- 1 - THE QEDbaton B2B MARKETING TECHNOLOGY SPEND REPORT 2014 To stay ahead in the marketing arena, you need to know what technologies your competitors are investing in.
TABLE OF CONTENTS The Marketing Technology Landscape: Holy Cow!... 4 Marketing Experiences: The Front Office... 6 Marketing Operations: The Back Office... 7 Marketing Middleware: The Glue... 8 Marketing Backbone Platforms and Marketing Infrastructure... 9 Internet Services and Social Networking... 10 Know Thy Customer... 10 Key Takeaways and Trends Wrap-up... 11 About QEDbaton... 12
To stay ahead in the marketing arena, you need to know what technologies your competitors are investing in. Here is a digest of the latest trends. Every ambitious B2B marketing enterprise is always exploring ways to reach more customers, show them how your capabilities align with their strategies, demonstrate that your services stand out from the pack, and make every dollar you invest carry its weight. Much of this, of course, you re going to do with technology. (We re living in the twenty-first century, right?) So how do you keep up with the technology, which revolutionizes itself every few months or so? The last time we looked, there were more than a thousand technology products and services, which we can evaluate according to the functional areas of marketing experiences, marketing operations, middleware, backbone platforms, infrastructure, and the internet marketing environment. In such a rapidly evolving market, it s easy get confused if you survey it on your own. There are more options than ever before in every category, and even if each one of them were terrific technology, you need to identify the ones that offer the most promise for your specific needs. The good news is all those options and all that rapid evolution mean the technology solutions for your business are out there, and getting better all the time. To gain of view of technologies are doing the most for those who use them, or at least to identify the ones that marketing technology companies are investing in most heavily of late, we polled and received responses from two hundred sixty B2B marketers in the United States and internationally. The report that follows gives you a snapshot of how B2B marketers such as yourself are placing their bets on technology. We think that this information can be a big help to you in identifying your marketing technology requirements, and in delivering successful marketing programs. - 3 -
The Marketing Technology Landscape: Holy Cow! The inspiration and foundation for our survey came almost exclusively from the brilliant Scott Brinker and the entries in his blog, Chief Marketing Technologist. Since 2011, Scott has been putting together an ever-more complex, and therefore more thorough and valuable, map of marketing technology companies. Growing from about one hundred companies in 2011 to three hundred fifty in 2012, the latest iteration (January 2014) of his supergraphic catalogues nearly a thousand companies, which he groups into six classes (from marketing experiences to the internet marketing environment, noted above) that represent almost fifty categories. Scott has taken the measure of the marketing technology space, and organized it in a way that makes sense to him and most B2B marketing businesses. Given how fast this space is growing and evolving, it s easy to understand that the categories and classes will also change. New divisions of the landscape will make sense in the years to come. New categories will emerge, and others will combine with each other, and some will simply fade away as the technology advances. We set out to build on Scott s fantastic work, and identify investment trends in the world of marketing technology. It was a fascinating exercise to carry out, and we trust that you will profit from the information and benchmarks that we unearthed in survey. - 4 -
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Marketing Experiences: The Front Office This class, which features customerfacing technology, has eighteen categories, with social media marketing being by far the most crowded with offerings. All these technologies directly affect prospects and customers across the marketing lifecycle, and include content marketing, testing and optimization, display advertising, email, SEO, and marketing apps the front office of modern marketing. In this and all the following sections of our survey, we asked participants to specify for each category their investment plans for the next 12 months: investing more (green), investing the same (blue), investing less (orange), or no investment or undecided (gray). - 6 - Looking at the green and orange areas in the diagram above, what emerges is an overall migration of B2B marketers away from display advertising toward social media marketing. We also found significantly increasing investments in content marketing, sales enablement, events and webinars, and email marketing. A lot of technological innovation is taking place in the content and social marketing space, and these options are tempting B2B marketers to engage their audience in a more interactive manner. In studying this diagram and the ones that follow, it is important to particularly consider the categories that could make the biggest difference in your particular B2B marketing ecosystem. Low overall investments in a category that could be a game changer for you might signal that now is the time to use that type of technology to steal a march on your competition. Amongst the best in class companies surveyed the visible trends were to invest more in Video Ads & Marketing (56%), Social Media Marketing (56%), Sales Enablement (39%) and Events/Webinars (39%).
Marketing Operations: The Back Office This class, which features tools for managing marketing data the back office encompasses nine categories. More vendors are offering solutions for business intelligence and web & mobile analytics than for any of the other categories, which include agile and project management, marketing resource management, marketing data, and marketing analytics. As with practically every aspect of technology today, the trend here is to invest more in marketing analytics and business intelligence. In fact, only an insignificant number of respondents plan to decrease their investment in any of the categories of marketing operations technology. Everywhere you turn these days, you see that companies are seeking to capitalize on big data however they can. The responses to our survey show that marketing technology is no exception. Big data analytics can provide surprisingly valuable insights of astounding precision. - 7 - Among the best-in-class companies surveyed, the trend was to invest more in marketing analytics (39%), web and mobile analytics (39%), and dashboards (39%).
