CabinetM Co-Founder Sheryl Schultz, alongside other industry leaders, shares crucial content marketing forecasts for 2016.

The digital marketing job title is giving way to more specialized titles and functions such as email marketer, customer acquisition specialist, marketing data analyst and social media marketer. While specialization is a necessity and brings with it many benefits, specialization also creates a number of challenges for both organizations and marketers.

To help marketers deliver ROI in the form of revenue, reduced cost of acquisition, and/or customer lifetime value, the industry has created an abundance of tools that can be used to find, target, influence, and track customer activity and engagement.

At the 2016 MarTech Conference, Scott Brinker, head of the conference, unleashed the highly anticipated 2016 Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic. With 3,874 logos featured, there’s only one appropriate word to describe Brinker’s updated visualization of the martech space: overwhelming.  In Brinker’s estimation, the number of vendors represented in the supergraphic is up 87 percent from last year.

Digital Clarity Group’s marketing automation round-up condenses and consolidates some of the industry’s most topical news, trends, and happenings from the past couple of months.  This edition’s round-up covers the forecasted growth in adoption of automation solutions for marketers, and the new Demandbase and Integrate Inc. partnership.

As seen through the lens of a “supergraphic” created and popularized by Scott Brinker on his blog ChiefMartec.com, which covers marketing as a technology-powered discipline, today’s marketing technology landscape of vendors, platforms and solutions is depicted as a chaotic rainbow of cleverly designed, colorful corporate logos. 

Contributor Nancy White recaps a lively presentation by marketing technologist Travis Wright, who lays out the tools you'll need to build a successful martech stack.

This year Scott Brinker restructured the entire way the landscape is organized. The 2014 and 2015 editions were laid out with a kind of “stack” metaphor — infrastructure and platform systems at the bottom, experience and operations applications on top, representing his belief that marketing technology would logically coalesce around a single platform in any given organization.

Anita Brearton and Sheryl Schultz have advice for other post-50 female entrepreneurs: Don’t give up, no matter how many ridiculous, insulting things are said to you by the mostly male venture capitalists you will inevitably encounter.

The two businesswomen, both entrepreneurs and both in their late 50s, should know. For the past year, as they looked for investors for their latest venture, Brearton and Schultz heard all kinds of unhelpful suggestions.