Martech Explosion: 14,106 Solutions and Counting


The Gist

  • Explosive growth in martech. The martech landscape has seen a significant expansion, now featuring 14,106 solutions, marking a 27.8% increase from the previous year, mainly driven by advancements in AI and new tool integrations.
  • AI’s dominant role. Generative AI has significantly contributed to the growth, with new tools focusing on enhancing content and experience segments, indicating AI’s deepening integration across various marketing technologies.
  • Resilience and adaptation. Despite economic challenges, the martech sector demonstrates resilience with a low churn rate. Companies increasingly prefer adaptable and integrative tools over centralized solutions, seeking better functionality and cost-effectiveness.

The marketing technology landscape’s heading toward 15K territory. 

Scott Brinker, first deemed by CMSWire as the Godfather of Martech (marketing technology), released today his martech supergraphic that now includes 14,106 solutions.

But who’s counting, right? Brinker is, alongside his martech data partner and researcher Frans Riemersma, founder of the MartechTribe. Brinker, who operates the Chief Martec blog, made the announcement at the annual #MartechDay. He and Riemersma also released a comprehensive, 104-page report on the state of marketing technology.

All told, the martech landscape grew by a net addition of 3,068 products since last year’s 11,038; Brinker called it a “crazy” 27.8% growth year-over-year for the martech supergraphic, first rolled out in 2011 with 150 solutions.

Martech Grew ‘by a Lot’

Brinker expressed surprise at the extent of the marketing technology’s landscape growth, admitting he hadn’t anticipated it. Initially, he expected the growth in martech, particularly in what he refers to as “peak martech,” to stabilize. 

He was aware of numerous tools emerging, especially driven by the hype around generative AI, but he also thought more tools would fade away (the landscape saw a record-low 2.1% churn). Despite his expectations, business dynamics didn’t rapidly eliminate martech tools, a process he likened to a “pig-through-the-python.”

“It grew by a lot,” Brinker told CMSWire in an interview ahead of today’s release. “And by the way, in case if you’re thinking, ‘Oh, these people just throw anything into that landscape,’ we actually had over 12,000 new candidates that we reviewed, and out of the 12,000 candidates we reviewed, we actually only accepted 3,000 of them. So, in fact, actually we do a deeper analysis where there were a number of things happening with these GPTs written for the OpenAI store. Most of those we didn’t include in the martech landscape, but you could get into a bit of a philosophical debate of, ‘Well, why aren’t they martech if people are using them to achieve marketing?’”

Related Article: The Long Tail of Composable in the Martech Landscape

Time for a Martech Audit?

What is it like out there for some marketing leaders grappling with all the technology choices?

Marc Bedine, director of marketing operations and analytics at Cloudinary, told CMSWire with the explosion of new tools and marketing messages, it’s critical for his teams to stay focused on solving their most important problems. They do this by constantly auditing their current stack against operational goals to ensure they are getting the most out of the tools they already have and identify any key gaps.

“We are very open to consolidating tools when feature duplication is apparent between two or three solutions,” Bedine said. “We gravitate towards scalable and composable tools that can perform multiple functions, seamlessly connect with complementary platforms and grow with us as our marketing becomes more dynamic. Through this process, we remain ruthlessly committed to delivering a sizable return on our technology investments — individually and collectively. To do that, it’s critical that we can connect our pipeline back to the tools themselves and communicate value to our stakeholders early and often.”

The Impact of AI on the Martech Landscape

About 64% of marketers say AI is “very or critically important to success in the next 12 months,” according to the 2023 State of AI Marketing Report by the Marketing AI Institute; it’s an increase of 13 point year over year.

Speaking of those pesky little artificial intelligence apps creeping up in marketing technology … how did AI impact the world of marketing technology solutions?

Well, for starters, The State of Martech 2024 report found 3,135 marketing-specific GPTs alone from OpenAI’s GPT Store. Brinker noted in his blog there are now 1.8 million AI projects on GitHub, according to the 2024 AI Index Report.

Brinker and Riemersma have seen a “massive acceleration” of new martech startups due in large part to generative AI, and, in turn, that’s fueled the growth of the 3,000 new marketing technology solutions in the past 12 months. 

In analyzing these non-qualifying GPTs, the vast majority (32.1%) provide content marketing capabilities, according to the report. The next most popular categories include GPTs to assist with social media marketing (8.4%), SEO (7.6%), collaboration (6.5%), and product management (5.6%).

“AI is not new in the professional marketing category,” Raviteja Dodda, CEO of MoEngage, said in the report. “Many companies in the professional marketing space have done work around AI, from dynamic content optimization to predictive modeling. But there’s a lot more happening today in AI with new models — and, of course, generative AI. These are all going to be a big tailwind for the cross-channel marketing category. After customer support, I think cross-channel marketing or the marketing more generally is going to be the major category in which we see significant tailwinds in terms of innovation, in terms of growth.”

The martech landscape grew for the 13th year in a row. It now has 14,106 marketing technology products — a net addition of 3,068 products since last year’s 11,038.Chief Martec

Related Article: Make It Stop: Martech Landscape Hits the 5,000 Mark

Largest Growing Category: Content and Experience

When asked about the areas where growth was most pronounced, Brinker noted significant growth in the “Content and Experience” segment, particularly highlighting the emergence of 1,200 new martech tools powered by generative AI within that category alone.

Martech researchers did not designate a specific category for generative AI because it integrates across all categories, similar to previous AI and machine learning tools infused into martech. Brinker emphasized the prevalence of a long tail in the industry, where many applications and companies remain small, with few achieving billion-dollar valuations.



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