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Scott Brinker is the Godfather of MarTech. In his lecture in April 2020, he spoke about the Marketing Technology Landscape – and about the exciting development he has observed in this landscape in recent years.
What is MarTech?
MarTech is an acronym for marketing technology, i.e. technology for optimizing marketing. This is especially predestined for marketing in the digital sector, as the connection to technology already exists here anyway.
MarTech is a kind of list that lists marketing technologies and monitors their development over many years. MarTech was coined in 2011 by Scott Brinker, editor of the Marketing Technologist blog Chiefmartec.com and author of the book “Hacking Marketing”, and since then he has been re-edited and supplemented every year. Brinker is best known as the head behind the “Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic“, a graphically prepared and carefully categorized list of marketing tools that has grown to enormous size. Through his years of observation of this market, he has also become one of the leading specialists in marketing technologies, which he impressively demonstrated in this presentation.
How do marketing technologists tick?
Brinker began his talk with a outline of the mindset of marketing technologists. In his opinion, there are four directions: the “Process Orientation” is opposite the “Technology Orientation“, the ” InternalOrientation” is the opposite of “External Orientation“. This results in the four tasks Marketing Operations (CRM/MAP Admin), Marketing Manager/Growth Marketer, Marketing Analyst/DataScientist/Data Engineer and finally Marketing Engineer/Web Developer/AppDeveloper. The marketers of Process Orientation are thus confronted by the technicians of the Technology Orientation.
Brinker gives these four functions simple, grippy names: Maestro, Marketer, Modeller and Maker. What tools do these four use?
- The Maestro is the Operations Orchestrator. It works 76% with MAP, 70% with spreadsheets, 61% with CRM/CDP and 55% with Project mgmt.
- The marketer is the Brand/Demand Builder. It uses 75% MAP, 68% spreadsheets, 59% CRM/CDP and 45% analytics.
- The modeler is the Analytics Architect: 73% spreadsheets, 60% analytics, 53% CRM/CDP and 57% BI.
- The maker is the marketing maker: 69% MAP, 69% Analytics, 54% CMS and 39% dev tools.
Scott Brinker’s Marketing Landscape
In its Latest Edition, Brinker visualizes 8000 Marketing Solutions in its latest edition as a complex supergraphic in the form of a map of a marketing landscape – divided into the six areas of Advertising & Promotion, Content & Experience, Social & Relationships, Commerce & Sales, Data and Management. These six areas float on the map like an island in an imaginary ocean.
MarTech was invented by Brinker in 2011 and has been re-edited and supplemented every year since then. What included 150 Digital Marketing & Technology Tools in its first year has grown to a staggering 8,000 units in its latest edition – a whopping 5,233 percent growth. Growth from 2019 to 2020 alone is 13.6 percent.
However, this is not always just supplemented and supplemented: 615 solutions have also been removed for the latest issue, a rate of 8.7 percent. On the other hand, 1,575 new solutions have been added. So far, the Marketing Landscape has been a table with six columns, the latest edition visualizing its content as a kind of map in which the six areas float like islands in an imaginary ocean.
Brinker outlined the trends he observed: The data sector grew the most with 25.5 percent,number two is management with 15.2 percent,closely followed by Social & Relationships with 13.7 percent. In fourth to sixth place are the weaker “islands” Commerce & Sales (up 9.0 percent), Content & Experience (up 5.6 percent) and advertising & promotion with an increase of a comparatively modest 4.1 percent. In the subcategories, “Conversational Marketing & Chat” has the most impressive growth spurts with 70 percent and “Governance, Compliance & Privacy” with 68 percent.
The MarTech 2020 Landscape is made available as crowdsourcing: the data is available as an Excel spreadsheet for everyone, anyone can add or update new solutions or report “card oaks” and thus contribute to an even better usability of this map.
A period of consolidation
But is the marketing landscape really just growing? Or is there not a slow consolidation? The MarTech industry is already consolidated, brinker says: While the “head” consists of a few dozen platforms and the “torso” consists of a few hundred category guides, the “specialist apps and components” in the “long tail” are already going into the thousands – and the “ecosystem and citizen apps” in the “long, long tail” in the tens of thousands.
According to Brinker, the curve from the App Diversity does not describe a straight ascending line in relation to the current, but a waveform that, while essentially upwards with periodic fluctuations, fluctuates over and over again around the local “peak martech”.
In 2019, for example, the number of MarTech Solutions was highest in quarters two and three, and in the quarter four the lowest compared to Ad Tech, Digital Content and D2C (which had much smaller fluctuations over the course of the year).
Everything changes – or not?
The digital world is changing rapidly. No stone seems to remain the other. But is that really the case? Not quite, because four things don’t change:
- More digital
- More software
- More “no code”
- Drive to differentiate
In the first months of 2020, Brinker saw a significant slump and a subsequent slight recovery as a result of the Corona crisis. In the end, market value in the MarTech division was down 8 percent – in the S&P sector by 25 percent and in ad tech by as much as 32 percent. MarTech has thus weathered the Corona crisis comparatively well.
The average number of cloud services per enterprise increased from 1022 to 1295 between 2016 and 2019. The SaaS Spend has been steadily uphill for small and medium-sized enterprises over the past five years, while it has not increased at large companies since 2018. Small businesses also have a much higher number of apps than larger ones in relation to the number of employees (roughly twice as many apps at ten times their size).
SaaS spending per department shifted significantly between 2012 and 2019: While The S&M (Sales, Marketing, Customer Support) division remained moderately the same with small fluctuations, R&D (Product, Engineering, Dev Ops) declined sharply – mainly in favor of IT & Security and Human Resources, which played only a minor role in 2012.
Polls point to second Golden Age
Surveys reveal the preferred method of choosing Marketing Technologies: 29 percent preferred Integrated Suite Approach, while 57 percent preferred a best-of-breed approach. Fourteen percent did not have a particular preference in this regard.
The Ascend2 Martech Stack Optimization Survey in February 2020 asked “What features should improve technologies to allow marketing optimization?” The answer was clear: 57 percent of respondents put user-friendliness first, followed by integration with other technologies in the stack (50 percent) and the manageability of the data with 41 percent. The adaptability of the technologies to specific needs, the ability to automate processes and the ability to improve the customer experience were mentioned from 32 to 37 percent each. In last place was the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning with only 18 percent. On the other hand, the software companies mentioned three reasons for upgrading an application: better features, better integration and cost reduction – at 32 percent each exactly the same.
Where does the journey go? Brinker sees the “First Golden Age of Martech” follow a second Golden Age, in which the “suite vs. best-of-breed” model is superseded by platform ecosystems, in which the “software vs. services” model transitions to “blended models of software and services” and the “build vs. buy” model into “customs apps on a common core”. In this way, “Platform Ecosystems” can reduce integration barriers, accelerate platform network effects and appeal to a special audience. “Blended Models of Software and Services” can deliver results instead of just software, provide customers with the skills they need, and thus increase profit and profit. “Custom apps on a common core” can produce business models that are as different as snowflakes, even though they are based on the same chemistry, and allow decentralized use by independent users.
Observers of dynamic development
No one else has watched the landscape of marketing technologies as intensely as Scott Brinker over the past nine years. His presentation provided extremely exciting insights into the current developments that are currently changing this landscape and cemented his reputation as the “godfather of MarTech” in an impressive way.