2020 Marketing Technology Landscape features 8,000 tools, goes interactive
Looking like more of a map than a landscape, the latest iteration of the MarTech Landscape was crowdsourced with help from hundreds of contributors.
It’s a big day in the martech community — the 2020 Marketing Technology Landscape has landed. This year, MarTech Conference Chair Scott Brinker, and maker of this supergraphic since 2011, crowdsourced data from hundreds of contributors to put together the latest version of the landscape.
With exactly 8,000 marketing tools included, Brinker reports the landscape saw an 8.7% churn rate since 2019. Even with the tools that were removed, one in five tools added this year are new.
“Growth from 2011 to 2020 is insane,” said Brinker during his Discover Martech day two keynote, “Technology has truly become a primary pillar of how marketing operates.”
What may be the most interesting — and useful — detail about this year’s MarTech Landscape: It comes with an interactive component. Marketers can register to access the interactive portal at www.martech5000.com. Users can search and view all 8,000 marketing technology tools listed in the landscape, as well as contribute new updates and add suggestions for moderators to review and incorporate into the official database of platforms.
Will the pandemic impact the martech landscape?
No one knows how the coronavirus outbreak will impact our industry — or business in general for that matter — but Scott is optimistic that the martech landscape will continue to grow. He says martech is a long-term game and the number of SaaS apps used by enterprises continues to increase.
“The truth is, if I look further out, and say ‘what are the next ten years of martech going to be about’ I feel like the underlying forces of a robust and diverse landscape is probably going to continue,” said Brinker. He admits we’re likely to see a bump now, but the world is becoming more digital. There is more software being developed because there are no boundaries to building platforms, and we keep seeing more no-code solutions.
One thing that has changed since last year is the focus on integration. During his keynote, Brinker referenced Ascend2’s martech stack optimization survey from February that found more marketers want easy to use tools that offer greater utilization and faster adoption by teams than solutions with integration capabilities. It was close — 53% of the survey participants wanted ease-of-use solutions, while 50% wanted integration.
Still, Ascend2’s data points to the ongoing trend for no-code and low-code martech solutions, a detail Brinker highlighted when he released last year’s landscape.
A deep dive into this year’s numbers
Even with the 615 tools that were removed since last year, the 2020 landscape saw a 13.6% growth rate, with 1,575 new solutions added in all.
When looking at growth among the primary categories of platforms, data solutions had the biggest increase — up 25.5% over last year. This coincides with MarTech Today’s Career Survey results which found nearly 70% of marketing technologists are responsible for monitoring data quality within martech products. Advertising and promotion tools had the least amount of growth, up less than 5% since last year.
In terms of subcategories, conversational and chat tools were up 70% and, unsurprisingly, governance and compliance tools were up 68% — although both of these categories represent a small section of the overall landscape.
As expected, putting together a graphic that lists 8,000 logos was an incredibly difficult production process, according to Brinker, but he’s happy with how it now has more of an organic feel to it. “I think this is becoming more art.”
I see it as more of a map — now with its very own legend — than a landscape, which offers up a perfect metaphor for our community. We’re no longer looking to the horizon, trying to find the edges of the martech landscape — we’re dead center in the middle of martech land.
Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily MarTech Today. Staff authors are listed here.
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