Marketing MarTech | Seller and Buyer Side
Product Marketing has become critical in the crowded 9,000+ MarTech solution ecosystem. Best practices have emerged in sellers gaining adoption and buyers making smart decisions like in Marketing Automation and Data Management. Many industries will learn from MarTech as it drives forward Product Marketing innovation.
What is the best way to sell & buy in the MarTech ecosystem of 9,000+ software solutions? How can sellers gain meaningful adoption and how can buyers make the best decisions for their company’s MarTech stacks? The creation and consumption of Product Marketing will play a key role in realizing these objectives.
Seller Product Marketing focus varies based on Lifecycle Stage / Brand Recognition. Once product factors (e.g. customer research, marketing validation, betas, new features, global expansion) are set, competing via the various elements of the Marketing Engine should be guided by these principles:
Early - Focus on well-known issue/gap. It should be substantial and tangible enough to elicit great fear or opportunity rooted in financials and customer experience so as to gain attention and ideally consideration. Perhaps that’s why infographics was cited as important at this lifecycle stage versus others.
Emerging - Focus on well known early adopters with testimonials and logos. By leveraging other companies’ brand recognition, it can serve as proxy for your company’s potential future brand recognition. Larger revenues/employees, volume of companies, and positive intensity of testimonial make the proxy much stronger.
Leader - Focus on differentiation relative to the competition who is likely chasing you as well as the market leadership position. Differentiation can be supported by patents, talent, relationships, and other classic barriers-to-entry. The greater volume of and separation from competitors in rankings by global research providers make the marketing leadership more compelling.
Category Deep Dive: Outbound Messaging / Marketing Automation
In Outbound Messaging, there has been active disruption and investment according to these principals. Cross-Channel Messaging players powerfully entered the space with “mobile first” messaging and have reached Series D/E rounds of financing with associated levels of substantial customer adoption. Their Product Marketing emphasized that incumbent Marketing Clouds are solely email-focused and mobile messaging players are solely push-focused whereas they orchestrate all channels from email, push notes, in-app messaging and more in a unified customer journey. As first customers adopted, they were tightly integrated into Product Marketing which accelerated growth. For example, here is the logo wall featured prominently on Segment’s website (it’s even personalized to the visitor) as well as a full-page takeover interstitial from Braze’s website:
Marketing Clouds emphasized top ratings in legacy research firms along with riskiness of companies in this new category; but that didn’t stop these emerging players. Now Marketing Clouds have invested in acquisitions and integrations for feature parity with these emerging players and possibly some competitive advantages coupled with the riskiness argument. But these emerging players have lots of momentum and regularly clash with Marketing Clouds in competitive marketplace situations.
The competitive dynamics have played out in the marketplace and the early & emerging companies are growing fast. The overall Outbound Messaging category companies have grown by 1,273 or 40% from 2017 to 2018 with the breakdown as follows:
10 Leaders of which 7 are focused on enterprise segment (just became 6 with Adobe > Marketo acquisition September 20, 2018) and 3 on small & medium sized business.
At least 33 emerging companies who made significant progress with revenue, revenue/employee, and/or funding rounds.
4,296 remaining are likely early companies, though some may be emerging companies.
Enterprise-focused Leaders competing organically and externally via acquisitions & investment:
Acquisitions grew from 4 in 2017 to 11 in 2018, that's 175% growth including major ones like Adobe > Marketo > Bizible, Salesforce > Datorama,MuleSoft, Oracle > Moat, SAP > Gigya, and IBM > Cloudingo.
Salesforce Ventures also became one of the most active investors in MarTech in 2017 and 2018 with 40+ investments annually including Amplero, Autopilot, Informatica, Pendo, SessionM.
Category Deep Dive: Data Enrichment / Data Management
Data Enrichment has experienced a similar trend. Emerging players entered the space with data scraping a la Python coupled with identity resolution that have attained significant marketshare with very limited funding. Their Product Marketing demonstrated lack of scalability and digital accessibility of incumbent solutions that use traditional means of gathering such as surveys, forms, data licensing, etc… To highlight the issue, they created detailed API documentation that is publicly accessible. Furthermore, they built global “lead magnet” APIs that surfaced elements of the data they collect as well as providing a sample of global leads so prospective customers could easily experience the gap for themselves, overcoming the typical “he said, she said” allegations from incumbents. As first customers adopted, they were tightly integrated into Product Marketing which accelerated growth. Incumbents reinforced their global data coverage, tried to re-create themselves as pure tech companies, and mention the riskiness of emerging players but are struggling to keep up.
