[Progress News] [Progress OpenEdge ABL] 10 Data Stats for Your Martech Stack

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Joelle Andrews

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How many marketing tools does your company use? Maybe two or three, right? Not even close!


The average number of marketing tools per enterprise is 120

chiefmartec.com, The Average Enterprise Uses 1,295 Cloud Services (2020)

According to chiefmartec.com, the average enterprise uses 120 marketing technology, or martech, tools. How is that possible? Well, begin by counting your social media engagement tools, your content management systems, the demand generation lead capturing service, your project management platforms, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing automation platforms and web analytics tools. Suddenly, it’s not so hard to see why the martech landscape is estimated to have over 8,000 options.

The martech landscape includes over 8,000 marketing tools

chiefmartec.com, Marketing Technology Landscape (2020)

Your martech stack produces a lot of valuable data. In many cases, the value of one system’s data shines the most when it’s combined with that of another platform. For instance, tracking the progress of a lead who opens an email becomes infinitely more interesting when you find out in your CRM that the lead is now a closed won opportunity.

While many applications have their own dashboards, the easiest way to visualize data is in a unified dashboard from a BI or analytics tool. Forrester projects that by 2022, businesses will be spending a significant amount of their marketing budget on analytics tools and services.


The estimated marketing spending on data and analytics tools was 3.404 billion in 2017, 3.967 billion in 2018, 4.498 billion in 2019, 5.007 billion in 2020, 5.684 billion in 2021 and 6.324 billion in 2022

Forrester, The US Marketing Technology and Services Outlook (2018)

Data and analytics spend in marketing is unsurprising when we look at the tools companies already use today to run their reports. It’s a given that most people have exposure to Microsoft Excel, but among data professionals, tools that do big-data heavy-lifting are becoming more common.


The preferred BI and reporting tools of data professionals include Excel (40%), Microsoft BI Platform (27%), Power BI (26%), Tableau (21%), IBM Cognos (13%), Qlik View (13%)

Progress DataDirect, 2020 Progress Data Connectivity Report (2020)

The Value of Analytics​


Most companies today are no strangers to BI and reporting tools, but our reliance on them is growing. Gartner’s 2019 Marketing Technology Survey found that 19% of the people they interviewed believed advanced analytics would be the most impactful technology for marketing in the next five years. Almost half of their respondents expect analytics to be one of the top three most important technologies available.

When asked in 2019 which emerging technologies are expected to have the largest positive impact on marketing over the next five years, 49% said advanced analytics and automated decisioning was in their top 3, with 19% saying it was the top choice.

Gartner, Marketing Technology Survey 2019

In a Gartner survey from the summer, 36% of respondents say that analytics is the most important tool at their disposal and over three quarters of people say it’s in their top 3.

When asked in 2020 whether analytics and artificial intelligence would emerge as game changing technology due to the COVID-19 crisis, 78% said it was in their top 3, with 36% saying it was the top choice.

Gartner, Data & Analytics During Covid-19 (2020)

Why is the analysis of data suddenly so important? As we produce more and more data, businesses realize it’s only as useful as we make it. If we can’t learn anything from past performance or if we can’t forecast anything about future performance, then all of our existing information serves no useful purpose.​

Data Professionals in Marketing​


Many companies keep data analysts on their IT teams or in a dedicated business intelligence team. But today, more medium-sized and large enterprises also have data analysts on their marketing teams. In fact, in many marketing operations departments, everyone is either a professional or citizen data analyst.

Marketing Data and Analytics Specialists spend ten hours or more of their week in: 73% Spreadsheet, 60% Analytics, 53% CRM/CDP, 57% BI
chiefmartec.com, Job Responsibilities of 4 Marketing Technologist Roles (2020)

In addition to spending so much of their time in BI and analytics tools, technical marketers are also proficient in a variety of technical languages. In a world of vast quantities of data, the ability to SQL query data is essential. The faster a marketer can find the answers they need in their data, the sooner they can return to mission-critical tasks.

Technical languages used by Marketing Data Specialists: 20% R, 33% Python, 33% JavaScript, 53% SQL

chiefmartec.com, Job Responsibilities of 4 Marketing Technologist Roles (2020)

With both IT and marketing operations teams having staff that handles data analytics, it’s now more important than ever to seek alignment between the Marketing team and the IT team. The CMO frequently leads, if not fully controls, the martech buying process as it is the marketers who best understand if a product will fulfill their needs. Nevertheless, the CIO understands the wider implications of integrating new martech tools into the existing tech stack. The strongest enterprises understand that it’s best not to wrestle for control of the martech stack but instead work together for optimal performance.

Marketing vs IT Control - For integration of disparate marketing technologies and databases, marketing controls the entire process 30% of the time, marketing leads with guidance from IT 32% of the time, IT leads with guidance from marketing 32% of the time, and IT controls the entire process 6% of the time. For the configuration and deployment of new marketing technology, marketing controls the entire process 20% of the time, marketing leads with guidance from IT 42% of the time, IT leads with guidance from marketing 29% of the time, IT controls the entire process 8% of the time, and 1% of the time it is managed by an external services partner.

chiefmartec.com, Martech Collaboration Between Marketing and IT (2019)


One thing marketing and IT professionals can agree on is the prevalence of data across multiple sources. Even if your martech stack has only a dozen tools, it’s likely that the native integrations between these tools and to reporting tools like Tableau or Power BI are unable to process data as quickly and as efficiently as your business needs.


Integration Challenges of Data Professionals—Integration of Cloud Data (39%), Data Spread Across an Increasing Number of Data Sources (41%), Data Variety (20%), Data Volume (20%), Data Quality (42%)

Progress DataDirect, 2020 Progress Data Connectivity Report (2020)

More often than not, IT and marketing operations professionals find themselves waiting for data to load, creating custom codes, or struggling with various APIs to create connections to data in martech tools or data warehouses.

With DataDirect, you can set up connections between a your data source and either a centralized data warehouse or a reporting tool such as Tableau or Power BI. Marketers get to see near real-time information, giving them better insight into the performance of their campaign efforts and marketing spend. If marketers have quick and easy access to the data they need, you can spend less time on data discovery and custom coding, freeing up your time to do other tasks.

Visit our page to learn more about Progress DataDirect’s connectors for popular martech tools such as Google Analytics, HubSpot, and Salesforce.

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