Find and Select Marketing Technology
The marketing technology landscape is one of the largest and most complex in enterprise software. With thousands of tools spanning email marketing, marketing automation, ABM, content management, analytics, personalisation, and AI-powered content creation, marketing leaders face a constant challenge: how do you identify the tools that will genuinely move the needle, without drowning in vendor noise or ending up with a bloated, disconnected MarTech stack?
Viewpoint Analysis is an independent Technology Matchmaker. We help CMOs, Marketing Directors, and marketing operations leaders find and select the right marketing technology quickly, objectively, and without vendor bias. Whether you are building out your MarTech stack for the first time, replacing a platform that is no longer delivering, or looking to consolidate an over-engineered technology estate, we bring structure and independence to every stage of the process.
Below you will find a guide to the marketing technology landscape, our selection services, free tools to support your project, and answers to the most common questions we hear from marketing technology buyers.
What is Marketing Technology?
Marketing technology - widely known as MarTech - covers the full range of software platforms and tools that marketing teams use to plan, execute, measure, and optimise their marketing activities. It is one of the broadest software categories in existence, with significant overlap between marketing, sales, and customer experience technology as the major platform vendors expand their capabilities.
The main categories within marketing technology include:
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Marketing Automation - platforms that automate repetitive marketing tasks including email campaigns, lead nurturing workflows, scoring, and lifecycle communications. Core to most B2B and B2C marketing operations. Leading platforms include HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Adobe Marketo, and Pardot.
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Email Marketing Platforms - dedicated tools for designing, sending, and analysing email campaigns, ranging from simple newsletter tools to sophisticated journey-based sending platforms. Closely related to marketing automation but often simpler and more affordable for organisations not needing the full automation suite.
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Account-Based Marketing (ABM) - platforms that support highly targeted, account-level marketing programmes, helping B2B marketing teams align with sales, identify in-market accounts, and personalise outreach at scale.
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Content Management Systems (CMS) - platforms that manage the creation, publication, and optimisation of digital content, including website content, landing pages, and campaign assets. Marketing teams increasingly need CMS capabilities that integrate tightly with their broader MarTech stack.
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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Content Analytics - tools that support keyword research, content optimisation, technical SEO, backlink analysis, and organic search performance tracking.
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Social Media Management - platforms that manage content scheduling, community management, social listening, and social analytics across multiple channels.
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Marketing Analytics and Attribution - tools that track marketing performance, measure ROI, model customer journeys, and attribute revenue across channels and campaigns.
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AI Content Creation and Video - platforms that use generative AI to create written, visual, and video marketing content at scale, dramatically reducing the cost and time of content production. Synthesia is a leading example in AI video generation.
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Personalisation Engines - tools that deliver personalised content, offers, and experiences to individual customers or audience segments in real time across digital channels.
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Digital Advertising Platforms - tools that manage paid search, paid social, programmatic display, and retargeting campaigns across the major advertising networks.
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Marketing Data and CDP - customer data platforms and marketing data tools that unify customer and prospect data from multiple sources to power segmentation, personalisation, and audience targeting.
The average enterprise marketing team now uses dozens of tools across these categories. The challenge is rarely finding more tools - it is rationalising what already exists, ensuring the core platforms integrate properly, and making sure the stack is delivering measurable return on investment. Independent guidance is particularly valuable in marketing technology selection precisely because the vendor landscape is so noisy and the marketing of MarTech tools is so sophisticated.
Marketing Technology Vendor
Content
Our analyst team publishes independent marketing technology vendor profiles, category explainers, and market guides to help marketing leaders understand the landscape. The following are relevant starting points from our existing content:
How to Select Marketing Technology
Marketing technology selection is notoriously difficult. The vendor landscape is vast, the marketing of MarTech tools is extremely sophisticated, and the gap between what a platform promises in a demo and what it delivers in practice can be significant. Many marketing teams have expensive, underused tools sitting in their stack as evidence of selections that were driven by vendor hype rather than genuine business requirements.
