3 reasons we love MarTech fragmentation
Is it a problem or opportunity for your startup?
I was fortunate to attend the unveiling of the annual MarTech Super Graphic at this years MarTech Conference in San Jose. As you can see, it is quite impressive. And by ‘impressive’ I mean it was an impressive accomplishment that Anand Thaker assembled close to 7,000 companies into some logical order. I have to wonder how long he can keep it up. At some point I think the graphic will have to be 3D or in VR or in the Matrix.
The growth of this list is also impressive and, frankly, not surprising, as I have long been skeptical of the oft predicted eventual MarTech consolidation.
Back in 2012, while we were building BrightWhistle (the first MarTech platform for Healthcare), the major tech platforms made a valiant effort to consolidate and control this space. But even at that time, we could see containing this space was going to be impossible due to the rapid rate of new tools hitting the market. This really wasn’t surprising because there were 2 macro-trends feeding the explosion and fragmentation:
- New forms of digital marketing were coming on the scene quickly. Social media marketing was morphing and evolving rapidly. Mobile marketing was exploding. Video marketing was transforming Google, Instagram, and Facebook. And traditional forms of digital, like email marketing and search marketing, were blending together into more and more complicated marketing automation platforms.
- Simultaneously, the ability to create new tools got faster and faster as cloud based solutions were becoming exponentially cheaper and easier to develop. From the move to AWS and Azure to containerized development with Docker and Kubernetes to completely serverless deployment with AWS Lambda.
As a result, MarTech hit escape velocity and the big players (Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, Adobe, SalesForce) had ‘platforms’ in name only as the underlying tool sets continued to proliferate
Scott Brinker says it best: “The dream of one-suite-to-rule-them-all has been superseded by a vision of many open platform-like tools being woven together in a more dynamic fashion.”
There are just too many methods and channels of digital marketing to warrant the creation of an uber-platform. Even if this were technically feasible, which it is not, there just isn’t a use case to substantiate this type of solution.
So is this a problem or an opportunity? Here are 3 reason new MarTech startups should see this as an opportunity:
- You can exist in the long tail. There are hundreds of long tail use cases in digital marketing right now. Whether it is industry-specific marketing solutions or geographic-centric methods or niche products and services, there is room for your solution.
- Digital Marketing itself is not slowing down or standardizing. Just when the industry thinks it has a channel figured out a new method pops up. Influencer Marketing, and Account Based Marketing, and Amazon Marketing, what’s next? Get there fast. Skate the where the puck is going to be. There is opportunity here.
- You can take advantage of new ways of doing business. As a startup you can leverage not just new marketing channels, but new ways to work. Messaging threads like Slack and chat bots like Drift and Intercom, are all creating new disruptive ways to deliver marketing technology. The next generation of marketing professionals don’t work in email, conference calls, or meetings. Can your startup figure out how to deliver your solution to this audience?
At Eletype, we are bullish on MarTech. We see this MarTech landscape as simultaneously mature enough to be taken seriously while also being dynamic enough for disruption.
This is a great time to be in this space… even if you need a magnifying glass.
CEO & Founder Eletype
Also published on CoverYourAds.io
