It is that time of year, birds are chirping, flowers are starting to bloom and the notorious MarTech landscape infographic has been released. This year, the Landscape encompasses more than 8,000 companies across six master categories, a dramatic increase of 1,575 from the year before.
Now, we all know that the first thing anyone who works in the marketing tech or sales tech industry does: look for their logo in the bubbles. Then swiftly look to see how their company is positioned compared to competitors, “Is my logo bigger than theirs?”
That aside, what does this mean for marketers?
Probably not a lot right now from a purchasing perspective. I haven’t seen marketers using this as a purchasing guide. I hear a lot of crazy things in my talks with marketers but not the idea that they are using the landscape as a shopping list. The addition of the Martech 5000 website is brilliant, I must say. I hope that the team is able to take that to the next level to provide further recommendations/reviews or additional data about integrations. I’m all about the beautiful representation of information, but I also want to act on it.
But I think there are ways for marketers to use this list as a way to consider how they can be using what they already have today. Let’s face it — many marketing budgets are currently on hold or worse, being cut — so people have to use what they have today. We also know that marketers haven’t done a great job of using the full set of capabilities that their technologies offer. In fact, Gartner reports that marketers are only using 58% of the capabilities of their martech stack, so we have an opportunity to get more from what we already have.
This subject is something I’ll be thinking about over the coming weeks. In the next month or two, I’ll hold a webinar to discuss how marketers like you can work with what you have today. The webinar will include an approach you can use to evaluate and prioritize which technologies to expand your use of their capabilities. Keep an eye out on this area for an update and I’ll see you then.