Today, it isn’t just about what’s in your martech stack, it’s about how those technologies come together. As the marketing technology landscape continues to grow exponentially, is consolidation (finally) happening within B2B? In this PiPOV panel discussion, Jeff Coveney, CMO, Digital Pi, discusses the future of martech with Adam Mincham, VP, Executive Global Director, Merkle B2B Group and Chris Messina, Vice President of Alliances & Partners, LeanData.
Jeff Coveney: 2019 and 2020 was consumed by MarTech, so now everyone has their stack, but how does it all come together? Right? It’s pretty complicated. Check out this Pi POV to hear what we think about the future of marketing technology.
Jeff Coveney: A couple years ago, Adobe acquired Marketo. Right? paid a lot for Marketo. How’s marketing automation evolved, and where do we see that going forward?
Adam Mincham: Yeah, I mean, I think going back to my last point, as well, I think that marketing automation has got some pressures coming… CDP is a pressure. ABM Universe is a pressure. There’s a lot of overlapping capabilities that are based off of, frankly, different strategic objectives. Right? So, is it that marketing automation is coming under pressure, or is it that demand, generation as a practice is coming under pressure from ABM and other areas? I think they are both of those intrinsically linked.
Adam Mincham: But marketing automation as being the centralized engine and the only option in B2B, which has been true for the last decade, is not as true now with these other areas. And there’s going to be a lot of overlapping capability between CDPs and ABM and marketing automation platforms as a minimum, and there’s going to be a lot of decisions that need to be made, back to Chris’s point. We’re going to need these different tools, they’re going to have to work together to do different jobs, but we want to avoid that overlapping cost and that overlapping… which could break the customer experience. So, we got to make sure they work together.
Chris Messina: Yeah. And we are actually seeing the long predicted consolidation of MarTech happening, but that said, it is a little bit like a game of whack-a-mole because it’s not hard to start a company these days. So, you do see some of these companies that really thought they were categories, and there’re more features getting rolled up because those are important features. They’re important things that need to be part of your tech stack. But to the communication conversation, they maybe didn’t communicate quite as well, so they need to be rolled up into a bigger ecosystem. So, I think we are going to see much more consolidation over the next couple of years. I don’t know, necessarily, that that’s actually going to change the number of logos that we see on Mr. Brinker’s eye chart every year, because we do continue to see companies pop up and try new things and try to solve new niche problems. So, I think the acquisition mindset is, and there’s a ton of money sitting out there on the sidelines, is going to keep moving forward.
Jeff Coveney: Yeah. You look at the money, right? So, yesterday, I mean, this company’s more in the SMB space, but active campaign, they raised a ton of money with a $3 billion evaluation. Right? So, this whole idea of being able to communicate and orchestrate the experience is really important. The way I look at it from the Marketo perspective is, where does that fit? I think that’s fitting more the future with CDP, where Marketo is built in a way that’s going to be able to leverage the intelligence of the CDP, so do a little bit more of that intelligence that brings the data from all these different places online, offline, and feed that into Marketo to make better personas, better segments. And what’s that do? It helps orchestrate the experience. So, Marketo will continue to sit into that area, be the central part of the overall stack, but there are other pieces of that stack that need to be there to help with that orchestration.
Adam Mincham: I think, Jeff—just to pile-on because I think that’s a great comment you made—in a lot of our clients, a lot of enterprise companies, there’s not one marketer or one Salesforce or one… Right? There’s a lot of cases, there’s multiple Marketos, there’s multiple Salesforce instances, for good reason. Right? Sometimes it’s because of acquisitions and it takes time to integrate, sometimes it’s just because of federal versus business. Right? So, you have to have these things separated. A CDP will help orchestrate, so a CDP will connect and create audiences and push them into the multiple Marketo audiences, which will help with privacy, will help with compliance and other components, but allow those businesses to still operate in the way that they should. So, I think you’re totally right.
Jeff Coveney: Well, that gave me a lot to think about. It’s going to be interesting to see how MarTech continues to grow and the orchestration experience evolves in the coming year. What do you think? Let us know your strategy at hello@digitalpi.com.