Marketing Automation Companies Funding by Category
The marketing automation industry encompasses a wide array of companies and startups in the email marketing, content marketing, social media, and other categories. As my marketing automation scan grows to almost 500 companies and $4.25B of funding, I’d like to take a step back and examine the whole industry by its common trends, growth rate, and funding capacity.
I’ve created a chart (see above) which summarizes the landscape of the marketing automation industry by the total category funding amount and by the percent of companies with funding, broken down by the different categories. This chart enables one to analyze which categories are the most saturated (as measured by high funding and high percentage of funded companies) and which categories are the most likely to see potential growth (as determined by having lower percentage of companies with funding).
After the analyzing the above graph, these are my conclusions about the marketing automation industry:
- The Marketing Automation Software category is the most saturated among all marketing automation categories. Not only is Marketing Automation Software the most well-funded category in the industry ($1.29B of funding), it is also one of the categories with the highest percentage of funded companies (48.04%). This category includes some established giants such as Marketo, HubSpot, and some new stars such as Sailthru, Epsilon, which offer comprehensive software suites for businesses’ multi-faceted marketing endeavors. This category is the most saturated as many marketing automation software companies are ripe for exits, consolidation, and mezz funding.
- Although Advertising Networks & Exchanges and SEO Companies are less-funded than others ($354M and $62.7M respectively), they are more likely to see higher potential growth due to their lower percentage of funded companies (25% and 7.81% respectively) which allows new funding to come in. This means that even though these two categories are still in their developmental stages, investors have made early bets by recognizing their growth potential and these categories could see more funding as winners emerge.
- Content Marketing and Email Marketing are becoming the main staple of businesses’ marketing endeavors. As one could see from the graph, both Content Marketing and Email Marketing are more likely to see potential growth because the former has a lower funding amount ($447M) and the latter has a lower percentage of funded companies (18.75%), both of which allow room for new funding to come in. This coincides with the most recent marketing studies which show that content marketing is replacing ads in becoming the preferred way for consumers to learn about a brand. Content marketing companies such as Outbrain, NewsCred, Tangerine Digital, and OneSpot are refining the entire content creation and distribution process.
What does the above graphical data tell you? What trends and opportunities in the marketing automation industry do you see? Let me know in the comments section.