The competitive dynamics have also played out in this marketplace and the early & emerging companies are growing fast. The overall Data Enrichment category companies have grown by 242 or 53% from 2017 to 2018 with the breakdown as follows:
6 Leaders of which 2 were acquired by big-tech (Oracle > DataLogix, Microsoft > LinkedIn), 1 with historical acquisitions (D&B > Hoovers & NetProspecx), and 1 being decommissioned (Salesforce Data.com)
At least 18 emerging companies who made significant progress with revenue, revenue/employee, and/or funding rounds with acquisitions (ZoomInfo > Datanyze in 2018, DiscoverOrg > RainKing in 2017)10.
656 remaining likely early companies, though some may be emerging companies.
Note: Financial Services players like Experian, S&P, and Lexis Nexis not included.
The Buyer’s Side
As a Buyer, how can you critically evaluate this sophisticated collection of Product Marketing to choose the best software for your MarTech stack? It’s important to recognize these Product Marketing tactics and evaluate them all regardless of vendors’ level of lifecycle stage/brand recognition in the context of your company’s situation including strategic objectives, existing MarTech stack, and organizational culture & preferences. Below are some examples of how this has played out in the categories mentioned above.
A large B2B company launched a startup B2C native mobile app unit. IT was hoping to leverage more licenses on the same MarTech stack to support this emerging unit. Since native mobile apps typically require different technology than that of traditional in-person and web, a departure from this approach by IT was necessary which led to an RFP. The incumbent Marketing Cloud suggested transitioning from their B2B Marketing Automation to B2C Email Service Provider. Several “mobile first” cross-channel messaging vendors participated in the RFP and shared their feature set, UI, support, customer base, and funding. The conversation quickly turned to where the greatest competitive differentiation lied as well as the “he said, she said” review of the RFP competitive set. The latter unearthed some lesser known critical info like enterprise risk, customers who had switched vendors, and weakness of some features. After synthesizing all this info, there was a very short list of finalists who went through the last round of due diligence. Speaking to actual customers as well as negotiating terms sheets. This multi-layered approach dug deeper into the Product Marketing tactics to find the nuances, the misrepresentations, the trends, and ultimately a more complete set of information to decide what was best for this specific context.
A large company had hundreds of millions of anonymous monthly unique website visitors and tens of millions of uncleansed records in its CRM and Marketing Automation databases. The Finance team had been manually cleaning customer records. Sales Ops was unfamiliar with MarTech capabilities. IT liked CRM data play. Marketing Analytics has close ties to leading B2B data company. Since the company had so many websites and systems, it was also important to understand API capabilities, performance speed for SEO & real-time personalization, and most importantly data quality. An RFP was set in motion with emerging tech company as well as the legacy CRM data and B2B data companies. To keep things objective, a sample 5,000 contact dataset was enriched by each vendor. The emerging tech company performed best for contacts. The B2B data company had best company performance. The CRM data company was inferior in both areas so despite the persistence of the sales rep it was released from the competition. The leading B2B data company did a presentation with many of its senior leaders including tech leader claiming to be modernizing itself with Northern California office & talent. The surprising finding was the leading B2B data company claiming better performance speed. But it’s pricing came in more than 2x the emerging tech company’s. When it was being dismissed for this substantial price difference, it argued that it’s a premium product but it didn’t matter at that pricing. Things got interesting when it met the emerging tech company pricing. Then the “he said, she said” was in full effect as well as client rosters. In this process, a critical feature was revealed - company hierarchies with parent companies and regional offices which is key for organizing sales team activities. Leading B2B data company wins because of differentiated features.
Conclusion
Product Marketing has become tremendously important in the crowded 9,000+ software solution MarTech ecosystem but is also important in many other industries as well. MarTech will drive Product Marketing best practices that other industries can derive tremendous benefit from.