A young guy I was chatting to last week proudly told me that he was “in charge of his company’s martech stack”. He did it with such a straight face that I could only nod sagely and quietly resolve to confirm to myself later that I did know what on earth he was on about.
Those of you who are ahead of me here will know that the ‘martech stack’ is nothing to be afraid of, just business-blather for all the software used in marketing. The term has been around for years, but it’s even longer since I first trained my brain to ensure terms like this go in one ear and straight out of the other. Sometimes this makes me look a bit clueless, but it’s a price I’m prepared to pay to retain my sanity.
Marketing technology (‘martech’) includes things like keyword research tools, content management systems, social media management services, event lead collection software, and search advertising or programmatic ad platforms.
Poorer integration
Inspired to read around the subject, a new report called The State Of Martech came to light (signup required). Produced by the Clevertouch consultancy with the University of Southampton, this is the fourth in an annual series tracking the use of marketing technology. It suggests that business to business marketing is getting worse at integrating its software systems, whereas consumer marketing is managing to improve the situation. Last year 40% of B2B respondents reported that they had data passing through platforms seamlessly – this year it’s down to 27%.
However, ‘practically every organisation’ responding to the survey is investing in technology. Across all types, 36% expect to have ‘software’ as their biggest area of marketing investment in 2023, ahead of campaigns (20%), services (19%), integration (16%) and people (10%). The enterprise market is still owned by two main players, Adobe and Salesforce. Adobe Journey Optimizer is a new market entrant and has been adopted by just over one-fifth of respondents, although Salesforce Marketing Cloud remains the dominant platform in the USA and UK. In EU, Adobe Experience Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Adobe Marketo occupy similar market positions. Other systems include HubSpot, Eloqua and Act-on.
Today’s AI update
The latest version of ChatGPT was launched to developers yesterday. More technically-inclined readers might like to watch the full launch demonstration – it was quite something. For a good summary, try this Guardian news story.