you need and what various services provide. Here’s a very simple example. 

The objective is to create a comprehensive map showing your capabilities and those you want. To create the map you’ll need for your own custom martech stack, start by making a list of all the stack components you think you might need. Use the list I provided above as a starting point. 

In each of the rows, list the functions you need. In the columns, list marketing tech applications. This sounds difficult, but you can get a head start using MarTechBot. For example, you can ask MarTechBot to list the top 10 functions and capabilities of an ESP. Here’s the list MarTechBot came up with: 

1. Email creation and design: ESPs offer a variety of templates and tools to create visually appealing and engaging emails.

2. List management: ESPs allow you to manage your email list, segment it based on various criteria and maintain its hygiene.

3. Email automation: ESPs offer automation features that allow you to send triggered emails based on subscriber behavior, such as welcome emails, abandoned cart emails and more.

4. Reporting and analytics: ESPs provide detailed reports and analytics on email performance, including open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates.

5. Integration with other marketing tools: ESPs integrate with other marketing tools, such as CRM systems, social media platforms and landing page builders, to provide a seamless marketing experience.

6. A/B testing: ESPs allow you to test different versions of your emails to see which one performs better.

7. Personalization: ESPs offer personalization features that allow you to tailor your emails to individual subscribers based on their preferences and behavior.

8. Deliverability: ESPs have tools and features to ensure that your emails are delivered to your subscribers’ inboxes and not marked as spam.

9. Mobile optimization: ESPs offer mobile-responsive email templates and tools to ensure that your emails look great on mobile devices.

10. API access: ESPs provide API access to allow you to integrate your email marketing with other systems and applications.

https://martech.org/martechbot/

The list won’t be perfect. For example, I don’t see “send my email campaigns” on this list. But it will provide a good starting place. 

Review and optimize

As you go through the AI-created list, do two things. 

• Highlight the functions you require (don’t delete the others). 
• Add your own requirements to the list. 

There are a couple of reasons not to delete the functions you don’t need. First, they’ll keep coming up anyway, so you might as well have a place for them. Second, just because you don’t need or want them now doesn’t mean you might not in the future. Creating a comprehensive document will help you in the long run. 

Follow this same procedure for each of the technologies on your list. You’ll quickly notice lots of overlap between these lists. ESPs, CRMs and CDPs might all have marketing automation capabilities. You’ll also notice that some of the technologies you use will have functions that don’t fit in their category. For example, your ESP might be able to make limited content recommendations or have SMS capabilities. 

That’s fine. Just decide where you want each function to live according to your understanding of how that technology should work. Again, there’s no official list of what each technology is supposed to do. 

You can readily imagine that this burgeoning technology map is going to become a big spreadsheet. 

Once you have all the capabilities in rows, list the technologies you use at the top of each column and fill in the intersecting boxes. You could use a checkmark to indicate that the technology has that capability and use cell colors to indicate things like: 

• This is what we use and we like it.
• This is what we use and we don’t like it. 
• This technology can do this, but it doesn’t meet our needs.
• We should move this function here. 
• Etc. 

You’ll devise plenty of ways to characterize each of these entries. 

Getting all the details about how a particular technology provides a given capability in a single spreadsheet cell will be hard. Using colors as a guide will help, but you’ll need additional notes and explanations. You could put the additional information in a comment field, or you could provide it in a second document, with a reference to the appropriate spreadsheet cell. 

Now you have a chart that visually overviews your current tech stack. From this chart, you can see a few things: 

• Capabilities that need to be upgraded. 
• Technologies with more capabilities than you need or use (possibly because they’re already done by something else). This might indicate an opportunity to find a cheaper option that only does what you need or to negotiate a cheaper rate for that technology. 
• Desired capabilities that don’t currently have a home. This indicates where you need to start looking for new services. 
• Capabilities you have from an incumbent technology but aren’t using. These might represent simple opportunities to improve how you run your business. 
• Capabilities you haven’t considered.

This document you eventually build will become a useful tool for internal use and reference (especially when there’s staff turnover!), but it also helps you to evaluate prospective technologies. What gaps do you need to fill? What services can fill those gaps? 

By the way, MarTechBot can help with that as well. Ask something like, “What services can help me track user engagement on my website?” 

As long as you don’t include proprietary information in this map or any accompanying documents, it can be a useful addendum to an RFP. When prospective vendors see what you’re currently doing, they can make more intelligent recommendations about how their services can fit in. 

The post A practical guide to building a marketing technology stack appeared first on MarTech.

