The 2018 Martech 5000 – Alacrity Looks at Martech’s Biggest Year Yet
The marketing technology (martech) space has been growing at a ferocious rate year after year, and 2018 is no different.
The “Martech 5000” – a visual summary of the marketing technology landscape, produced each year by Scott Brinker of the Chief Marketing Technologist blog – has tracked martech’s growth since 2011, when only 150 solutions made the list.
By 2015, the number of listed solutions grew to 2,000, and then nearly doubled in 2016, gaining the reputation as “one of the most loved-and-hated slide in marketing”.
2018’s “Martech 5000” boats a gargantuan 6,829 marketing technology solutions from 6,242 unique marketing technology vendors (the “Martech 5000” name has been maintained due to its “catchyness”). To help appreciate the magnitude of martech’s diversity: the size of the 2018 landscape is equivalent to all of the marketing tech landscapes assembled from 2011 through 2016 added together.
2018’s Martech 5000 – You can download the high resolution Supergraphic here.
The rapid growth in scale of the Martech 5000
8 Takeaways and Insights from 2018’s Martech 5000
- Virtually any company involved with digital marketing can be considered in the martech space, but the term especially applies to major tools, projects, and suites that use technology to achieve marketing goals and objectives.
- The Martech 5000 Supergraphic does not reflect the sizes of the different martech companies and solutions. In his blog, Scott Brinkler notes that if the companies were organized by valuation, they would form a classic longtail graph with a handful of multi-billion dollar giants in the “head”, and thousands of smaller firms in the very long “tail”.
3. Acquisitions continue to happen, and martech companies and solutions do go out of business, but new companies are entering the market at a faster rate than that of consolidation.
4. Funding into martech companies remains high and increases each year.
5. There are effectively zero barriers to enter software today. The demand for great martech software continues to expand, especially as marketers deal with ever-changing buyer expectations, face new market disruptions, and try their best to differentiate themselves amidst a multitude of competitors.
6. The average enterprise today uses over 1000 cloud services across every department: marketing, sales, customer service, finance, IT, HR etc.
7. One of the fastest growing categories in the Martech 5000 landscape is iPaaS (integration-platform-as-a-service). This helps bring light to the demand for combining the different components of companies’ marketing strategies, and the desire to make a whole marketing process that is greater than the sum of its parts.
8. GDPR has been a source of much frustration and upheaval for marketers this past year – but on the bright side it has led many companies to invest in better data quality, which may in turn lead to greater customer empowerment.
All signs suggest that we will see an even larger martech landscape come 2019. At Alacrity, we’re proud to see a diverse variety of our portfolio companies helping to drive forward this space’s growth. It’s almost as if we have a mini internal Martech 5000 of our own, and we’re excited to have even more portfolio companies add to this landscape in the future.
Current Alacrity portfolio members involved in various aspects of the martech landscape include:
Echosec: location-based social media platform for marketers
SaaSquatch: special offer and promotion platform for modern digital businesses
Pretio: technology-enabled performance marketing
Twentify: smart market research platform
CreatorDen: social media influencer marketing platform
FileFacets: privacy compliance (GDPR) & enterprise analytics
Pisano: customer experience management platform
All of these tools from the Martech 5000, including those from the Alacrity portfolio, will give more power to marketers to shape their craft in a digital-everything world.
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Do you recognize most of the logos in the Martech 5000? Do you notice any missing?
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