Marketing Technology maze in B2B

Earlier today I ran into this great overview* of the plethora in B2B marketing technology platforms currently available. At the same time, to many this chart may well be an overwhelmingly intricate maze too. 

Whilst it provides a great overview of the kind of B2B marketing & sales technology categories** available, I suppose this chart poses a whole next set of questions to marketing managers, CMOs and online marketing professional alike. Questions that I assume most marketing directors do not have time to answer themselves (or have answered from within their own teams). It’s these kind of questions and concerns the right digital marketing agencies will need to answer on their behalf.

Of course any model has its limits in representing reality. In this case for instance, the chart does not highlight to what extent solutions in adjacent or complementary categories indeed will effectively work together. Also there is no indication as to the affordability of solutions mentioned. Or their relative fit to small, medium-sized businesses or enterprise customers.

In updates to come I’d therefore welcome these additions as well as information on:

1) a weighting in terms of best-of-breed solutions

2) solutions more likely to ‘span’ 2 or more categories (marketing automation players incl HubSpot eg would be eligible to cover analytics, social media marketing, CMS and to some extent CRM capabilities too), and

3) Forrester/IDC/Gartner top X list per category to be included. In WCM eg Adobe, Ektron, MSFT, OpenText, Acquire should be mentioned too.

*   Should you really want to enter the maze, see the enlarged version, by LUMA partners.
** Categories included:

Marketing & Sales
Email Optimization
Integrated Marketing Management
Marketing Modeling
Database Marketing
Email Service Providers
Sales Automation
Visualisation
Sales/Marketing BI
DMPs
Marketing Automation
Data Warehouses
Marketing Data
Social Marketing Management
Social Publishing Platforms
Social Promotion Platforms

Website
Recommendation
Personalisation
SEO Platforms / Tools
Chat
Real-Time
AB/Multivariate-testing
Landing Pages

E-commerce Technology
E-commerce Platform / Storefront
Social Referral
Payments
M-Commerce
Merchandising

Website Creation & Management
Online Video Players
Digital Asset Management
Tag Management
Web Analytics
Web Content Management
Feedback/ Surveys
Community
Social Content & Forums
Mobile Web
Translation
Social Login/Sharing
Gamification