Walker Sands / Chief Martech Study: Martech Maturity Has Skyrocketed

Tech marketing agency Walker Sands and industry guru Scott Brinker of Chief Martech yesterday published a fascinating survey on the State of Marketing Technology 2017, which you can download here.  The 27 page report provides an insightful analysis of the data, which there’s no point to me duplicating in depth. But I will highlight a couple of findings that are most relevant to my own concerns.

Martech maturity has skyrocketed in the past year. This theme shows up throughout the report. The percentage of responders classifying their companies as innovators or early adopters grew from 20% in 2016 to 48% in 2017; marketers whose companies invest the right amount in marketing technology grew from 50% to 71%; all obstacles to adoption were less common (with the telling exception of not needing anything new).

Truth be told, I find it hard to believe that things can have shifted this much in a single year and that nearly half of all companies (and 60% of individual marketers) are innovators or early adopters. A more likely explanation is the new survey attracted more advanced respondents than before.  We might also be seeing a bit of “Lake Wobegon Effect,” named after Garrison Keillor’s mythical town where all the children are above average.  Evidence for the latter might be that 69% felt their marketing technology is up to date and sufficient (up from 58%), making this possibly the most complacent group of innovators ever.


Multi-product architectures are most common. I have no problem accepting this one: 21% of respondents said they use a single-vendor suite, while 69% had some sort of multi-vendor approach (27% integrated best-of-breed, 21% fragmented best-of-breed, 21% limited piecemeal solutions). The remainder had no stack (7%) or proprietary technology (4%).

 

But don’t assume that “single-vendor suite” necessarily means one of the enterprise marketing clouds.  Small companies reported using suites just as often as large ones. They were probably referring to all-in-one products like HubSpot and Infusionsoft.

"Best of breed marketers get the most out of their martech tools." That’s a direct quote from the report, but it may overstate the case: 83% of integrated best-of-breed users felt their company was good or excellent at leveraging the stack, compared with 76% of the single-vendor-suite. That not such a huge difference, especially given the total sample of 335. Moreover, companies with fragmented best-of-breed stacks reported less ability (67%) than the single-vendor suite users. If you combine the two best-of-breed groups then the suite users actually come out ahead. A safer interpretation might be that single-vendor suites are no easier to use than best-of-breed combinations.  That would still be important news to companies that think pay a premium or compromise on features because they think suites make are easier to deploy.
  

Integration isn’t that much of a problem. Just 20% of companies cited better stack integration as a key to fully leveraging their tools, which ranked well behind better strategy (39%), better analytics (36%) and more training (33%) and roughly on par with more employees (23%), better defined KPIs (23%), and more data (20%). This supports the previous point about best-of-breed working fairly well, whether or not the stack was well integrated. I would have expected integration to be a bigger issue, so this is a bracing reality check. One interpretation (as I argued last week) is that integration just isn’t as important to marketers as they often claim.

There’s plenty else of interest in the report, so go ahead and read it and form your own opinions. Thanks to Walker Sands and Chief Martech for pulling it together.