G2 Crowd’s list of the Best Software Companies for 2018, based on data from real users & real reviews. See the top 100 Software Companies determined by feedback from those who know software companies best-their customers. Plus, G2 Crowd gives the Top 50 software companies segmented by company size.

Who are the CDP leaders right now? 

It’s a really early market. You have ecommerce-focused vendors. BlueCore recently raised money. You have others that have been around a little: AgilOne, Blueshift, SmarterHQ. We categorize BounceX in there, as they have similar capabilities in unifying data sets and using that to send triggered emails.

Then you have companies not focused on commerce, like Lytics, or companies that are more about moving or extracting data like mParticle, Segment and Tealium, so those are being classified as CDPs even though the founding principles are different than those focused on creating a single view of the consumer.

The digital marketing software market is projected to grow from USD 33.39 Billion in 2016 to USD 74.96 Billion by 2022. The global digital marketing software market is expected grow at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 14.9% during the forecast period. The forecast period has been considered from 2017 to 2022, while 2016 is considered as the base year for estimating the market study.

There is an ongoing conversation we have with marketing industry insiders about the number of marketing technology companies …

Prediction 1: By 2021, Privacy Will Have Been Redefined from "the Selective Sharing of Data" to "the Value of Data" and Digital Marketplaces Will Have Emerged That Enable Consumers to Provide Data in Return for VIP Services, with up to 10% of Consumers in Developed Countries Participating

Prediction 2: By 2021, at Least 15% of Businesses' Standard Customer Experience Decisions Will Be Handled by Algorithms as Companies Shift from Person-to-Person (P2P) to Machine-to-Person (M2P) Engagement and Transactions

Prediction 3: By 2020, 20% of Marketers Will Share Customer Experience Budgets, Processes, Metrics, and Compensation with All Other Customer-Facing Functions in the Enterprise Including Sales, Finance, Fulfillment, Customer Service, and Contact Center

Prediction 4: By 2019, 80% of B2B Marketers Will Have at Least One Account-Based Marketing Campaign in the Field

Prediction 5: By 2019, Available Inventory in Marketing Databases Will Shrink by 40%

Prediction 6: By 2021, 70% of Digital Advertising and Marketing Will Be Augmented or Automated Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

Prediction 7: By the End of 2021, 75% of Large B2B Events Will Personalize Participant Experiences Using Human-to-Machine Technologies; Augmented Reality, Sensors, and the Use of Biometric Data Will Propel Events into Brand Differentiating Powerhouses

Prediction 8: By 2021, 25% of B2B Companies Will Reshape Their Marketing Organizations into Nonhierarchical Structures, Aided by Collaborative Technologies; New Forms, Such as Circles, Squads, and Tribes, Will Help Companies Break out of Silos and Provide Better Customer Experiences

Prediction 9: By 2020, 60% of B2B CMOs Will Be Held Accountable for at Least One Customer-Oriented Metric as Companies Accept Customer Centricity as Core to the Marketing Mission; Metrics for Loyalty, Advocacy, and Quality Take Their Place Alongside Revenue-Related Metrics

Prediction 10: By 2020, 50% of B2B Companies Will See a Reduction in Sales, General, and Administrative (SG&A) Costs of up to 15% as More Cost-Effective Automated and Algorithmic Marketing Eclipses the High Cost of Selling

Officially, my first published marketing technology landscape graphic was in 2011. That was the one where I categorized around 150 marketing technology companies. My most recent one, produced in collaboration with Anand Thaker, was released in May 2017 with nearly 5,000 marketing technology companies on it. By sheer quantity of logos, it got 32 times …

1. Consumers interact with brands on just two channels, while potential business customers interact with brands on four. 

2. There are currently more than 8,000 openings for Internet of Things marketing specialists listed on job sites.

3. According to a recent Salesforce study, brand marketers said that their AI use will grow more than 50 percent over the next two years.

4. According to an IBM report, 73 percent of CEOs predict AI will play a “key role” in their companies’ future. 

5. Adobe analyzed 14.3 billion visits to ecommerce sites as well as 14.5 million social media mentions of voice assistants and voice assistant devices.

After a slow Q1, 105 marketing technology companies found favor with 278 investors in the April-May-June quarter of 2017 to bring this industry into focus once again; Gamification top funded category shows PE paying attention to firms creating tech meant to engage millennials

The mother of all assumptions here is that you need large VC investment to grow a successful software company. Talk about an epic false dichotomy: either you can raise tens of millions (or hundreds of millions) and IPO to a billion dollar valuation, or you might as well not bother getting out of bed.

Those are the only companies that matter to large VCs with gargantuan funds that have to deploy at least $20 million or more in a portfolio company to make their economics work.

There will be some martech companies that fit that model. But doing the math on the total market, it’s obvious that there can’t be thousands of them.

