MarTech Advisor presents SpendScape 2016 (Click here to view the High-Res version) - where we chart projected spending trends across the marketing technology landscape. This landscape is the result of a MarTech Advisor survey of the hottest categories in which marketers plan to spend in 2016. We asked over 300 marketing leaders mainly representing small and medium businesses, to prioritize the most important marketing categories for making technology investments in 2016. The analysis of the marketing spend survey reveals the vendors and technologies where marketers wish to spend more in 2016:
The graphic above maps the most suitable MarTech vendors within each of the product categories that survey takers have identified as areas where they will spend more. With the current explosion in MarTech, developing this as a comprehensive list of vendors is an almost impossible task. Instead, the MTA team has selected vendors in the above landscape to depict the software products we feel are the hottest (in terms of market share and capabilities) technologies within each of the hottest marketing categories.
The MarTech Advisor Research team analyzed the survey data and categorized the different marketing technologies in the MTA marketing framework shown above. This framework of processes spans a marketing operations flow: from creation and amplification of content to building relationships with customers in your marketing funnel, and the processes and technology needed to automate, execute and measure and optimize these operations. MTA’s Create, Connect, Manage, Measure marketing framework also has Merge in the center, representing the data management platforms that supply data for your marketing ops.
CREATE: Shift Towards Better Customer Experiences
In the “Create” category the top five technology products prioritized by marketers reflect the shift towards creating enriching digital experiences in order to rise above digital noise and achieve relevance with the customer. B2B marketers recognize the need for creating compelling stories around your brand and using the power of that content to create a buzz. Software products for Content Marketing, Creative & Design and Event marketing are the hottest areas that marketers want to spend more on because they all enable them to enrich the overall customer experience. The importance of creating engaging customized messages for customers means that marketers are now willing to spend on areas such as Sales Enablement software for Account based marketing and to creating interactive content.
CONNECT: Social and Email still top channels; Mobile, Video gaining importance
Within the connect technologies, Social Media technology continues to dominate marketing budgets, possibly because very few marketers are actually getting it right and able to hit their social media targets. This also explains the rise of influencer based social marketing as a way to get noticed in social media. Email continues to be an important channel of communication and is the second biggest tech priority. Meanwhile, “Voice of the Customer/Customer Experience” tools for creating better customer feedback and customer service experiences is a high growth technology, which many marketers are planning to adopt in 2016. The importance of Mobile and Video based advertising solutions in marketing continues to expand, as marketers look to adopt strategies to go where the customer is, and deliver targeted messages on whichever digital platform the customer maybe on. Marketers are now tending to look at all the customer touchpoints, and seek ways to influence and nurture the customer throughout the buying journey.
MANAGE:
The MANAGE set of technologies includes CRM systems which are the lifeblood of any marketing operation. With new SaaS products hitting the market, we are seeing a high intent among the SMB segment to spend on such CRM solutions with low upfront expenses. While Marketing Automation is an important goal but many companies still struggling with customer data, before they can really try to automating operations. Customer data remains a problem area for marketers and with more marketing technology giving them access to more and more data, spending in these areas is bound to increase.
MEASURE
Marketing professionals are aware that data pouring into an organization can be tapped to drive decision-making in marketing campaigns. Combining data from multiple sources to study customer behavior, is a largely new science which can help marketers understand where to optimize and customize their marketing message.
Technologies to Measure performance, build intelligent dashboards, use advanced intelligence & machine learning capabilities can help uncover insights that can have a huge impact on customer interactions. By pulling in data from multiple sources, marketers can apply big data analytics and advanced data science to uncover opportunities never seen before, and to measure and optimize campaigns in real time. This is a category where we today have advanced technology and capabilities but organizations are still to catch up in the way they measure and optimize marketing performance.
MERGE
Customer data platforms have emerged as an important piece of the marketing technology stack as marketers realize that having access to the right data from multiple sources drives better decision making. With a data management strategy, the enabling factors are in place for CMOs to use technology to scale-up and marketing campaigns, build personalized customer experiences and optimize campaigns based on real-time analytics.
Getting an integrated marketing data platform to integrate and manage data assets, is now a primary challenge for CMO’s looking to build a marketing technology stack. Marketers recognize the need to get this important part of the marketing stack puzzle right, and are willing to invest in technology to manage their marketing data.
Talking Dollars: Examining VC Investments in MarTech against Spending Trends
We compared the hottest spending categories from the SpendScape survey, with the most well-funded categories which we tracked in the MTA InvestScape. Comparing Marketing spend vs the actual investor activity shows that VC funding positively correlate with marketer’s priorities in categories such as social media, analytics, automation, customer data platforms and content marketing. The investor community also seems to be placing big bets on new technologies that have the potential to disrupt marketing in a digital world.
However, VCs are showing great interest in innovative solutions and new marketing channels where marketers do not have immediate plans to spend their budgets, such as Interactive content or Video, or Collaboration and Customer Experience tools. In CRM for example, many survey respondents are planning to invest in a solution, but this interest does not seem to be matched by VC’s either due to lack of opportunities or a saturated market. The opportunity within the CRM space for small and medium business remains largely untapped.
We also see high investment numbers in categories where vendors are building solutions that solve the data explosion problem – areas such as Marketing automation platforms, Data management platforms, Dashboards and Analytics capabilities received a lot of funding. The investor community is pouring in the money to find a vendor that can develop a single platform that integrates marketing data from anywhere – and then adds rich analytics and intelligence capabilities on top of that. Any platform which manages to achieve this will have a great chance to emerge as the biggest tech ecosystem for marketing.
This battle of platforms to build a consolidated “full stack marketing cloud” is where a lot of VC interest seems to building up. The above comparison suggests that marketers today, especially in the SMB segment, are prioritizing investments in marketing infrastructure and data technology. Marketers today are in a race to build data and automation platforms, and acquire the analytics and reporting capabilities needed to establish a digital presence.
