Your MarTech Silos Are Slowly Killing Your Company (And What To Do About It)

The average company invests in 16 separate marketing technology platforms, which leave a ton of blind spots. What you don’t see can kill your company. Here’s how to eliminate this threat.

At last count, the marketing technology landscape has ballooned to an overwhelming 5,381 solutions according to Scott Brinker in his latest post on the MarTech 5,000. Props to Scott for pulling all 5,381 logos onto a single monstrously vast and scarily overwhelming graphic (shown above).

With this many solutions, it’s not surprising that the average business today has deployed 16 marketing technologies according to the 2017 MarTech Industry Council study. For larger organizations this number is as high as 98! This includes customer relationship management (CRM), marketing automation platform (MAP), content management system (CMS), and various forms of advertising, data management, reporting and analytics platforms.

Why Marketing Technology Silos Lead to Large Blind Spots

Think about this for a minute. Let’s say you keep your customer data in SalesForce, and use Marketo to nurture leads and Hootsuite to manage your social media marketing effort. You probably have Google Analytics set up on your website and I’ll stop here rather than illustrating all 16 marketing technology deployments because I don’t want your eyes to glaze over and totally lose you. Let’s just stick to these 4 platforms, but keep in mind that the problems I’m about to articulate are further complicated by a factor of 4.