Future of MarTech

Shownotes

Scott Brinker, VP of platform ecosystem at HubSpot shares his insights on the future of marketing technology. Scott discusses the concept of Martec’s Law and why organizations are not keeping up with technology’s advances. He discusses how change management is anxiety-provoking for many people, how marketers need to be strategic about which changes they embrace and talk about prioritization, and how marketers should think about using data to optimize their execution rather than just their technology.

About the Guest

Scott Brinker is VP of Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot, helping to grow and nurture the company’s community of technology partners. He writes the chiefmartec.com blog, covering marketing technology management, and is the author of the best-selling book Hacking Marketing, published by Wiley. Previously, he was the co-founder and CTO of ion interactive.

Connect with Scott Brinker

Key Takeaways

• Marketing is constantly evolving and changing tactics, which makes it a great candidate for MarTech solutions.

• There is a supply side and a demand side to the problem: The demand side is that there needs to be someone buying the technology, and marketing is one of the largest discretionary budgets in the enterprise.

• The future of technology stacks will be more horizontal, with functional overlaps between vertical and horizontal layers.

• Marketing is increasingly specialized in digital experience and product, lending experience between these two areas.

Quotes

“I think all goals as it relates to EdTech tools in the classroom should be aligned to student impact, student outcome, and student engagement”.

– Scott Brinker

Highlights from the Episode

Why are there so many MarTech solutions?

Simply put, there’s a supply side and a demand side factor to it. And what is happening is an explosion of software that is not just MarTech. Anyone who wants to create a software product now relies on what big companies are doing and then creates something on top of that. There is also a change in customer expectations of what they expect to be able to do in different engagements. This creates a strong incentive for marketers. New technologies can either help them be more effective in the things they have been doing or give them a bridge to start to experiment with some of these new emerging capabilities

What is MarTec’s Law and how should organizations respond?

MarTec’s law is the juxtaposition of two curves. One curve is the curve of technology changing and exponential rate. The second curve is how quickly organizations change to more or less estimate it, and changes logarithmically. Scott argues that companies are not able to change exponentially. The solution is to be able to adapt and change more quickly than competitors.

Do you have any tips on how marketers should think about that prioritization?

Scott advises being sure of actually allocating the investment and being clear about which pieces are going to be leaned. To master MarTech, it is necessary to understand the analytics of what is moving the needle, it has to get good at analytics to understand the dynamics of prioritization.

How should people be thinking about MarTech?

Is the impact. Understand what will be the use case, what the product is trying to achieve, and what outcome will have inside the organization. That determines all the different layers and the data component behind them.

What do you think that means for the future stack?

Scott argues that in the future, it all will consolidate in one app for the performance of business metrics. Aggregation patterns inside people’s tech stacks can be found in different types. And what is ideal is for these technologies to help aggregate the stacks in a useful and manageable way. Scott argues this is happening across the stack horizontally-like data layers and workflow aggregation happens. Right now, the user experience such as Slack and Teams has become in some ways a de facto alert UXs for all these different apps and this is happening throughout tech stacks.

We’re entering the second age of MarTech. What do you mean by that and what does it mean for MarTech over the rest of this decade?

For the past two decades of MarTech, there has been a dichotomy between software and services and suite versus best of the breed. Scott argues that the second age or MarTech is about a unified and common platform at the center of the SACs and being able to pull any specialized app of new capability into any service.

How many core central platforms a company should have?

For Scott, the right question would be what is the underlying coordinating device across the things that need to be in synchrony? He discusses that CRM is something more of what a sales team would be using in their synchronization process and it might be different than a marketing automation platform. So, in the end, he explains that platforms need to be reduced by disrupting the whole process.

The general trend seems to be merging into Big Rev. What does that mean for MarTech?

Scott argues that the MarTech in no way is coming to an end. What the trend is showing is that probably in the next five years how the changes and mechanisms of ops have to continue to evolve, due to the amount of data that has been generated.

Is there a book, blog, newsletter, website, or video that you would recommend to our listeners?

A blog: Chief MarTec by Scott Brinker

Shout-outs

Juan Mendoza – Founder and Editor of The MarTech Weekly

Carlos Doughty – CEO, Founder & Course Instructor at LXA (Formerly MarTech Alliance)

Frans Riemersma – Founder of MarTech Tribe

David Raab – Founder of CDP Institute