The Explosive Growth of Martech

This Week

This week I’m covering the latest research on the martech landscape, how to adapt your content strategy for your company’s growth stage and showcasing the 4 steps you need to improve your LLM outputs. Read on!

The Explosive Growth of Martech Revealed

The 2024 Martech Report just dropped, and the figures are staggering: we now have 14,106 products cataloged, up almost 30% from last year. Since the first survey back in 2011, the number of martech solutions has skyrocketed 9,304%. This kind of growth isn't just impressive—it seems to almost defy gravity.

Despite this relentless expansion, consolidation is inevitable. In the fierce martech arena, companies continue to jostle for dominance. The most successful grow larger, either by edging out competitors or through strategic acquisitions, leveraging economies of scale to accelerate their momentum and expand into new categories.

At the pinnacle sit a few colossal, publicly traded companies like Adobe, Google, HubSpot, Microsoft, and Salesforce. These giants not only command billions in revenue but also boast the largest market shares in their categories. Their strategy often involves acquiring smaller players to cement or broaden their market dominance, showcasing textbook examples of industry consolidation.

Beyond them lies the industry's long tail'—thousands of startups and specialist products, most generating less than $10 million in revenue. The landscape saw only 263 products drop off in the last year, a tiny 2% churn rate. 

This resilience is largely due to the relentless influx of new ventures fueled by generative AI.

Over the past year, more than 3,000 new martech products were introduced—more than the first five years combined!

As technology advances and marketing practices evolve to leverage new opportunities, the martech landscape continues to be a hotbed of innovation. Entrepreneurs and inventors are constantly at work, pushing the boundaries and expanding the martech industry's long tail.

Now, we just need to figure out which of these tools to use. 

Download the 101-page report at Martechmap.com. 

How to Maximize Your Return on Content with AI

As your company evolves, so should your content strategy. To maximize your return on content, you need to tailor your approach to your current growth stage. Focus on experimentation and fast feedback loops if you’re in the early stages. If you are scaling your growth, develop content programs that cover the entire buyer journey, and at the mature stage, concentrate on maintaining your market position.

AI can enhance your stage in the following ways:

1. Early Stage:

   • Use AI-powered tools to generate and test content ideas and formats quickly

   • Analyze audience engagement to identify top-performing content and iterate accordingly

   • Tools to try: Anyword, Canva, Parse.ly

2. Growth Stage:

   • Leverage AI for content personalization based on user behavior and preferences

   • Automate content distribution and optimization across multiple channels

   • Utilize AI to identify trending topics, analyze competitor content, and assist in creating thought-leadership pieces

   • Tools to try: Tofu, Mutiny, Hubspot, SEMRush

3. Mature Stage:

   • Employ AI-powered language translation and localization to adapt content for different markets

   • Continuously monitor and optimize content performance using AI-powered tools

   • Tools to try: Smartcat, Brandwatch, Braze

Remember, content should always serve a purpose—whether it's supporting customer acquisition, building your brand, or gathering audience feedback. By adapting your strategy to your growth stage and incorporating AI, you can create a content ecosystem that gets you well on your journey to unicorn status.

Get AI to Ace Any Project in 4 Steps

Tara Aranha from Section offers a straightforward guide on training AI to help with work tasks. She compares training AI to onboarding a new employee and suggests building its knowledge step by step. 

The method involves integrating AI into specific work processes and improving its performance by iterating. This way, AI can efficiently handle tasks like proofreading or email drafting, saving you time and effort.

1. Treat AI as a new team member: Gradually introduce it to tasks.

2. Build context: Teach AI about your work incrementally.

3. Specify tasks: Clearly define what you want AI to do.

4. Iterate and refine: Continuously improve AI's accuracy and usefulness.

As Aranha says, if you’ve ever tried something with AI and decided it wasn’t faster, you were probably right—it wasn’t at first. Training AI is a time investment but worth it if you want to speed up in the long run.

Read the full article at Section.

Become an AI-Powered Marketer with SEMRush

Marketers are being asked to do more with less every day. AI can make this possible, but how? SEMRush is offering a free course covering the practical and immediate ways to increase productivity and success with AI. 

You'll learn how to level up your prompts and dive into core use cases for AI in marketing: strategy development, campaigns, and content creation. The course also covers a few useful tools you can integrate into your martech stack.

Enroll in the free class at SEMRush.