A featured contribution from Leadership Perspectives: a curated forum reserved for leaders nominated by our subscribers and vetted by the Construction Tech Review Advisory Board.
SEEK
The Evolution of MarTech
Christophe Eymery
Christophe Eymery has more than 15 years of experience in marketing and media. Eymery also has industry expertise across areas such as FMCG, finance, auto, education and recruitment, and team building and management. As a manager, Eymery has always been pragmatic and passionate about leveraging technology to help brands connect with their prospects more efficiently. Eymery currently serves as the Head of Digital Marketing at SEEK.
In your opinion, how has the MarTech landscape evolved over the years? How has technological evolution proved to be beneficial for marketing today?
MarTech is now the core focus for new-age marketers. As evidenced in the new Gartner’s CMO Spend Survey for 2018-2019,MarTech is the single most significant area of investment, when it comes to marketing resources and programs with 29 percent share up from 22 percent in 2018 (In contrast to labor costs, paid media, and the agencies managing it). This demonstrates that MarTech is crucial to meet marketing objectives, and it can hide inefficients pending in that category.
Indeed the MarTech landscape can prove complex to navigate due in large part to its ever-changing nature. We have been facing two conflicting trends in the MarTech landscape over the years. On one side, the MarTech landscape is becoming more complex and harder to read for marketers making decisions on technologies to adopt.
Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic now lists 7,040 vendors in its2019 edition. While we are witnessing a slowdown in the number of vendors’ growth, it nonetheless grew 3 percent year-on-year vs. 27 percent growth the previous year, which is still a staggering number compared to 150 vendors in 2011.
Most marketers now have a good grasp of what the large vendors such as Google and Salesforce (>$1b in turnover) can offer and how it can benefit their business. However, it is more challenging to understand the tier 2 vendors such as Vimeo which managed to reach maturity (>$100m in turnover) and earned their permanent position on the map. It is even harder when dealing with the up and coming players (<$100m in turnover) which represents the big bulk of the MarTech landscape as they could come and go. It is a big challenge for marketers to identify the relevant new tech, to anticipate what will take off, and what will fade away to make the right call and the right investment. Some technologies can be genuinely beneficial, but without the right founding, can fail, which represent a risk for marketers to invest.
It Is A Big Challenge For Marketers To Identify The Relevant New Tech, To Anticipate What Will Take Off, And What Will Fade Away To Make The Right Call And The Right Investment
On the flipside, those who make the right bet in new techs can take their business ahead of their competitors who don’t. Savviness in mastering the MarTech landscape has thus become an essential attribute for successful CMO and marketing leaders. Marketers have not only a lot to gain, but also a lot to lose depending on the decision they make.
On the other side, we have been witnessing an acceleration of the concentration of the MarTech landscape with the emergence four dominant ecosystems: Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Salesforce. This concentration of tech stacks makes it easier for marketers to identify the most relevant eco systems for their business. Those consolidations facilitate the adoption of ecosystems within which there is compatibility of tech and well-functioning integration. The challenge though is the existence of wall gardens between those dominant ecosystems, which forces marketers to make a choice and can limit their understanding of their brand impact when measurement cannot be consistent across the board. However, there are signs for improvement with the promising integration between Google and Salesforce through GA360 moving forward, for example.
MarTech needs to be driven by strategy, but it can also push the strategies forward in some instances. The same way, MarTech often requires a collaborative effort within a business to maximize its potential. For instance, Salesforce CRM would be used to its full potential if strategically managed across Marketing but also Sales and Services. MarTech can also drive the collaboration: when teams across multiple business units use the same system, it can foster collaboration that would be harder to achieve if they were operating with different systems.
Which are a few technological trends influencing MarTech today? What are some of the best practices businesses catering to the Marketing sector could probably adopt today?
The current trends in MarTech today are driven either by innovation or by the needs of marketers or the regulator. Technology empowers marketers to measure everything that they do. It can be very complicated to aggregate data from different sources and extract insightful information to make the right decisions. There is consequently a strong need for marketers to get support in Analytics and data integration/visualization. This need has encouraged the emergence of new vendors in MarTech and more sophistication of existing vendors for dashboard solutions such as Datorama and tableau (both recently acquired by Salesforce) but also DOMO.
In retail, the primary source for incremental growth in sales has been e-commerce for the past couple of years. As a result, marketers have been seeking for MarTech supporting sales automation, enablement, and intelligence. Changes in privacy requirements primarily driven by GDPR have encouraged the development in MarTech for Data compliance and security. New technologies such as AI, chatbots, and live chat opens the door for new opportunities for marketers to improve customer experience, service, and success.
Do you have any suggestions for our reader segment, which comprises of industry veterans and budding entrepreneurs addressing the needs of the Marketing realm?
To remain on top of the MarTech landscape, there is no better way than keeping close to the key players in the industry, attending industry events such as the Salesforce World Tour Series, DigiDay and SocialMediaWeek, networking with peers to understand what works and what does not, what are the new opportunities to consider and test. This also requires remaining on top of the industry press following Think with Google and the independent network such as Mumbrella, Adnews, and CIO Advisor, etc.
