A glance at the new version of Scott Brinker’s marketing technology landscape supergraphic will show that marketing technology solutions grow at a tremendous pace. The 2018 graphic has 27% technology solutions as compared to the previous year’s figures (6829 vs. 6242). However, if you consider the growth over the past few years, you will find the expansion of the marketing technology space as incredibly overwhelming. The 2018 landscape alone constitutes the total of all marketing tech landscapes assembled from 2011 to 2016.
The surfeit of technologies makes assembling the right combination of marketing software applications a challenging task. It has become critical that marketers get their technological decisions right.
Fortunately, it has become easy to evaluate business software applications today because of the presence of the published ‘buying guides’ to help marketers navigate the software selection process.
However, it entails that marketers concentrate on assembling a marketing technology that in its entirety delivers the optimum results for the company. It includes adding a layer of complexity to the technology selection process that helps the marketers design and assemble an optimal Martech stack at the same time.
The expectations of the customers have increased today. As they use multiple channels to communicate or interact with companies, they expect the companies to remember their interactions as they move from one channel to the other. It can put extraordinary demands on the Martech systems.
Hence, marketers need to change their mindset by thinking of their marketing technology stack as an ecosystem of interdependent capabilities. It involves the integration of the components of the stack at appropriate levels to produce optimum results.