Technology seems to be evolving at a faster and faster pace as the years progress, and marketing tech is an area that’s certainly not immune to this speeding up of advancements.
So it may come as no surprise that half of marketers think that the martech landscape is evolving quicker than companies’ adoption of the tech. That’s according to a new piece of research by digital marketing agency Walker Sands Communication, which examined what marketers think about the pace of change.
In the Closing the gap between martech innovation and adoption report, only 9% of 300 marketers said thier companies are keeping up with industry adoption when it comes to tech.
As it’s the second year of the report, this version does however look at how companies are faring in 2016 in comparison to last year. Overall, they’ve made “significant progress” when it comes to marketing tech adoption, according to the reserach, and markters are becoming more optimistic as a result.
Although a third of marketers told researchers that their companies’ martech adoptino is evolving quickly, 72% said the same thing about the martech landscape in general, showing that there is a gap present.
Improvements
This gap is closing though, as more than double the number of marketers now call their companies “innovators” or “early adopters” in terms of marketing tech as compared to last year.
A further 71% think their companies are investing the right amount of money in martech, also up from half last year, and 70% expect their martech budgets to increase in the coming year.
This improvement in adoption, as well as the rapid evolution of the martech landscape means that how marketers build their tech stacks is changing.
For example, nearly half told the reserachers that they are embracing best-of-breed stacks with multiple tools rather than single-vendor suites. The use of these tools is excellent or good, according to 83%.
“Marketers are a tech-savvy group, and they’ve been frustrated in the past at their companies’ relatively slow adoption of marketing technology,” said Dave Parro, vice president of the marketing technology practice at Walker Sands.
“That seems to be changing, though, and they’re becoming much more optimistic about innovation within their organisations.”
