6 implications for selecting and managing today's and tomorrow's marketing technology

We've been sharing the latest Marketing Technology Landscape map by Scott Brinker, @chiefmartec for several years now. You've almost certainly seen one of the earlier iterations since it has been widely shared. I love it because it's a USEFUL infographic - it prompts marketers to review their current Marketing Technology and take action to improve their Marketing Technology Stack. When I discuss it with marketers when speaking or training, it certainly has a big impact, not always in a good way... It prompts that "OMG how do I cope?" fear amongst marketers and business owners due to its complexity. But, for me, from a positive POV, it shows the opportunity of the many tools we have available to deliver more relevant, more personalised communications today. It's inspired the Smart Insights team to create our own Martech infographic which includes both insight and operational tools…

Use our new digital marketing tools infographic to manage how you use marketing technology

As marketers today, we’re fortunate to have a huge number of free and low-cost tools to give us insight about our customers, competitors and market. They also help us compete by delivering automated relevant, real-time communications integrated across desktop and mobile and digital plus traditional marketing channels. To help highlight the range of great options available, our infographic and free Digital Marketing Tools and Services download recommends 30 categories of marketing technology and our pick of the most popular 5 in each category. We’ve grouped them across the Smart Insights RACE Planning framework for managing digital marketing so you can review where you could make better use of the tools across the customer lifecycle. Click on the infographic below to see a larger version.

What…

The 14 top rated digital marketing techniques for 2017 according to Smart Insights readers

[Editor's note: Dave Chaffey has now updated his predictions for 2018: Read Digital Marketing Trends to act on in 2018] In this article, I'll take an in-depth look at what I see as the most significant trends in digital marketing for the year ahead. But, it's not only my view, since I have 'crowdsourced' the importance of the different trends rated by the popularity of each trend. For all members of Smart Insights, we also have a more detailed free download of the marketing megatrends for 2017, which are 9 digital marketing and martech megatrends will help give you an edge in 2017. In the download we discuss machine learning and artificial intelligence, which for me is the biggest trend in marketing right now. Machine learning techniques apply across many of the techniques we discuss in this post including Big Data,…

Too Many Tech Options = Random Acts Of Technology

If you blink, a dozen more marketing technology providers show up. Just 5 years ago, about 150 providers could hang their hat in the marketing tech sector. Today, we count more than 3,500 marketing technology providers. With so many choices to choose from, it’s no wonder random acts of technology happen more often than not.

What’s A Random Act Of Technology (RAT)?

A RAT happens when companies throw technology at problems without a strategy. In sales and marketing, it’s one of the top reasons marketing technology ends up flopping. In research conducted in 2016, Ascend2 conducted research into application of marketing technology. They found insufficient strategy as a top barrier to achieving success with marketing technology.

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New 'SimilarTech' service promises to help marketers compare martech stacks

We love any tool which helps marketers do their jobs better, which is why we created an infographic breaking down 150 of the best marketing tools into 30 different categories. But we aren't the only ones. Some of the folks at SimilarWeb also looked at how to help marketers decide on what marketing tools to use, and came up with a clever new service which they've dubbed 'SimilarTech'. We chatted to Daniel Buchuk, SimilarTech's head of brand and strategy about their new feature, what inspired it and how it works.

As someone involved in the marketing technology industry, what did you make of Scott Brinker’s latest Martech graphic? 

Scott Brinker's market landscape graph is testament to the extraordinary evolution of this industry, featuring featured 350…

What is it? Does it matter? Do I already have one?

Marketing technology is exploding. Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape showed 947 companies in 43 categories in 2014 – which seemed overwhelming. Then in 2015 it jumped to 1,876 companies. And we’ve learnt that 2016 has seen it double again, to a massive 3,500 companies. So what does this mean for marketers? What does it mean for IT managers? And how can we plan to make the most of the new technologies without getting lost in a sea of data? The aim of this post is to introduce the core components and purpose of a Marketing Technology Stack. Most of the current literature is aimed clearly at large organisations whose CIO’s, CMO’s and CTO’s are very busy dealing with mega integrations of multi-user software solutions. It’s fascinating…

How does your 'marketing stack' compare? Do you use the same tools as the best in the business?

Marketing tools can speed up processes, automate messaging and boost conversion rates. Whatever area of digital marketing you are involved in, you can bet they’ll be a plethora of tools to choose from which could help you do your job better. Tools can be incredibly useful, but with so many different types to choose from it can be really tricky to decide which is the right fit for your business.

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We've been inspired by Scott Brinker's awesome map of the vendors across the Martech landscape which we have featured on the blog. While Scott's visual does a great…