How attitudes to purchasing martech may be changing

Are brands retrenching on martech under COVID, relying on tried and tested stack components? Or are they willing to experiment and try new solutions to seize unexpected opportunities which might come their way?

“It’s hard to generalize,” said HubSpot VP of Platform Ecosystem Scott Brinker in a recent appearance on MarTech Live. Among other things, it depends on a brand’s digital maturity, he said. Would a brand get value out of a new martech tool? “For a relatively mature, technologically speaking, marketing team it’s entirely possible; for someone further down the curve, there might just be other priorities.”

Greater discipline in evaluating martech is praiseworthy, Brinker added, but software innovation is not going to shut down. Vendors certainly see opportunities to innovate, said Davis: “It was on our roadmap already, but it has special utility and applicability in an environment … where digital engagement is important above all.”

That’s one of the topics Scott Brinker discussed with our own Kim Davis in their recent MarTech Live encounter.

According to our latest survey on budget priorities for 2021, respondents say purchasing budgets for the next fiscal will be focused on bringing in new platforms and services. That also suggests that the focus on expanding capabilities is not soon to dissipate.

“Pretty much every business to some degree is thinking about how software is a part of what they do in their business as well and how they engage with their customers,” said Brinker. “I embrace and applaud bringing greater discipline to the process of evaluating and adopting marketing technology but I think the idea that somehow we’re gonna just shut down software innovation and martech and not continue to embrace new opportunities and new capabilities, I just don’t see that happening.”

Earlier this year, Brad Geddes, co-founder of AdAlysis, told our sister site Search Engine Land that he had seen a major difference in the readiness companies dealing with the pandemic’s upheaval had based on the sophistication of their marketing stack.

“One thing I can say is a true trend when we look across clients who are doing really well versus [those that are] struggling right now, is how well organized they were beforehand,” said Geddes, speaking on Live with Search Engine Land. “Companies who had good CRM systems that talked to their stuff [and] their data flowed well, are managing this much better than people who are cobbling together systems with everyone now distributed.”