My Research Calendar

As I wrote in a recent article on Martech Advisor, this is an exciting time to be discussing marketing automation. According to the recent Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2018-19, nearly one-third of CMO budgets is now allocated to marketing technology, making martech the single largest area of investment when it comes to marketing resources and programs. But, for most marketing professionals, managing a vendor selection process is not in their immediate comfort zone. They need help.

As you may have noticed, I am collaborating regularly with a business partner, Research in Action GmbH, to field user-surveys about the marketing software vendors they are working with.

Research-in-Action website visitors see a matrix graphic as well as the scores for vendors across the various categories. Our clients (survey panel members, user- and vendor-clients) also get the vendor scorecards for the leading ten vendors in the matrix. A vendor scorecard is a one-page commentary by me on the vendor – duly fact-checked of course.

As an industry analyst with 17 years of experience, I know that the approach we use here, mixing user ratings with the analyst POV, is quite unique. One marketing professional got the point immediately and wrote this blog about it. I am quite amazed and gratified at the response from users and vendors alike.

For your information, I am now listing my research plan for the next months, so that you can plan accordingly.

This list is based on requests from clients. While ABM could end up just profiling data vendors (though I will try to avoid that), I also plan to do something in the second half of 2019 around how marketers use data to steer their programs, content presentation, and even performance management reports. I am still working on a concept there. If you have any other suggestions, please let me know.

Always keeping you informed! Peter