At a high level, any robust marketing technology selection process should address:
• Starting with your marketing strategy, not the technology - the platforms you need depend entirely on how you go to market, who your buyers are, and what your marketing team is trying to achieve. Selecting technology before clarifying strategy is one of the most common and costly mistakes in MarTech
• Auditing your existing MarTech stack before adding new tools - most marketing teams already have platforms that are underused or duplicating functionality. Before selecting anything new, understand what you already have and whether the problem is a capability gap or an adoption and configuration problem
• Evaluating integration with your CRM and data infrastructure - marketing technology only delivers its full value when it is properly connected to your CRM, your customer data, and your analytics stack. Integration capability should be a first-order evaluation criterion
• Assessing total cost of ownership including implementation and ongoing management - MarTech platforms are often priced attractively at entry level but scale quickly with database size, usage volume, and feature tier. Build a realistic three-year cost model before comparing platforms
• Involving marketing operations, not just marketing leadership, in the evaluation - the people who will configure and manage the platform daily are the best judges of whether it is fit for purpose. Technical capability and ease of administration should carry as much weight as strategic features
• Evaluating AI capabilities and roadmap - AI is transforming marketing technology faster than almost any other enterprise software category. The platform you select today needs a credible path to delivering AI-powered capability across content creation, audience intelligence, and campaign optimisation
• Checking vendor references in your sector and at your scale - a marketing automation platform that works brilliantly for a 50-person SaaS startup may be entirely wrong for a 5,000-person enterprise with complex data governance requirements
FINDING
Marketing Technology
If you are at the early stage of a MarTech project and are not yet sure which platforms or vendors to explore, our finding services help you bring structure and objectivity to that initial assessment.
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MarTech Innovation Series - looking for new ideas? Our Innovation Series brings vendors and thought-leaders to present new ideas and technologies.
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Stick or Switch Application Review - a great way to decide whether to continue with your existing MarTech, or move elsewhere.
MarTech Selection
Once you are ready to move into formal marketing vendor selection, Viewpoint Analysis offers three distinct services depending on where you are in the process and how quickly you need to move:
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Rapid RFI and Rapid RFP - Our super-quick approach to the old-fashioned technology selection process to go from a 'long list' to a shortlist of potential options.
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30-Day Selection - need to move even quicker? Our fastest technology selection process is completed in less than a calendar month!
FREE MarTech Longlist Builder
NEW - Not sure which customer experience technology vendors should be on your initial longlist? Our free Longlist Builder generates a tailored list of relevant MarTech vendors based on your specific experience objectives, technology category, organisation size, and budget. Answer a few questions and we produce a comprehensive report you can use as the starting point for your market assessment.
Useful MarTech Selection
Advice
The following Viewpoint Analysis resources are designed to help Marketing, digital, and IT leaders run better technology selection processes:
Enterprise
Software
Selection
Playbook
Our Enterprise Software Selection Playbook 2026 is the most complete instructional guide to finding and selecting enterprise technology across any market or category. The structured approach to requirements definition, market assessment, RFI, RFP, and vendor evaluation applies directly to customer experience technology selections of all types and complexities.
Frequent Asked Questions
What technology areas do you cover with the Marketing Technology Matchmaker?
We cover the full marketing software and services marketplace. As a Technology Matchmaker, Viewpoint Analysis simply connects customers with a need, to those marketing software vendors or marketing service providers that can provide the solution to the need. Our job is to understand what the marketing team really needs, and then bring the right vendors to the table to be able to offer suitable solutions.
How can Viewpoint Analysis help us with our marketing technology procurement?
The Marketing Technology Matchmaker is designed to help marketing teams to find and/or select marketing software and marketing services. Our solutions can help the marketing team to find new innovative marketing systems and introduce marketing technology vendors that can help with particular issues. Our job is to understand the marketplace - so that when our customer needs those new technology ideas, we can quickly bring the right technology vendors to the table.
If our clients know what they need, we run marketing market assessments (our Technology Matchmaker Service) and marketing RFPs (through our Meet My Need service and our Rapid RFP service) to quickly find the right marketing technology to meet their needs.
Do you only work with certain marketing software vendors?
No, we are not tied to any marketing software vendor and do not receive any compensation for introducing our clients to them or bringing them into a marketing selection process. We only work on behalf of our clients. Our service is built to help marketing teams to find and select new marketing technology and therefore we will go to whichever vendor can offer the right service to our client. Furthermore, we only act as a marketing matchmaker - meaning that we bring the different vendor options, but ultimately it is the marketing team and marketing leadership that make the vendor selection.
How long does a marketing Vendor Selection Process take to complete?
We strongly believe that a marketing software selection process should be quick and easy - both for the marketing team and also for the marketing software vendor and systems integrator (if applicable). There is a business requirement that is driving the selection process, and we want to make sure that our clients get on to implementing the marketing software or services rather than spending weeks and months on the IT selection. Our Project Matchmaker and Rapid RFP are both designed to quickly find and then select the right marketing vendor for the customer - we expect the process to be completed in a few weeks (an average of 6 to 7 if we go from a standing start).
Can you run a marketing RFP process?
Yes we can run a marketing RFP but our marketing vendor selection process is not an old-school marketing RFP process, it is super-quick and super easy to run. We want the process to be simple for the marketing team and simple for the marketing technology vendors. We want to drive a marketing software selection decision in the quickest possible time - whilst getting the right solution. We also want to build a partnership between the marketing IT vendor and the marketing team. So yes, our Rapid RFP and Marketing Vendor Selection might be what you need to make your marketing vendor selection.