Revised June 26, 2017
B2B marketing professionals are faced with an expanding universe of tools to help them produce, distribute, and measure the results of content marketing (among many other tasks) more effectively.
But, particularly for small to midsized businesses, the marketing technology (martech) landscape presents as much confusion as promise. A new website launches today with the mission of being “a resource to help CMOs, VPs, and marketing directors make more strategic marketing technology purchase decisions”—B2BMarketing.Technology (note: there’s no dot-com).
B2B marketers face several martech challenges. One of the most fundamental is strategy. As noted in VentureBeat, “Marketing has the unique challenge of not having a typical stack or process. If you look into any Fortune 500 company, they will have hundreds of products that they are stitching together.”
Marketing technology isn’t a “stack,” it’s a matrix. SMBs don’t have hundreds of products to “stitch together,” but they also have fewer IT resources to help stitch together the applications they do have.
B2BMarketing.Technology has been developed to help marketers make strategic decisions about what categories of tools invest in; to evaluate specific tools in the context of that strategy; and to plan for sufficient training and integration to be successful with their matrix of tools.
The three main sections of the site are the home page, blog, and Marketplace. The home page prominently features this interactive model enabling visitors to instantly drill down to posts about specific types of tools, from the “Best Online Business Tools” series here.
The blog will cover developments in martech strategy, address the martech-related challenges faced by small-to-midsized B2B companies, and feature occasional reviews of specific tools.
Finally, the Marketplace will list noteworthy vendors I’ve chosen to affiliate with. It’s not likely to be the first place marketers go to look for tools—but hopefully will sometimes be their last stop.
Looking for practical guidance and useful information about martech strategy and evaluation? Explore B2BMarketing.Technology. And let me know what you think!