What technology would you bet on in the martech race?

There are over 14,000 martech tools, according to ChiefMartec and MartechTribe. It’s an overwhelming number that no one can keep up with.

To make things worse, many of these tools become data islands in the martech archipelago, holding small volumes of data related to their specific task. This data fragmentation narrows the insight we can gain into our data, as no platform allows you to process everything you know about contacts.

Developing martech tools isn’t cheap, and it’s unlikely that marketing budgets can support the cost of creating tools. As marketers, most of us would prefer a smaller number of tools offered at a lower cost.

It isn’t even good for the audiences we target. Fragmented data means we have to ask the same question multiple times, creating friction that annoys the audience and damages our campaigns’ performance.

Not one solution

Realistically, there is unlikely to be one martech super tool that rules the world. The pace of change and the complexity of marketing campaigns make that impossible. But we can’t live with 14,000 choices: there has to be some consolidation, and there will be.

Today, martech is a Wild West. Companies see opportunities and try to stake their claims in different areas of technology, new social platforms or ways to target prospects. Even the Wild West, however, had to grow up and mature. It’s normal to see fragmentation during times of high innovation and consolidation as the market matures. The big guys acquire the necessary technology, and the lower-value tools quietly die as technological Darwinism rules.

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Who will be the winners?

There is already a clear leader in the martech gold rush: Salesforce. With a large user base, app hosting capabilities and integrations with many of the 14,000 other tools, the company is the first sharpshooter to ride into town and claim the role of sheriff.

Salesforce (SFDC) will likely remain a dominant force in the martech world by continuing to acquire technologies and expand capabilities. This is how SFDC became much more than a CRM, with marketing automation tools and — something that is particularly relevant to the discussion around data — a customer data platform (CDP). Integrating more features naturally drives customers to the platform and the core CRM product.

Although I’m sure world domination is part of SFDC’s plan, I can’t see the day coming when everyone has to use their CRM. It’s overkill for many small and midsize enterprises (SMEs).

Will other CRMs be on the podium? At this point, it doesn’t look likely that any other products in the category can match SFDCs power and momentum in enterprise-level systems. 

Marketing automation platforms are an obvious place to look for a market dominator. By pulling together activities across channels, they are the mainstay of many campaigns. They are also adding features that eat into the market of other tools like social media scheduling, AI content generation, advertising delivery and campaign management. True, their capabilities generally lag the best-in-class alternatives, but they are increasingly more than good enough for most users.

Marketing automation platforms, however, aren’t dominating the industry. Many have been acquired — Pardot, Marketo and SharpSpring are now owned by larger and richer companies that can fund the expensive cost of platform development. Interestingly, new marketing automation platforms are entering the market. This suggests that the MAP sector might not be as mature as you think.

HubSpot is an interesting case. Their approach is to offer a wide range of features that make it the only product marketers need, particularly in the SME sector. So far this has been a winning strategy.

The huge increase in the importance and amount of customer information could make data platforms the next big thing. However, many of the biggest data companies aren’t focused solely on marketing and don’t make it possible to take action with that data. So, I don’t see data platforms becoming dominant.

The big players will likely stay on top in a consolidated market. Adobe is a good example — it offers many tools marketers need and is becoming a fully integrated vendor. While there’s no obvious reason a company that started with design tools should dominate, their financial power allows them to.

Maybe the companies with sufficient resources to acquire and grow big will become the dominant consolidated vendors in the industry. 

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Who will be the losers?

Maturity and consolidation will generate losers. This is a major concern as marketers don’t want to pick a losing product and must invest a lot of time and money to migrate to a winning product.

The first and biggest losers will be martech companies that fight to remain independent for too long. As the market consolidates, if you wait too long in some categories, you’ll find integrated products taking your customers and interest in an acquisition falling away. As these companies decline, their users will also lose, as the costs will be less competitive than integrated products, and development will slow until the product is ultimately closed down.

However, companies that sell too early will not have developed products with a sufficiently complete feature set to demand maximum valuation. It’s a tricky balancing act.

Some of the bigger martech tools will lose the race. Peers or startups will overtake them. Their customers will lose, too, forced to either accept a substandard product or make a complex and expensive switch to another vendor.

I worry about SMEs. Companies most likely to win this primarily focus on the enterprise market — it’s where the most money is. They are not set up to deal effectively with small customers, and their pricing is frequently beyond SMEs’ budgets. HubSpot is the one likely winner that has the capabilities to deliver what smaller customers need.

What should marketers do?

The good news is that there is no need to panic. Martech tools are growing, so we’re still panning for gold in the Wild West. We can, however, learn from history. The real gold rush started in 1848 when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in Sacramento Valley.

By the end of the following year, however, panning for gold was no longer generating most of the wealth. Large corporations used hydraulic jets to mine for gold and find deposits. Ultimately, the big corporations will dominate martech.

Marketers also need to be flexible. Just as many miners realized they needed to be flexible and switch from prospecting on their own to working for corporations, marketers need to make sure they can jump into the winning tools. Data portability should be a priority for any modern marketer.

Smart marketers will monitor the landscape, follow developments and pick who they think might be winners in the future. They’ll place one or two bets on vendors that could dominate. If you want to ensure you don’t lose out when the great martech gold rush slows down, you should also adopt this approach.

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