In 2022 there were 376 new product announcements reflecting the output of the investment made in marketing technology companies in the previous two years. This was a significant jump from 225 in 2021.
In contrast, investment in martech companies dropped from $39.8B in 2021 to $28.4B in 2022. It’s important to note that these numbers do not include investment in AI content creation startups which we did not start to track until late Q4. We believe that economic uncertainty and martech “investment fatigue” were key factors in the downturn in investment.
Against this backdrop, there continues to be a steady drumbeat about the need to consolidate the number of tools in the industry and individual martech stacks. With more than 15,000 products on offer, it does not appear that the industry is consolidating as a whole. Rather than focus on reducing the number of tools to reduce expenses, marketing teams should rationalize their stacks to eliminate contract, product and functional redundancies and discard products that no one is using.
and what may be a difficult year for the industry, the outlook for martech looks great. There’s a tendency to say that the technology landscape is too big and over-invested, to which I say “ridiculous.” Martech is not one homogenous industry it is made up of more than 500 different categories some of which have been over-invested (how many more CRMs do we need?), while others are brand new and generating a ton of excitement (i.e., AI-driven content).
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