Key findings. Looking at new product announcements, we’re seeing an uptick from previous quarters with the number of new products jumping to 121 in Q1 2023. 

Investment in martech companies was spread across 36 categories and increased from $3 billion in Q4 2022 to $13.2 billion in Q1 2023. This number is skewed by a single investment of $10 billion in OpenAI. If you eliminate OpenAI, investment was consistent with Q4 2022 reflective of the continuing innovation and investment in marketing technology. 

Dig deeper: Why CMOs must cross the technical divide

The rise of AI. AI has been a widely discussed and utilized technology in martech for quite some time now. It has proven to be a powerful tool for processing massive amounts of data, generating new customer segments, and providing invaluable insights into customer behavior. However, the recent emergence of generative AI tools has sparked a new level of excitement around AI’s potential for martech innovation. These tools are not only easily accessible but also user-friendly, making it simple for marketers to incorporate them into their marketing plans. 

Over the past two quarters, CabinetM has begun to track and catalog both generative AI products as well as other categories and products that leverage AI. In Q1, there were 13 new AI tools announced and four vendors that announced new AI capabilities for their existing products. 

Categorizing AI is challenging. CabinetM has chosen to approach it as follows:

• Enabled: Products that could not exist without AI.
• Enhanced: Products that leverage AI to deliver new features or better performance.
• Egregious: Products that don’t actually leverage AI but leverage AI claims in their marketing materials.

We give Enabled products their own categories. Enhanced products stay within their core category (e.g. Business Intelligence) but are flagged as leveraging AI to deliver key functionality. Egregious products we do our best to ignore, but it’s often difficult to ascertain what’s real and what isn’t.

Why we care. Categorizing AI offerings in the martech space is something everyone watching it closely is going to need to do. The proposal from CabinetM here is useful (compare it with our own reflections — “Are the AI vendors in the martech space?” — here.

The CabinetM Q1 2023 MarTech Innovation Report is not gated and they tell us that downloading it will not result in a barrage of emails and phone calls. 

M&A activity. In Q1 we saw a downturn in M&A activity with 40 acquisitions, in comparison to 74 in Q1 2022, and 52 in Q1 2021. However, in comparison to the Q4 the number of acquisitions is flat. It’s too early to draw any conclusions about whether we are seeing a general downturn; it is something we’ll be watching closely over the coming quarters.

All CabinetM MarTech Innovation Reports can be accessed without a gate on LibraryM.

The post The martech space grows as acquisitions decrease appeared first on MarTech.

Understood today as campaign and messaging management tech, outbound marketing represents a holdout against the broader evolutionary trend. Yet, vendors are not immune to structural changes taking place in martech — and this part of your stack may well become the least recognizable by the end of this decade.

Outbound marketing technology today

Marketers have always loved outbound marketing: It offers proactive messaging that promises immediacy, actionability, measurement and flow that wasn’t available via traditional advertising. The old means of direct mail and telemarketing gave way in the digital era to email marketing. Thus, it’s no accident that email lies at the center of most major outbound marketing platforms today. 

Almost immediately, email marketing platforms built campaign-creation palettes so that you could send sequenced emails, including branching based on customers’ reactions. Over the past decade, these campaign subsystems enabled marketers to trigger messages in other channels, like SMS, in-app or outbound telephony and even on-demand print mailers. This allowed vendors to boast of their “omnichannel” capabilities, but really they coordinate just multichannel outbound messaging.

Typical platforms today divide into two camps: 

• Mass-market B2C email services providers (ESPs).
• B2B and high-end / high-touch B2C marketing automation platforms (MAPs).

Some MAPs further evolved additional capabilities, including potentially account-based marketing, inbound personalization, CRM integration and more robust reporting. In short, they have become a mini martech stack-in-a-box, especially for mid-sized B2B or considered-purchase B2C firms where a salesperson enters the mix.

This world is changing, though, especially at the enterprise tier.

The great decoupling

Beginning in the late 2010s, a new martech architectural pattern emerged that decoupled shared, foundational enterprise services from specific customer engagement channels. It began with customer data platforms (CDPs), which unify customer data in a single enterprise repository, sparing customer-facing systems from managing complex data going forward. 

We call this new pattern “legless,” and the overall approach is broadening beyond data to include enterprise content and personalization services. What’s driving the transition to legless architecture? 

As we emerge from the pandemic, there’s a new grammar to customer experience where the person on the other side of the screen becomes the subject of the interaction and no longer the object.

