Over the last 20-something years, the Internet and smartphones have transformed the art of marketing… several times over.
INTERNET USERS WORLDWIDE:
With the tremendous growth of Internet, smartphone, online video and social media usage, and the digitization of nearly all customer and prospect touchpoints, have come corresponding innovations in marketing, such as:
- Online display ads (1994)
- WebEx/ reliable Webinars (1999)
- Salesforce/ SaaS Customer Relationship Management (1999)
- Google AdWords (2000)
- Facebook Ads (2008)
The early adopters of these and other effective new marketing and sales technologies realized significant competitive advantages. For example, Larry Bartholomew, Lively Lobster’s owner and ad manager, was Google AdWords’ first paying customer. He quickly understood that AdWords could drive more business to his restaurant and help him make money from other sites’ affiliate programs. He grew his affiliate optimization empire to a 16-person business that placed more than $12 million in ads on Google over the next decade. Similarly, early WebEx customers enjoyed sizable gains in productivity and travel savings, as they were able to market and sell to prospects without travel or tradeshows.
The pace of innovation around new marketing technologies is exploding. ChiefMarTech strives to track all the vendors in the marketing technology space. In 2011, there were about 100 vendors listed. In 2015, this exploded to 1876 vendors. And during that time, entirely new marketing technology categories were introduced, including:
- Performance & Attribution
- Dashboards/ Visualization
- Data Management Platforms/ Customer Data Platforms
GROWTH IN MARKETING TECHNOLOGY VENDORS, 2011-2015
And this explosive growth has yet to include newer categories, such as account-based marketing, predictive analytics, and programmatic TV.
While newer marketing technologies frequently offer great promise and Return on Investment (ROI), not every technology offers a great ROI. And even more frequently, most newer technologies present technical implementation challenges before a customer can realize the ROI. For example, one company I know tried to introduce an Account-based Marketing (ABM) system recently, but it was disappointed with the results. The company found that many of the prospects it targets work remotely from the road or a home office (without a VPN). Due to limitations with the Account-based Marketing’s IP-based technology approach, the company was not able to target enough of its prospects to continue its investment in ABM.
Another technology company I know has a product that is embedded in customers’ Websites. The product, like similar competing products, is visible in a Website’s JavaScript tags when it is running on a site. The company planned to run a campaign to target prospects that were running competitive products on their Websites, by utilizing a JavaScript tag-identifying tool. The company was able to identify prospects who had installed competitive products, but they then found that they could not email these companies in a standard manner, like Marketo. They risked having their email server identified as a source of spam if they continued targeting prospects with competitive products through standard email automation approaches.
There is an explosion in marketing technology, and it is not stopping anytime soon. The marketing software market is expected to grow to more than $32.3 billion in 2018, according to IDC, which is up 42% from 2015. Much of this technology can improve your top-line revenue, your operations, your lead nurturing, and so on. MarTech Review, through our reviews and analyses, is here to help you identify the best and most promising MarTech technologies, and support you through the implementation. Join the www.martechreview.com subscriber list to continue receiving our updates on this dynamic industry. And contact us if you want MarTech Review to cover any specific technologies.
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