The role of the marketer is drastically changing as technology becomes a critical part for how practitioners do their job. The channels by which customers interact with brands are exploding, as is the underlying connective tissue of analytics, content, acquisition and more. Hundreds of technologies enable marketers to identify and target customers, while personalizing the entire experience. However, with more tools comes greater uncertainty about which to invest in and implement.

Marketers are now required to understand and build powerful best of breed technology stacks, and formulate the strategy to integrate these tools with key business objectives. This is a burdensome and confusing task, which is why we created the Growthverse.

What is the Growthverse?

Growthverse is an interactive visualization of the marketing technology universe (www.growthverse.com). This is a living taxonomy of the marketing technology ecosystem, built from more than 10 years of both investing and operating experience, in tandem with insights from more than 100 CMOs. While Growthverse is comprehensive, it’s only a starting point — we don’t claim to have all the answers, so we encourage your feedback and hope this destination becomes more and more reflective of the real-time views of the industry.

The visualization is one of the first tools to help all marketers — startup-through-Fortune 50 — easily find, learn about and implement the right tools and services for their marketing team.

Snapshot: Accel and Marketing Technology

After years of investing across this ecosystem, from early players like Offermatica (now Adobe Test and Target) and Responsys (acquired by Oracle) to new emerging entrants such as Qualtrics, Hootsuite, Usertesting and Segment.io, we are continuously curious and passionate about supporting the leading entrepreneurs and technologies in this category.

Emerging Themes of Interest

As the industry evolves, we’re particularly focused on the new wave of vendors that help manage and offer insights about the marketing stack. Specifically:

Marketing Collaboration Workflow:

There is the opportunity to build a platform that better organizes marketing teams. This solution will help marketers more effectively collaborate while striking the proper balance between the science and art of marketing.

Next Generation Analytics:

The explosion of new marketing channels, paired with traditional marketing responsibilities, requires a next-generation analytics platform. Marketers can benefit from a central console to manage multi-channel marketing attribution, next-level metrics beyond click behavior (such as engagement) and visualized insights to make data easily digestible and exciting.

Customer Data Platforms:

Marketers require a 360-degree customer view in order to operate in a true customer centric manner. We envision there being a “brain” that learns and orchestrates all appropriate marketing actions across the entire landscape driven by a centralized and comprehensive customer database. This will be “the hub” that powers most marketing actions.

If you are building software in any of the above areas, we would love to speak with you.

Final Thoughts

Many more companies, if not entire categories, will be added over time to Growthverse. If you have a company that should be added to this list simply submit it through the online form. We are excited to have you part of the Growthverse experience!