Marketing Technology Market Overview and Innovation Quadrant – Q2 2017

The following post highlights how Venture Scanner categorizes the Marketing Technology startup landscape, and presents our Innovation Quadrant showing how those categories compare to one another. The data for this post is through May 2017.

The above sector map organizes the sector into 15 categories and shows a sampling of companies in each category.

Our Innovation Quadrant provides a snapshot of the average funding and average age for the different Marketing Technology categories and how they compare with one another.

• Heavyweights: These categories are comprised of companies that have reached maturity with significant financing.
• Established: These categories are comprised of companies that have reached maturity with less financing.
• Disruptors: These categories are comprised of companies that are less mature with significant financing.
• Pioneers: These categories are comprised of companies that are less mature with earlier stages of financing.

The definitions of the Marketing Technology categories are as follows

Advertising Networks and Exchanges: Companies that allow media buyers to purchase ad space from advertising companies. Typical advertising formats include search ads, display ads, and video pre-roll ads.

Automated Personalization Platforms: Companies that work with retailers to deliver custom ads, marketing messages, and dynamically optimize site pages for different users. Examples include platforms that allow A/B testing and platforms that tailor websites to each individual user’s specific tastes.

Content Creation: Companies that help brands and businesses create custom content for branding and marketing purposes. Such content can include blog posts, photos, infographics, videos, and other visual or auditory material.

Content Marketing: Companies that create valuable and relevant written and visual content to promote a product and convert readers into customers. Such content created may exist in the form of informative blog posts, infographics, research analyses, video tutorials, how-to guides, and others.

Email Marketing: Companies that create products that allow marketers to deliver email newsletters to their user base in a more efficient manner. Such products also allow for the segmenting and targeting of email lists, as well as the tracking of analytics of CTR and other important stats.

Influencer Marketing: Companies that focus on the fans and followers that have the greatest influence in the blogosphere and social media, and utilize their influence and network to execute marketing and promotion campaigns.

Marketing Analytics: Companies that measure the traffic, engagement, behavioral patterns, and other important statistics for a website or service. Such data is used in the improvement and optimization of the website to increase traffic and conversion rate.

Marketing Automation Software: Companies that allow marketers to efficiently streamline and automate marketing tasks, such as converting leads into customers. Instead of performing certain repetitive marketing tasks by hand each time, marketing automation software enables certain routines to be completed automatically.

Marketing Platforms and Customer Relationship Management: Companies that enable merchants / brands to engage with their customers across social media channels, and execute and manage marketing campaigns. This category also includes customer relationship management tools used to improve customer communication, tracking, and overall relations.

Mobile Marketing: Companies that allow businesses to deliver ads and market products across mobile devices. Typical mobile marketing formats include text/SMS ads, mobile app ads, email ads, branded content, and others.

Search Engine Marketing: Companies that help marketers with managing and scaling their paid-search programs.

Search Engine Optimization: Companies that help websites attain higher placements on search engines’ results page, which lead to more clickthroughs and traffic. Such is accomplished by adapting websites’ content, utilizing common search keywords, increasing the number of backlinks to the website, and others.

Social Discovery: Companies that allow for discovery of products through social sharing and location check-ins. Examples include discovery social networks as well as platforms with integrated ecommerce functions.

Social Intelligence: Companies that examine social media interactions in order to better allow companies to identify power users and market their products.

Social Media Marketing: Companies that promote brands and products across popular social media networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and others. Brands rely on social media influencers to spread the word about their products to gain buzz and web traffic.

We are currently tracking 1,607 Marketing Technology companies in 15 categories across 57 countries, with a total of $28 Billion in funding. Click here to learn more about the full Marketing Technology market report.