What Technology Do You Think Will Win the Martech Race?

ChiefMartec and MartechTribe report that there are more than 14,000 martech tools available. It’s an overwhelming number that no one can keep track of.

To make matters worse, many of these tools become data islands in the martech archipelago, storing little amounts of data particular to their role. This data fragmentation limits the insight we can obtain into our data because no platform can handle everything you know about contacts.

Developing martech tools is expensive, and marketing budgets are unlikely to cover the costs. Most marketers would want a smaller number of tools available at a lower cost.

It’s not even good for the audiences we’re trying to reach. Fragmented data forces us to ask the same question numerous times, causing friction that irritates the audience and harms the performance of our ads.

Not a single solution.

Realistically, there is unlikely to be a single martech super tool that controls the planet. The speed of change and the intricacy of marketing strategies make this impossible. But we can’t live with 14,000 options: there must be some consolidation, which will occur.

Today, martech is the Wild West. Companies recognize opportunities and endeavor to stake their positions in various sectors of technology, new social platforms, and prospect targeting strategies. Even the Wild West had to mature. It is usual to witness fragmentation during periods of significant innovation and consolidation as the market matured. The big players obtain the essential technology, while lower-value instruments quietly perish as technological Darwinism takes hold.

Who will be the martech winners?

Salesforce is the clear frontrunner in the martech gold rush. With a big user base, app hosting capabilities, and connectors with many of the 14,000 other products, the firm is the first sharpshooter to ride into town and take on the position of sheriff.

Salesforce (SFDC) is anticipated to remain a dominant force in the martech market as it continues to acquire technology and extend its capabilities. This is how SFDC expanded beyond a CRM to include marketing automation capabilities and, most importantly, a customer data platform (CDP). Adding new features organically attracts clients to the platform and the primary CRM solution.

Although I’m sure world dominance is part of SFDC’s strategy, I don’t see a day when everyone must use its CRM. It’s excessive for many small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs).

Will there be other CRMs on the podium? At this point, it appears that no other solution in the category can match SFDC’s capability and momentum in enterprise-level systems.

Marketing automation tools are the obvious place to search for a market leader. They serve as the foundation of many campaigns by bringing together efforts from several platforms. They are also adding features that will compete with other products on the market, such as social media scheduling, AI content development, advertising delivery, and campaign management. True, their capabilities often lag behind best-in-class competitors, but they are becoming more than enough for the majority of users.

However, marketing automation tools do not now dominate the business. Many have been bought, including Pardot, Marketo, and SharpSpring, which are now owned by larger, wealthier organizations that can afford the high cost of platform development. Surprisingly, new marketing automation platforms are hitting the market. This indicates that the MAP industry may not be as developed as you believe.

HubSpot is an interesting example. Its strategy is to provide a comprehensive set of features that make it the sole solution that marketers require, particularly in the SME sector. So far, this has been a successful tactic.

The significant increase in the significance and volume of client information may make data platforms the next big thing. However, many of the largest data businesses are not purely focused on marketing and do not allow users to take action with their data. So, I don’t see data platforms gaining traction.

In a concentrated market, the big players are likely to maintain their dominance. Adobe is a good example; it provides many of the capabilities that marketers require and is evolving into a fully integrated vendor. While there is no evident reason for a corporation that began with design tools to dominate, its financial resources allow them to do so.

Perhaps the companies with the means to acquire and become large will become the dominating consolidated providers in the industry.

Who will be the loser?

Maturity and consolidation will result in losers. This is a serious worry since marketers do not want to choose a losing product that will require a significant investment of time and money to transition to a winning product.

The first and greatest losers will be martech companies that have struggled to remain independent for too long. As the industry consolidates, those who wait too long in some sectors will lose clients to integrated goods, and interest in an acquisition would wane. As these companies decline, their customers will suffer as costs become less competitive than integrated products and development slows until the product is eventually discontinued.

Companies who sell too early, on the other hand, will not have built products with a sufficiently complete feature set to demand the highest possible valuation. It’s a challenging balancing act.

Some of the larger martech tools will lose the race. Peers and startups will overrun them. Their consumers will also suffer, forced to choose between accepting a subpar product and making a complicated and costly transfer to another provider.

I’m worried about SMEs. Companies who are most likely to win this tend to focus on the enterprise market because that is where the greatest money is. These organizations are not designed to efficiently deal with small customers, and their price is sometimes prohibitively expensive for SMEs. HubSpot is the most likely winner because it has the capabilities to supply what smaller customers require.

What should marketers do?

The good news is that there is no reason to panic. Martech tools are expanding, so we’re still prospecting for gold in the Wild West. We may, however, learn from the past. The actual gold rush began in 1848, when gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in the Sacramento Valley.

However, by the end of the following year, panning for gold was no longer the primary source of riches. Large firms employed hydraulic jets to mine gold and locate reserves. Ultimately, large firms will dominate martech.

Marketers also need to be adaptable. Just as many miners understood they needed to be adaptable and transition from prospecting on their own to working for corporations, marketers must ensure they can leap into the winning technologies. Data portability should be a top issue for all modern marketers.

Smart marketers will study the marketplace, track developments, and predict who will triumph in the future. They’ll make one or two bets on suppliers who could dominate. If you want to avoid missing out when the great martech gold rush slows, you should also use this method.