The marketing technology space is projected to grow tenfold over the next 10 years, expanding from a $12 billion to a $120 billion dollar industry, according to a new whitepaper from venture capital firm Foundation Capital.
Foundation Capital general partner Ashu Garg has identified three major C-suite shifts in his “MarTech and the Decade of the CMO” report that are poised to boost CMO technology spending from one percent to 10 percent of budgets, and are defining the new roles of CMOs and CIOs. The first is a shift in priorities.
“CEOs surveyed by Gartner singled out three tech capabilities as their most important near-term needs: digital 
marketing, ecommerce, customer experience management. Each often falls under the purview of the CMO. Each is the responsibility of the CMO and requires new technology,” Garg says.
Marketers are also seeing shifts in budget priorities when it comes to marketing tech solutions.
“Marketers are commanding larger budgets and spending larger portions of their budgets on technology. CEOs already give the CMO and CIO relatively equal importance in driving digital initiatives. That will likely change by 2017, when Gartner estimates that CMOs will begin to spend more on technology than their CIO counterparts,” he says.
A shift in power is the third shift marketers will face moving forward in the tech space.
“Marketing is already gaining significant influence within the C-suite. Many marketers have already assumed the title and/or responsibilities of the chief experience officer. Those that do are becoming indispensable to the CEO and are on a path to becoming CEOs themselves. A Korn/Ferry survey of CEOs found that 53 percent believed their current CMO could one day replace them,” Garg says.
Marketers that will see the most success will harness these new tech solutions and work directly with IT departments to create a suite of solutions to drive ROI moving forward.
“For most marketers, both the pace of change and complexity of the MarTech landscape is overwhelming. Every major software vendor has a marketing cloud, and there are at least 2,000 MarTech startups knocking on the door of CMOs, a figure that has doubled in the last twelve months. As a former marketer and now an investor, I created the five keys framework to simplify the chaos. Like CIOs, CMOs must build their own technology stack, combining offerings from emerging companies with solutions from established players,” Garg says.
Click here to download the Foundation Capital whitepaper on marketing tech and learn more about Garg’s findings.
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