Marketing Technology by the Numbers

What’s the state of marketing technology today? How healthy is the space, and what solutions and tools are marketers most interested in discovering?

Boston-based marketing tech discovery platform CabinetM currently lists some 6,000 products of potential interest to the digital marketer. Users can leverage CabinetM to build virtual marketing stacks, reconstruct their own company stack—both to monitor and manage it and to discover gaps and new tools—and even put together their own personal marketing tech skill stack. 

Is Growth Slowing?

We’ve been talking for years about the hectic, almost uncontrolled growth of the marketing technology landscape. It’s not shrinking to a manageable scale any time soon, but are their signs that expansion is slowing?

Implosion?  Not quite: CabinetM cautions that figures for 2015 and 2016 are likely understated, because founded companies haven’t yet made it into their database. Nevertheless, looking at 2013 and 2014, there does seem to be a decline in marketing tech start-ups from the peak years of 2010-2012.

Data also shows a remarkable consistency in the main categories over the past ten years, with content marketing, analytics and ad tech jockeying for the top three positions. The number of marketing automation start-ups has fallen away since 2005 (perhaps consistent with the perception of gradual stabilization in the MA category).

Nevertheless, users of the platform continue to search for the most well-established players, MA vendors included.

The top category searches are more of a mixed bag.

We also know what users did with their search results.  They put together tech stacks based around the following products and companies:We

There may be some surprises in the company list, but overall the statistics show a conservative selection of solutions. Maybe not so many marketers are walking the technology wild frontier; maybe we’re seeing consolidation among strong and manageable solutions from trusted vendors.