As a marketeer, you need to understand where your market is moving. You nurture the relationship with leads and customers. You keep a close eye on your competitors. You watch new technologies and innovative players that enter the market. Traditional reports are outdated by the time they are published. Data crunching is time-consuming. The myriad of 3rd party data sources offer exactly the information you are looking for, but unfortunately, it is hard to aggregate the data.
DataScouts helps to turn an excel list into a live stream of market information by automating the data workflow and connecting the most relevant data sources for your specific use case. Doing this keeps you informed and your database up to date.
In this blog post, you will find a brief overview of how to map a MarTech landscape in 5 steps.
I am a fan of ChiefMarTech ever since Scott Brinker started his blog in 2008. Over the past decade, technology has completely overhauled the metier of a marketeer. There is a tool for every aspect in the life of a marketeer from developing your marketing strategy, over managing the marketing mix, to building a remarkable customer experience. Marketing has undoubtedly become a technology-powered discipline.
The landscape of marketing technology developed by Scott includes 7000+ different vendors. It is immensely difficult and time-consuming to keep up with the pace of change. We configured DataScouts to visualise the MarTech ecosystem as a demonstration of our technology to map out a technology space.
As a marketer, you have a good understanding of your market, the types of sellers and the categories of products and services they offer. It should be fairly easy for you to define the labels and categories that will allow you to classify all actors and provide a useful overview of your market. As far as the MarTech landscape is concerned, the classification is quite simple. There is a 2-level classification with 6 main categories
For the Marketing Technology landscape, we used a standard list of company types, target industries and emerging technologies. DataScouts allows you to customise the depth of the classification to your specific use case.
Prepare your list of companies to be uploaded. The minimum information needed is a company name and a URL. We recommend adding the base classification as to step 1: type of company, category & subcategory. The excel-file of the Marketing Technology Landscape is a great example of what you need to get started. While uploading the list, DataScouts starts automatically building profiles of the vendors. DataScouts automatically collects 3rd party data from providers you selected from our data catalogue. For this exercise, DataScouts aggregated data from Google, ClearBit, Crunchbase, Alexa, AHREFS, Wikipedia, Open Corporates, national company registries, the public website of the vendor, collected news feeds from ChiefMarTech, Martechseries, Martechcube, Martechtoday, Marketingland and social media feeds from Twitter.
With a cocktail of heuristics and machine learning algorithms, DataScouts brings order to the enormous quantity of business information:
The end result is a fairly clean, comprehensive database of relevant vendors, key opinion leaders and enablers. Bottom-up analytics converts the wide range of data points into insightful interactive charts and dashboards.
Once you have identified the relevant actors in your ecosystem, you are ready to continuously monitor the public whereabouts of all the vendors in your technology landscape.
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Technology is a good tool to automate the data workflow, but human interactions provide the finishing touch. By publishing the landscape, stakeholders can be invited to contribute to building collective intelligence.
Request a demo and learn how to use the DataScouts Platform to map and monitor your business environment, scout for innovations and technologies, and build your own ecosystem!