Marketing Technology Landscape: Growing and Knowing Customers

Care to make a wager on the number of marketing technology (martech) solutions currently on the market?

Would you believe me if I told you that there are nearly 5,400? Yep, you read that right.

Based on the research of our friends at ChiefMarTec, as of May 2017 businesses have access to 5,381 different martech solutions.

As part of their annual analysis of the martech sphere, ChiefMarTec put together an impressive supergraphic containing all 5,000+ solutions organized into one of the following six categories:

• Advertising & Promotion
• Content & Experience
• Social & Relationships
• Commerce & Sales
• Data
• Management

Affectionately nicknamed the Martech 5000, the 2017 edition of the Marketing Technology Landscape supergraphic (pictured below) is based on research from CabinetM, Capterra, G2 Crowd, Google, LUMA Partners, Siftery and TrustRadius.

(You can find TowerData in the Data category, about halfway down the Audience/Market Data and Data Enhancement section on the left side. Click here to view the full supergraphic)

ChiefMarTec’s supergraphic drives home an important point: The number of available martech solutions is unfathomably overwhelming. And when you take into account the growth of this number (shown in the image below), one thing becomes crystal clear: things have gotten complicated for marketers. And fast.

The Evolution of Martech

The challenge modern email marketers face is three-fold:

• First, they must develop effective content and data strategies
• Then, they have to choose the right martech solution(s)
• Finally, they need to connect their strategies and their solution(s)

What makes this challenge more complicated is that the exponential increase in the scope of martech means there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution anymore. Marketers have no choice but to use multiple solutions to build, manage and optimize campaigns. The good news is most martech solutions have evolved to fit this new paradigm, offering marketers plug-and-play platforms that most commonly feature customer relationship management, marketing automation and content management in a single solution. These solutions integrate with different technologies that offer other capabilities – for example, social advertising, search engine marketing and customer data management. Being able to connect these solutions means marketers are better equipped to create a more effective, more engaging cross-channel experience.

One of the things we pride ourselves on at TowerData is providing our customers with comprehensive data about their audiences via our Real-Time Validation and Enhancement Application Programming Interface (API). Using the TowerData API, marketers can easily exchange information between their existing marketing technology and the TowerData servers to improve and expand their customer data. And better data leads to better cross-channel marketing.

Add valuable customer insights with TowerData’s Active Customer Intelligence (ACI).