Why the explosive growth of the martech industry is leading businesses like yours to change platforms

Migrations are becoming more and more common in today’s market. Our Director of Consultancy, Jamie Burrell takes a deep dive into why. (About the Author)

The Marketing Technology market is competitive

Salesforce, Adobe, Oracle, HubSpot and Act-On are just a few of the results you'll see in a web search for Marketing Automation tools. Add to that Marketing Cloud, Sales Enablement, Content Management, Social Integrators, Event platforms, CRM and CDP tools and it's clear there are multiple vendors offering an approach to marketing technology (martech).

"Marketing technology has become a core enabler of B2B marketing, consuming about 20% on average of the B2B marketing budget"
Future of B2B Marketing, Forrester, May 2021

What is just as important as the choice of vendor, is the commitment those vendors have to continually improving their products. There are those who elect to buy in new features through acquisition, those who invest in product development, and those who stick with the product as it is.

It is becoming ever clearer that optimisation and integration are now major drivers of market growth, but the question posed however, is how this explosive growth contributes to martech migrations, and that begins with Gartner’s magic quadrant.

Download our guide to Martech Migration

The Magic Quadrant for digital marketing hubs: 2014 to Today 

Every year, Gartner release a visualisation of the different marketing automation platforms and where they believe they are in the market, based on their own research. This sets out the platforms on a quadrant divided by four categories:

• Challengers
• Leaders
• Niche Players
• Visionaries

As you can see, according to Gartner, in 2014 there weren’t really any clear tiers to the market, although Salesforce and Adobe were starting on the trajectory to 'leaders'.

Oracle's Eloqua was on top in 2014, but a lot of organisations couldn’t afford the licence fees, so it didn’t see much sustained growth or wide scale market penetration. These high fees posed a problem for smaller organisations who wanted to invest in Marketing Automation, simply because there wasn’t an obvious vendor choice for them in the tier below Eloqua.

This resulted in large numbers of organisations investing in martech that probably didn't actually meet their needs because, in 2015, the industry was only really starting to become more mainstream, and businesses didn’t really know what they wanted or what the martech capabilities were.

Fast forward to 2020 and there are three obvious market leaders, and the other platforms seem to have found themselves and settled on their roles, with a few classed as niche players, and others visionaries.

Today, organisations know better what they want out of martech and how they want it to align with their business objectives. There are also more knowledgeable martech operatives at both the strategic and tactical levels who can advise on best practice and likely ROI.

Consequently, at the time of writing, a martech customer is both better able to articulate what they need from the technology, and there is a greater marketplace from which to select from. A business today can sensibly evaluate their organisational design and choose to move to the platform and vendor that best aligns with their vision.

As an example, if in 2014 you invested in an Email Service Provider (ESP), because that was what you presumed was required at the time, and now, as you've grown and learned what your customer's want, and what martech exists to serve them a great customer experience, it could be time for a platform change.

Download our guide to Martech Migration

It takes more than just one platform - use a Martech Spine

The power and opportunities of marketing technology are still evolving. Today, Marketing Automation sits alongside a suite of technologies generating data and communicating with customers and Sales. Vendors continue to build out comprehensive ecosystems of martech, striving for the single source of truth on a customer and a unified communications strategy.

The struggle in achieving this marketing nivarna often lies in the integration of all the technologies. With so much data, different skills sets required to operate each platform, different teams working with the platforms it's not surprising that the best technology still leads to lackluster marketing.

Clevertouch advocate the Martech Spine™ which simply acknowledges that some marketing technologies are more important than others. Once you get those integrated together, and generating reports and dashboards you can use to make decisions with confidence, you'll reap the benefits of your investment in the technology.

Is your organisation considering a move to a platform that better suits your business objectives? Read our guide on Martech Migration.

About the Author

Jamie Burrell is an experienced Consultant with a demonstrated history of working with enterprise clients to successfully deploy and optimise technologies into their Sales and Marketing organisation. An expert at both designing and guiding successful martech implementations that maximise return on investment.