Marketing Middleware: The Glue cloud automation/integration products, user management/single sign-on services, and API management are all a part of this important connective tissue." The middleware class contains five categories, of which platforms for data management (DMPs) and customer data (CDPs) is the most vendor-rich. The other categories are cloud connectors, tag management, user management, and Application Programming Interface (API) services. Scott Brinker emphasized the importance of marketing middleware in the introduction to his 2014 report on the marketing technology landscape by saying: "Middleware is the software glue that makes it even easier for multiple... products to work together. Instead of each product needing to explicitly integrate with each other product out there middleware can serve as a common highway...for data between them. DMPs and CDPs are the emerging giants in this role, but tag management, Brinker also notes that marketing middleware facilitates the orchestration of diverse marketing technologies into a cohesive unit, enabling a marketing business to tailor its technology into a portfolio that best serves its mission. We found two significant trends in middleware technology investments among our survey recipients: increased spending on 1) DMPs and 2) cloud connector services. These trends did not surprise us, given the ROI on data centralization, enrichment, and cleansing that DMPs provide, and the competitive advantages that come with building a custom marketing ecosystem in the cloud. - 8 - Amongst the best-in-class companies surveyed the visible trends were to invest more in Cloud Connectors (39%), Data Management Platforms (28%), and User Management (28%).
Marketing Backbone Platforms and Marketing Infrastructure Marketing backbone platforms serve as foundational services or data repositories that a business s other systems rely on as a basic resource. Brinker divides this class into four categories: CRM, marketing automation/integrated marketing, website/content management, and e-commerce. Of those four categories, our survey revealed the least amount of new spending planned for e-commerce. CRM, website/ content management, and automation/ integration all appeared to be areas where our respondents see strong reasons to invest more. Infrastructure technology for marketing is all underlying systems that enable the higher orders of technology to work as they do. For our survey, we continued with Brinker s categories of databases, big data, cloud resources, web development, and its subset, mobile application development. As with marketing backbones, the most obvious trend here was a collective decision to invest less in a particular category, in this case, the category of mobile application development. Perhaps - 9 - marketing technology for e-commerce and mobile has reached a plateau, and several years will elapse before renewed investment makes sense. According to our survey respondents, three infrastructure categories appear to be good prospects for investment: databases, cloud, and web development. The best-in-class companies that responded to our survey said that their biggest backboneinfrastructure investments in 2014 would be in CRM (56%) and cloud solutions (39%).
Internet Services and Social Networking In addition to the classes and categories on Brinker s Marketing Technology Landscape, we also surveyed marketing businesses on their projected investments in internet service providers and social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google. As the graph below makes clear, internet and social will continue to be an important channel of investment for B2B marketers. We then followed up by asking the marketers to rank the elements that make up a 360 degree view, and they responded by saying that content engagement was the most critical element, and that web history, social profile, demographic, and firmographic information bunched up behind it. Know Thy Customer To get a sense of B2B marketers commitment to understanding their prospects and customers, we also asked respondents whether they would like a 360-degree view of them. A whopping 86 percent responded that they would like such a view. Among the best-in-class companies surveyed, the most critical attributes of a 360-degree view of customers and prospects were information about demographics and content engagement. - 10 -
Key Takeaways and Trends Wrap-up Marketing technology is only going to expand as more products and services encompass further capabilities to store, analyze, and display marketing information. On that foundation, our survey and analysis revealed the following trends: 1B2B marketers are moving away from display advertising, placing their bets instead on social media and content marketing initiatives. These investments address the essential need to engage with the prospect. Doing so allows B2B marketers to facilitate the prospect/buyer s engagement with the brand, and educate the prospect/ buyer throughout the buying journey, all of which leads to making an informed decision. 2We also see that marketing analytics, delivered over the web/ mobile, as an area of strong interest to B2B marketers. Given the unparalleled value of granular and reliable market information available in real time, this makes sense. Like everyone else, marketers need to demonstrate ROI on the campaigns they execute, and analytics provides all the variables of the ROI equation. 3Apparently, one of the biggest trends is the emergence of customer data platforms. These are central repositories of marketing data that not only keep marketing data clean and up to date, an ageold problem, but also push that data out to other systems, such as platforms for ads and/or marketing automation. The customer data platform could also start to play a key role in pulling together 360-degree views of individual prospects as they travel across town and navigate the web, engage with brand content, and interact on social media. - 11 -
About QEDbaton QEDbaton Inc. is an award-winning, innovative, demand generation agency that enables its global client base of technology companies to achieve highperformance prospecting across the entire sales and marketing funnel. Our in-house team of 350 tele-prospecting agents assist B2B tech companies in driving impactful programs that include: 1Audience Generation: Webinar registrations/on-demand webcasts 2Lead Generation: Content syndication/ lead profiling 3Sales Appointment Setting: Highly qualified sales appointments to help drive revenue Join the world s largest LinkedIn group for sales, marketing & business development professionals. This group is moderated by QEDbaton and currently has over 190,000 members from across the globe. Copy and paste the following link into your web browser: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/ Business-Development-25005/about To learn more, please visit: www.qedbaton.com Corporate Website www.leadenrich.com Our Customer Data Management Platform www.demandfarm.com Our Key Account Management Platform Furthermore, LeadEnrich, our customer data management platform, helps automate data aggregation, deduplication, and standardization, and fulfil new contactdiscovery requirements. - 12 -