With the analysis of millions of real-user data points, Ghostery has found that a large website has an average of 75+ digital technologies. To supplement this finding, a recent ActualTech Media & Soasta presentation noted that “a typical web page today can contain requests with upward of 75% happening via 3rd-party scripts.” The driving force behind our previous tag categorizations was an effort to better calculate the risk and ROI of these 75+ vendors.  

We found that these marketers are overwhelmingly embracing self-service tools, not all-in-one marketing clouds. They prefer solutions that are easy to use, affordable and work seamlessly out of the box. They want the flexibility to build powerful stacks of technology, unique to their business needs, that integrate with one click.

When you consider budgets alone, mega-vendor marketing suites immediately break the bank. More than 40% of marketers at mid-market companies we surveyed have less than $50,000 per year to spend on marketing technology. Simplicity is also crucial, whether it’s technology for landing pages, social media, content marketing, SEO, website testing, or analytics. More than 98% of marketers want products that can be set-up and used by people with minimal technical skills.

#1. The marketing technologist has “crossed the chasm.”

#2. Martech is eating adtech — and the big gulp is still ahead.

#3. Best-of-breed marketing technology stacks are thriving.

• Mythbusters: 10 Myths MarTech Vendors Tell by Theresa Regli of Real Story Group
• Best of Breed: The DNA of Unicorns by Isaac Wyatt of New Relic
• Building Your Ultimate MarTech Stack by Travis Wright of CCP Global
• One Profile to Serve Them All by Troy Steen of Dell

#4. Agile marketing is crossing the chasm too.

• A Herculean Story From Intuit’s Global Marketing Automation Rollout by Jaemi Bremner of Intuit and Pat Spenner of CEB Marketing
• Agile Marketing Measurement by Shubu Mitra of Coca-Cola and Jennifer Zeszut of Beckon
• Scaling Innovation by Christopher Penn of SHIFT Communications
• Agile Marketing: Your Key to Becoming a Modern Marketer by Brent Bird and Chris Savoie of Workfront

#5. Cognitive computing is coming to marketing frighteningly quick.

• Cognitive Marketing: The Rise of the Super Intelligent Marketer
• How Machine Intelligence Will Really Change Marketing — or — How to Market With Smart Machines Without Ensuring the Destruction of Mankind or Losing Your Job

Follow these three steps to navigate the ever-evolving MarTech landscape:

1. Build a Solid Foundation

It’s critical to have a few core solutions that represent the foundation of your ‘house’. A good way to think about this is to understand what will be your source of truth or system of record for your key functions. For many companies, this is often your marketing automation systems, customer database/CRM and content management system (CMS) .

2. Understand Where You Are and Where You’re Going

You need to know what the current state of your business is and where you plan to go. The majority of businesses are trying to grow–so make sure you consider this as you evaluate new solutions. It’s critical to think about tools that will grow with you, so you don’t have to rip-and-replace every other year. 

3. Avoid a ‘Frankenstack’

Some of you might have seen what’s commonly referred to as a “Frankenstack”, a set of individual siloed tools that an organization tries to get to work together and ultimately results in a hot mess. It can happen to the best marketers, and it often happens because of rapid growth and a lack of planning or impulsive decisions (“Hey we can use it here!”). It is painful for IT, and it is painful for marketers. When this occurs, it is often more time consuming and expensive to fix. The key here is to have a plan, involve IT, and be honest about the resources you need to maintain and manage the solutions. 

marketingIO: One Source for All Marketing Technology Challenges. See our solutions.