Welcome to the 2020 edition of the marketing technology landscape.
Yes, it grew once again, by 13.6%, up to a total of 8,000 martech solutions.
That’s after 615 from the 2019 landscape went away, either consolidated with another martech company or simply gone defunct. If you were predicting consolidation, an 8.7% churn rate from one year to the next is pretty significant attrition to support that narrative.
But the rate of new venture creation — or at least new venture discovery in our research — outpaced the forces of consolidation once again. In fact, if we first remove the 615 from last year’s 7,040 count, then the growth of new entries on the landscape was actually 24.5%.
Think about that: 1 in 5 of the solutions on this year’s martech landscape weren’t there last year. That’s almost the equivalent of the entire 2015 marketing technology landscape.
There were other martech companies that were acquired from the 2019 landscape — but they were acquired by firms that weren’t already on the landscape. So those transactions didn’t count as consolidation, just a change of ownership. They did not shrink the net number of solutions available to marketers.
The new design of the graphic this year — more on that in a bit — gave us space to add in a legend with the counts for the number of solutions in each category. Here’s how the categories grew relative to 2019:
Data is by far the fastest growing category, up 25.5%. It makes sense. We have a ton of data. The challenge now is figuring out how to harness it effectively. That’s driving a lot of software innovation in the space.
We also calculated the fastest growing subcategory in each category, by percentage of growth. It’s interesting to see that physical world interactions (print, retail proximity, and IOT), data governance and privacy, video marketing, conversational marketing and chat, and project and workflow management led the pack. These all have been major themes in marketing and martech over this past year.
Forget shiny object syndrome. Martech chases marketers more than the other way around.
For the record, here’s the complete progression of the overall landscape since 2011:
