Sector Roadmap: Marketing-Technology platforms

1. Summary

The Most Important Marketing Technology Trends Digital Marketers Should Know

As digital takes an increasingly large chunk of marketing and advertising spending, marketers need tools to manage and evaluate their campaigns. Major enterprise software and CRM players, as well as digital marketing specialists, are putting together suites of products in an effort to provide marketing technology platforms.

Marketers need these platforms to work across different channels – including traditional media like TV, print, and direct mail – in the service of all four marketing objectives: customer awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention. And the platforms must address new spending areas like social media and mobile marketing.

Key findings from this Sector Roadmap^TM include:

• Social-media marketing will be the most important trend in digital marketing over the next 12 to 24 months. Spending on social media is exploding, though there is currently a less-than-perfect understanding of its effectiveness and ROI.
• The other two most important marketing needs that platforms must address are multichannel and multi-objective campaigns. While mobile marketing is exciting and growing fast, most mobile spending is on search and social media, and on choreographing mobile programs alongside other marketing tactics. It will be a much more disruptive force in years to come.
• Likewise, digital video will play out over the long term, and programmatic buying, while hugely disruptive for online publishers, is an issue only for digital display advertising for the moment.
• Some of the marketing-tech platforms are too CRM-centric — at the expense of advertising and customer acquisition. We evaluated a representative selection of suppliers, including some niche specialists, for their strategic focus and vision, as we expect their product sets will evolve rapidly. Of the companies we examined, IgnitionOne and Adobe currently align best with the trends we deemed most critical. Neustar and Salesforce.com are also well positioned. HubSpot and Bronto Software offer compelling, but more narrowly focused platforms

Key:

• Number indicates companies relative strength across all vectors
• Size of ball indicates company’s relative strength along individual vector

Source: Gigaom Research