Have wrestled with this challenge for 7 years, I’ve sketched dozens ideas in a notebook. Almost all of them have been crap. But there’s one that I’ve been chewing on for the past year that seems promising, so I thought I’d finally share a draft of it — The 6 C’s Model for Organizing Marketing Technology shown above.

It organizes marketing technologies into 6 domains that just happen to all start with the letter C (which was a wonderful stroke of serendipity, I swear):

• Customers — all the data about customers/prosects in our universe
• Content — all the content we produce and distribute in all channels
• Community — interactions with customers as a group, e.g., social media
• Commerce — capabilities to directly sell our products and services
• CORE — our product/service and campaigns/data that cross all of marketing
• Collaboration — the tools we use for collaborating inside marketing

I’ve mapped common “categories” of martech products (e.g., the alphabet soup of CMS, DAM, CRM, CDP, ABM, MDM, SEO, etc.) into these six domains to illustrate how I see these as clusters of related technologies. But it’s important to emphasize that what really gives meaning to these domains is the shared practices and organizational capabilities that tend to blossom within each of them.

Earlier this week, Oracle announced that it's buying Moat, a provider of tools that measure how ads are viewed and engaged with across various devices, and who is looking at them. Terms are undisclosed, but Re/code reports Oracle paid over $850 million.

Sources speaking with AdExchanger suggest Moat's ability to drive large, recurring, subscription software fees appealed to Oracle, and that its ability to measure the effectiveness of ads appealed to suitors in general. But as the Moat and Krux deals show, marketing software/services leaders remain quite open to snapping up smaller peers that can provide differentiated technology and/or fill product line holes.

In addition, private-equity firms have shown an interest in this space. Vista Equity bought marketing automation firm Marketo last year for $1.8 billion, and marketing data/analytics provider Neustar is set to be acquired by Golden Gate Capital for $2.9 billion.

MarTech Advisor, the world’s leading resource for marketing technology related news, research, product comparisons and expert views, on April 7th released their exclusive Q1 2017 Investscape that analyzes venture funding in the martech space. Identifying the top 10 companies receiving major investments and the top categories that equity players have shown interest in, the data is a useful ready reckoner for B2B enterprise marketers as they plan their marketing technology purchase decisions.
When compared to Q1 ’16, Q1 ’17 witnessed a 29% drop in VC funding from $2.24 billion in Q1 last year to a moderate figure of $1.59 billion. The kinds of categories invested in and the average amount invested in each has reduced, even though the number of VCs actively investing have gone up from 90-plus firms to 200-plus equity ventures diversifying into this booming tech sector. So far, 2017 has seen select martech companies capture niche, micro-landscapes, while helping enterprises take giant steps in their customer fulfillment journey.

It’s been a sedate start to the new year for martech companies with a 29% drop in VC funds compared to the same quarter last year. (from $2.24 billion in Q1’16 to $1.59 billion in Q1’17. 2016 closed Q4 with $3.87 billion in funding, still higher than what Q1’17 has garnered. Consider this: 200+ VCs invested in 95 martech companies across 30 Categories in Q1’17, compared to 90+ VCs investing in 107 martech Companies across 41 categories (of a possible 44 categories) in Q1’16. Both the sweep of categories invested in, and the average amount invested has reduced, considering the actual VCs active have gone up from 90+ to 200+. The top investor for Q1’17 - Greycroft Partners (with 4 Investments already!) were also among the top 9 investors in 2016 with 7 investments.

Surveys consistently show that marketing technology is far down the priority list of IT managers.  That wouldn’t be the case if martech spend were equal to all other tech spending combined. Indeed, one of the main reasons that marketers have been eager to take control of their technology has been the neglect, benign or otherwise, shown by corporate IT.

Understanding the real relationship between martech and other systems is important.  Marketers need to recognize that their systems are a small part of a big picture and can’t work independently of the rest of the company. Yes, marketers should control their internal systems. But the IDC figures show that sales and customer service spend more on tech than marketing. So, when it comes to customer-facing systems, marketers shouldn’t expect other departments to simply adopt marketing systems as a new core.

I do feel I can safely publish statistics for three groups within the industry.  This gives some additional insight without exposing any proprietary or misleading vendor data.  The groups are based on each vendor's original business.  They are:

• Tag managers.
• Campaign managers. 
• Data assembly systems.

An exhaustive list of the top 100 global MarTech influencers & brands driving the most engagement in 2017

Speaking separately with The Drum, Luma Partners chief executive Terry Kawaja highlighted why martech companies are increasingly popular with investors, compared with adtech companies; namely how “the software model” was increasingly attractive as opposed to “the media model”.

He added: “You’ll start to see greater multiples from the software model than from media, but that’s for obvious reasons,” he says, adding that the latter type of company is more exposed to seasonality where media spend peaks and dips throughout the year.”