Recently I was talking with an entrepreneur about marketing technology — a space he knows well — and he said that because of so much capital going into the space, there aren’t that many gaps. Hmm, I thought, there are a number of gaps where leaders haven’t emerged. Most segments have vendors in them but that doesn’t mean a group of tier 1 vendors have emerged.
Here are some big picture gaps in marketing technology:
- Simple Marketing Automation – Marketing automation is powerful, valuable, and too complicated for many marketers. There’s plenty of opportunity in certain segments.
- Full Account-Based Marketing – Lots of vendors are doing parts of the puzzle but there’s not a comprehensive solution. This market is harder than it looks but there are still big gaps.
- Deep Online Behavior Understanding – People are tracked online much more than they realize. Only, beyond the basics (which are 100x better than no data), there isn’t deep understanding of user behavior and patterns.
- Marketing Orchestration – Marketing has an incredible number of tools (see 27 SaaS tools in the marketing department). What system orchestrates them all?
These are a few of the gaps in MarTech that I expect to be addressed over the next five years.
What else? What are some other gaps in the marketing technology landscape?
David Cummings on Startups 
The volume of vendors in mar tech creates an area of opportunity. Each new vendor signed is another data silo a company must create that updates independently and has it’s own specifications for how data is structured. Making these disparate data silos communicate cohesively is a massive pain and thus a massive opportunity. The most likely outcome is larger companies start consolidating these vendors into one large cloud. Will it be the usual suspects of Salesforce Oracle IBM or do you see other large tech companies, i.e. Facebook, Google, Amazon start making more B2B focused acquisitions?
The volume of vendors in mar tech creates an area of opportunity. Each new vendor signed is another data silo a company must create that updates independently and has it’s own specifications for how data is structured. Making these disparate data silos communicate cohesively is a massive pain and thus a massive opportunity. The most likely outcome is larger companies start consolidating these vendors into one large cloud. Will it be the usual suspects of Salesforce Oracle IBM or do you see other large tech companies, i.e. Facebook, Google, Amazon start making more B2B focused acquisitions?
David, unfair question, but if you had to do Pardot over again, which of these areas would you focus on? Any gut sense?
I wouldn’t change anything. We were racing to be the market leader for the mid-market and built an amazing product. Now that the market it more established, new segments are appearing like the opportunity for a simpler, SMB product.
Thanks for the insight, David. I felt that Pardot was, in fact, fairly simple to use as an SMB product.
Yet you believe that this portion of the market (or segments of it) require something even easier?
From my vantage, it sometimes seems the harder part of the SMB’s work is coming up the marketing strategy & content to support it. That remains a challenge for most resource-challenge, experience-short, SMBs.
Agree/disagree?