At Bowery Capital a major area of focus for us is around the CMO. We talk to about 5-10 CMOs a week, mostly at medium to large companies to both understand the market to invest more wisely but also to help our portfolio companies access more customers. Since 2010 when we were at AOL Ventures we began to seen a flurry of activity around CMO spend from a new company formation standpoint. This has started to generate M&A and IPO events and we believe that 2014 and beyond will be great years for those that play in this space.
Given the amount of questions we constantly get from our portfolio about the state of the state, we thought it would make sense to provide our point of view and research. For my first post, it is important to understand “what are the categories that the CMO is buying?”
We break this down into 6 major categories**:
Analytics – Any tool that combines the power of actionable analytics and audience segmentation with value reporting and analysis.
Content Management (CMS) – This segment usually enables marketers to create, manage and optimize customized online customer experiences.
Social – Encompasses any tool that helps CMOs measure and manage marketing across social media sites, platforms, apps, etc.
Marketing Automation + SEM – Probably the most talked about segment, this combines portfolio and rules based ad management with intelligence campaign forecasting and targeted ad delivery.
E-Commerce – Any platform that encompasses and incorporates commerce for all channels including web, mobile and social.
Campaign Management / Email Marketing – Platforms that deliver sophisticated campaigns via email to reach potential customers and grow existing customer relationships.
There are obviously more categories and sub-categories that one could create but this is how we generally see it at Bowery Capital and many of the CMOs we speak with feel this accurately describes the market from a spend standpoint. When you start to think about your company selling into the CMO, start to think about these buckets. For Part II, I will talk about the major players in the categories to set a competitive landscape.
**Kudos to our friends at Evercore for originally coming up with these categories
