Or imagine you’re red-hot virtual events startup Hopin, with a $2.1 billion valuation, and you want to upgrade your live video streaming tech by buying StreamYard. A $250 million price is no object even though you bought social networking app Topia a few weeks ago. Sure it’s a bubble, but wheeee!
Strong stock prices and a weak economy make it easier for big companies to buy tech than build it. For example, say you’re Hootsuite (not public, but highly valued) and you’d like to expand into customer support. Why build an agent messaging platform when you can buy Sparkcentral? In fact, they just did.
Any shred of normalcy is worth grabbing right now. So here are some characteristically interesting but mainstream predictions from Gartner about marketing priorities for 2021. Unified customer experience, anyone?
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.