By David Crane, Strategic Development Manager and Marketing Technology Strategist, Integrate
There has recently been much industry debate around “consolidation or proliferation” in the marketing technology space. This dialogue has essentially drawn a line between marketing suite vendors and smaller, open platforms. As a result, we’ve seen healthy industry discussions just as marketers deploy and digest technology to discover, nurture and serve customers in a more personalized manner.
By David Crane, Strategic Development Manager and Marketing Technology Strategist, Integrate
There has recently been much industry debate around “consolidation or proliferation” in the marketing technology space. This dialogue has essentially drawn a line between marketing suite vendors and smaller, open platforms. As a result, we’ve seen healthy industry discussions just as marketers deploy and digest technology to discover, nurture and serve customers in a more personalized manner.
In a comprehensive article, Scott Brinker — one of marketing tech’s most influential commentators — raises an intriguing idea. There has historically been a consolidation of business software as most vendors are either acquired or killed, but the marketing technology landscape is in a new, very different situation due to two trends:
- Marketing tech is the first major business market of the cloud computing era, which benefits technology startups with nearly zero capital requirements, greater scalability, easier tech development and more accessible talent and customer pools.
- While the start-ups benefit from the cloud computing era, large marketing tech vendors struggle with diseconomies of scale typical of enterprises, such as slower reaction to change, more management layers, coordination difficulties and delayed initiatives due to larger legal departments.
Shortly after Brinker’s post, Jon Miller, Marketo Co-Founder and VP of Marketing, declared Marketo’s intention to shun the marketing automation herd that has gradually been migrating toward marketing suites via acquisitions. Further, Gartner Research Director Martin Kihn cast additional doubt on the idea of consolidation and big suite monopolies, providing three compelling reasons:
- Marketing tech proliferation is moving too quickly for big suite acquisitions to keep pace;
- Big companies can’t innovate like start-ups, as they have little incentive to invest in speculation; and
- Marketers gain more from open connectivity, data portability and flexible tools — meaning they are less inclined to be constrained by marketing suite vendor requirements, limitations or specifications.
While Marketo discusses the rise of open marketing platforms, marketing technology influencer David Raab questions the platform’s core constituency, pointing out that marketing, sales and services should use a common “customer engagement platform” if businesses are to deliver a unified customer experience. Thus, marketing isn’t the sole (or even primary) buyer, which will have major implications regarding which platform vendors ultimately succeed.
Blair Reeves of IBM Digital Analytics recently argued that suites are the superior model. He reports that marketing vendors offering a packaged solution built on a single system of record have an advantage. With the open-platform model,unless your marketing solution is directly informed by a digital analytics solution, you’ll run into trouble with regard to integration, data feeds, effort and costs. He further argues that only big companies have the research and development resources to deliver the substantial new capabilities.
What remains to be seen, however, is whether marketing suites execute on the promise of smooth integration better than open platforms. It’s intuitive to think so, but acquisitions don’t always translate to cohesion. And we all know that large enterprises are hardly devoid of problems with product and operational silos — so homegrown tech innovations don’t necessary mean unity either. Thus, we shouldn’t assume that marketing suites are better prepared to address this issue.
Marketers shouldn’t neglect the fact that, when it comes to marketing platforms, we’re not comparing apples to apples with open or all-inclusive being the sole differentiator. Individual marketing departments may find their two best options comprise one of the big suite vendors and an independent marketing automation platform. Organization (or marketing department) size, industry focus (e.g., B2B or B2C), and specific strategic/procedural focuses (e.g., inbound marketing, lead scoring, reporting and analytics, lead nurturing, etc.) will all affect decisions because client portfolios and marketer needs differ between organizations.
Moreover, marketers shouldn’t overlook the need for flexibility with pre-existing tech investments. We’re always discussing what’s next — what tech solution will increase workflow efficiency or improve the customer experience. It’s as if we’re assuming marketing departments have a blank check with which to rebuild their tech stack every year, and the procedural flexibility and cultural discipline to make this continual reinvention of their marketing complex work. This is pure fantasy.
Many marketing departments have pre-existing tech investments that they must factor into any proposed solution. This means third-party integrations. Open-platforms are likely more accommodating to this group, simply because there’s less chance of solution overlap, fewer issues with vendor lock-in, and arguably more experience with third-party integration.
When all is said and done, it’s the customer who will decide the future of marketing tech. They will vote with their actions and checkbooks on the path to revolutionize marketing and deliver on the data- and tech-driven era of marketing.
David Crane is Strategic Development Managing and Marketing Technology Strategist at Integrate, working with marketers to understand the relationships between their current marketing processes and systems, as well as different ways in which they can be improved to achieve better performance. He also helps guide the company’s thought leadership and writes regularly for the Integrate blog.