The most important change for this discussion is that heavyweight, service-rich outbound marketing platforms are increasingly anachronistic in a world where enterprises want key services to operate omnichannel. Let’s examine from the perspective of a decoupled, composable, “legless” stack. 

Decoupling data, content and decisioning

Decoupling data management from campaign management is a big win for enterprises. They no longer have to use their ESPs as quasi-CDPs (a role for which they are very poorly suited) and can instead focus on campaign optimization. This means operational change as more segments and individual message triggers get set at an enterprise level. On the other hand, this is the only way to scale. 

The advent of CDP adoption in large B2B enterprises puts great pressure on legacy MAPs, which traditionally relied (albeit reluctantly) on Salesforce or other CRM platforms for the single source of truth about customer data. It’s harder for them to integrate with CDPs. More generally, as stacks decompose, the need for an omnibus martech platform also erodes. I predict the demise of legacy, higher-end MAPs by the late-middle 2020s, if not sooner.

More and more enterprises are also decoupling content management from outbound marketing platforms. Here again, most ESPs and MAPs truly stink at content management. But more importantly, they tend to fare poorly at component block management — a critical precondition for more personalized messaging that all of you want to do. 

To be sure, not every DAM or CMS will integrate neatly with an outbound marketing platform. But we have seen proper omnichannel content platforms (OCPs) excel at this.

Finally, some enterprises are beginning to decouple decisioning (e.g., enterprise campaigns) from messaging platforms. This has the potential to totally disrupt the market because simple message-sending is now a commodity.

This trend started in the past decade as many enterprises decoupled transactional messaging from their outbound campaign platforms — simplifying their architectures and saving a ton of money along the way. 

Today, we see enterprise efforts towards more omnichannel orchestration logic (for example, things like “next best action” decisioning) as the hub that drives more customer interaction, including campaigns. Finally, the sometimes intense need to better integrate media ad spend with campaigns on owned channels is compelling a new look at what systems generate which messages.

A new model

This last trend is potentially the most profound. Some of our far-thinking clients already manage journeys and campaigns at a lower level in their stack. As for messaging, they deploy very cheap, highly-performant programmatic (API-based) senders for delivery and metrics gathering. The firms doing this now tend to be more born-digital enterprises, but it will become mainstream in a few years. 

There are many challenges to this legless approach. But automation and scalability require it. Enterprises will generate fewer ad-hoc campaigns, with more always-on listening and better response.

Most firms will want to govern and execute AI-fueled messages at an enterprise level rather than at the edge. You’re likely to see ever-more centralized marketing ops yielding improved customer experiences. With lower volumes of more targeted messaging, you’ll achieve better outbound and inbound engagement. 

It will take some time, but you can start heading there. And along the way, you may want to reconsider your choice of outbound marketing platform. 

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On May 2, designated as International Martech Day, Scott Brinker unveiled the latest edition of his marketing technology landscape. From 9,932 last year, the total number of solutions in the landscape has grown to 11,038. This represents something like a 7,000% growth in the space over the last 12 years.

One new feature launched alongside the landscape is the Marketing Technology Capability Heatmap. It reveals the most searched-for capabilities, with personalization at number one, and identifies the categories that offer them.

Presenting at Best of Breed Marketing Summit alongside Marketing Tribe founder Frans Riemersma, Brinker, VP platform eco-system at HubSpot, said: “On average, across companies of all sizes, you still have around 291 SaaS subscriptions. Even while there is consolidation of the industry in the economic environment of today, a motivation to rationalize stacks, we still see people using this very wide variety of tools.”

Dig deeper: Why marketers are replacing foundational martech

Other key trends. Among the trends identified within the new landscape, Brinker and Riemersma highlighted the following:

• Two-way data flows between data warehouses and front-line solutions like CDPs.
• Composability emerging in a number of categories including DXPs, commerce and CDPs.
• “AI as your co-pilot is real,” said Brinker; and it’s going to change the relationship between buyers and sellers because buyers will have AI too.
• Generative AI will extend the no-code revolution beyond marketing ops and power users to any marketing or business user.

Why we care. Everyone who knows marketing technology knows the marketing technology landscape. It’s an evolving but iconic image. It’s such a crowded graphic, however, that it simply became hard to read. This is why it’s so valuable that it has become, essentially, interactive. Registered users can explore the actual content of the landscape rather than just gaze on it in wonder.

The landscape is available at Chief Martec and can be sorted, filtered and queried at martechmap.com.

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