Good morning: The marketing tech space is still changing fast

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Good morning, Marketers, and is marketing automation reverting to an email tool?

Sara McNamara, Marketing Operations Solutions Architect with Slack and a well-known voice in the MOPs space has been making some very timely observations about changes in marketing technology. In particular, a Pardot specialist herself, she sees a trend to remove processes from marketing automation platforms and relocate them to specialized tools. This implies MA being boiled back down again into an email and list-building tool.

This chimes with what I’m seeing with CRM — the prospect, at least, of it being used as a sales records tool while a lot of sales enablement, as well as the marketing initiatives leading up to the hand off for sales, taking place elsewhere.

I’m speculating here, but I think we’re going to see some big changes in the space over the next year, and I think — although I’m still joining the dots — these changes will reflect how far we’ve moved away from a focus on specific channels and towards a channel-agnostic orchestration approach to CX.

Kim Davis

Editorial Director

Shorts 

MarTech is marketing. “Martech is technology. But it’s also talent, teams, tactics, touchpoints — and most of all — a way of thinking.” Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem, HubSpot. 

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About the author

Kim Davis

Kim Davis is the Editorial Director of MarTech. Born in London, but a New Yorker for over two decades, Kim started covering enterprise software ten years ago. His experience encompasses SaaS for the enterprise, digital- ad data-driven urban planning, and applications of SaaS, digital technology, and data in the marketing space. He first wrote about marketing technology as editor of Haymarket’s The Hub, a dedicated marketing tech website, which subsequently became a channel on the established direct marketing brand DMN. Kim joined DMN proper in 2016, as a senior editor, becoming Executive Editor, then Editor-in-Chief a position he held until January 2020. Prior to working in tech journalism, Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.