(this is a modified version of a blog posted by my colleague Carl Doty on our B2C Marketing page)

Sick of scouring sector landscapes with thousands of vendor logos organized into loosely defined categories?  I mean, do you really need to know the names of scores of predictive analytics vendors out there?

What’s the total Martech ecosystem going to tally this year – 7000+ vendors?

Actually, yes. Yes it is. As my colleague Joe Stanhope wrote in a recent blog: “it’s hard to remember a time when there was such an unhealthy and unsustainable technology ecosystem.”

At Forrester, we’ve covered marketing technology and the now overused term – “left-brained marketing” – for nearly fifteen years.  We've come a long way as an industry since then, and today Forrester's B2B marketing clients now enjoy step-by-step playbooks like the Lead-To-Revenue Management (L2RM) Playbook that help them get more out of their technology investments. This is becoming more important every day. Why? Because marketing technology now commands one-fifth of overall marketing budgets for B2B marketers. That’s already a sizable chunk, and we expect it to climb quickly because 41% of these marketers tell us that they still lack the technology they need to grow their business.

To help you make smarter technology decisions, Forrester publishes TechRadars for B2B and B2C marketers that show the relative maturity of specific technology categories and advise you on how aggressively you should pursue them. To take it further, we evaluate the top B2B Martech vendors across several categories – like L2RM Automation, Through-Channel Marketing Automation, Sales Enablement Automation Platforms, Enterprise Marketing Software Suites, and coming soon, Predictive Analytics – in our proprietary Forrester Wave™ that help you choose technology wisely, so you can achieve your revenue goals.

But wait – there’s more:  Our clients tell us that they want more coverage of emerging technologies across the Martech ecosystem.  So last week, during our Consumer Marketing Forum in NY, we published several new reports on this including: The Top Emerging Technologies For B2B Marketers.

The report (and its B2C equivalent) highlights the 11 emerging marketing technologies that matter most to marketers. Sure, there’s some commonality across the two, but also some uniqueness to the different industries and we spell all of that out for you.  Stay tuned for an even deeper dive on these emerging categories as we prepare to highlight several breakout vendors who are showing some exciting capabilities in this ever-changing landscape.

Okay, I hope you’ll forgive me this shameless plug. But I hope you’ve learned something about Forrester’s long history in the Martech space, where to find our best research on marketing and advertising technologies, and more importantly, how to apply it all to your business to drive revenue.  After all, isn't that what marketers are supposed to be doing anyway?

Always keeping you informed! Peter