Marketing Tech Across the Pond

Read the first part here.

I’d learned that the market for marketing technology in the U.K. lags behind the U.S. because of budget restrictions and a consonant skill shortage. Related to that, both brand marketers and tech vendors were focused more on customer retention, less on acquisition — in the latter case, because of less pressure from investors to build a mass market swiftly. But I still needed to flesh out this relatively conservative picture. What tech needs were at the forefront of U.K. marketers’ minds, and how had this changed over the years?

From past to present

Jonny Rose at Idio was my history tutor. In the U.K., marketing tech really started ten years ago with social media tools: “Brandwatch, Buddy Media, that’s what emerged. People were still using email contact databases, of course. Five years on,  and suddenly mar tech became a byword for content marketing tools like Taboola and Outbrain. They brought content marketing and management, calendars, auto-publishing, workflows. Everything then galvanized around the idea of content marketing. For the past two or three years, I’d say mar tech has become a byword for marketing automation, like Pardot and Eloqua, with single point solutions beginning to consolidate into one stack and being amalgamated into Salesforce or things like that.”

Rose, of course, has a strong B2B focus in his thinking. “Also for the last ten years in the U.K., lead gen and ABM have been  the two watchwords. They are crystallized as practices, very formalized and structured. Necessarily that has come with an appreciation of the marketing tech which supports those practices. We now have strong categories of email service providers, marketing automation, and campaign management. These have become much more defined in the UK marketer’s mind than perhaps ten years ago, because of the understanding of lead gen or ABM as a practice.”

Interestingly, he had named more U.S.-based vendors than anything home-grown. “There are certainly U.K. marketing tech companies. He mentioned dotmailer, founded in his home town, Croydon, and now part of dotdigital: “A solid marketing automation platform with a sizeable market cap, really making an impact both locally and globally. But if you really want a home-grown story there’s social;  you have Brandwatch and Conversocial, two examples of notable companies.”

As for what’s happening now: “It’s with people plugging data into your stack, like Lead Forensics, Growth Intelligence.” The kinds of data involved include account based data sources, and third party intent data, Bombora-style. Lead Forensics, for example, handles lead prioritization, and plugs into Marketo to trigger nurture campaigns. “These are companies,” said Rose, “doing neat enterprise things, rather than peripheral use cases.”

The robots aren’t coming

Jordan Adams of MarTech Tracker started by highlighted for me some big thematic differences between the U.K. and the U.S.. Nevertheless, his commentaryon the space matches Rose’s closely — although for the most part he cited U.S. vendors succeeding in the U.K. market rather than home-grown solutions. As for the big differences: “Every conference I go to in the U.S.,” he said, “is about ‘the robots are coming.’ AI. This is just not the case in the U.K.. Nobody is bothered about blockchain in the UK. Nobody. It won’t appear on any agenda; nobody is talking about it. It’s not that we’re ignorant of it. No-one cares. The whole AI piece; it’s just not a hot topic. So the robots don’t seem to be coming over here.”

So what are U.K. marketers actually interested in? “A couple of groups of marketing challenges are pretty well known in the UK. Data management and data intelligence, and underpinning that, GDPR. The U.K. virtually came to a standstill for four weeks after GDPR. Who was going to send the first email? We saw that to an extent globally, but very much with marketers in the U.K..” Secondly, he sees an increase in the rise of lead management platforms. “The big player here is Conversant. They’re making big waves. They influenced a lot of the ad agencies in the U.K. to use their platform, that meant the agencies went out and educated their customers why they were doing it.” Conversant, of course, is a U.S. company, and they’re competing against another U.S. company for U.K. customers. “They’re pushing against the door of Integrate, the biggest lead management platform in the U.S.,” he said, “and have a massive steal on the market in the U.K..It’s a great business..”

As Rose had indicated, ABM is big in the U.K. B2B space. “We play in that space,” he said. “It’s about, rather than try and find new customers, learn more about people you know.” He named two other players, one U.S. — Signal (which helps identify and refine propensity data), and one U.K.-founded —  Bright Target (which uses machine learning make recommendations on non-obvious lookalike prospects). 

As for intent marketing, Adams described Intent data: Bombora as “shouting from the rooftops” to U.K.; marketers about what they do (MarTech Tracker is a Bombora partner). “Intent is what gets everyone excited. The challenge they have is that no U.K. publishers have signed up to Bombora, so it’s not U.K. data going in there. All of Bombora’s data is based out of US cookies. Bombora asked for our help to get into U.K. publishers, and I had to tell them U.K. publishers — being prim and proper —were not going to let them have their cookies. But now there’s a U.K. version of Bombora, Cyance. It does exactly the same thing, and it’s swallowing Bombora’s customers slowly but surely.” 

Adams also shared Rose’s estimate of dotmailer.  “In the U.S., dotmailer would certainly be competitive to MailChimp.” Adestra, another U.K. vendor, is also making a move on the U.S.. “Anecdotally, the hundred businesses who take email marketing most seriously will be using Adestra, DotMailer or MailChimp: but it certainly won’t be all MailChimp.”

He mentioned one more imortant development: a fast-growing emphasis on content marketing. “It’s been top of the agenda since the year dot, but a lot if happening now. Leading the charge is Passle, no two ways about it, but you’ve got players like Gartner who have now come into the market (Gartner Content Services), less around getting content out there, more about getting the right content, the right messaging. In my day it would have been copywriters, but now it’s about taking data points, taking a bit of machine learning, taking the understanding of your audience, and being able to create content which is timely rather than hire a bunch of journalists, or — god forbid  — a marketer with copy-writing skills.”

He had already explained to me that some of the most successful U.K. marketing tech companies based their business around a handful of closely-held clients. Now he gave me an example. “Phrasee had just two clients for a long time.” One was Virgin Holidays. “It uses machine learning to write emails for you. It’s a big thing to sign off to a machine, but they had one or two big customers who fueled their entire design. Now they’ve  swallowed the UK market, and have secured funding to go into the U.S.. I’ll be amazed if they don’t swallow the U.S. market incredibly quickly. That’s the one I’d say to watch going into the U.S.. They’ve got an infinitely scaleable model, an incredible customer success story, and now they’ve got VC cash which has allowed them to put a lot of feet on the ground.” Also, CEO Parry Malm  is great for soundbites, he told me.

Still to come: Organizational changes and the agency story.  But right now…

From CabinetM, a check-list of over 500 U.K. marketing tech companies discovered in their database (there are some additional ones mentioned in the story: