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What’s been happening in the MarTech sector over the last 3 months?
Our Buyer Intelligence platform has been continuously tracking first-party buyer signals across our database, bringing you timely insights in the form of our latest marketing technology intent report.
Our mission? To help tech vendors keep their demand generation strategies tightly aligned to real market demand.
Published quarterly as part of our category-specific intent reports, our latest blog takes a deeper dive into the shifts most likely to impact your MarTech campaigns — and how you can action these insights to drive success.
Ready to level up your strategy? Let's go...
This quarter vs last quarter: what's changed?
MarTech buyer behaviour didn’t just evolve over the past quarter; it recalibrated.
Comparing intent signals across Q3 and Q4 2025 reveals a clear shift that shapes how MarTech teams should approach Q1 2026. In Q3, buyers were navigating change and adapting to platform updates, privacy pressures and emerging capabilities. By Q4, the focus had tightened. Buyers became less interested in what’s new and more focused on what delivers measurable value.
Here are the 4 key takeaways:
1. ROI measurement is now a shared priority across the buying committee
What was previously concentrated among senior budget holders now spans influencers, mid-level decision makers and leadership alike.
2. Evaluation has moved from tools to platforms
Buyers are shifting away from point solutions toward integrated platforms, with growing emphasis on interoperability and ecosystem fit.
3. Decision-making now extends beyond purchase
Q4 research shows stronger interest in long-term ROI, implementation strategy and post-purchase value, not just selection and pricing.
4. AI is expected, not experimental
AI-powered automation has moved from a surging topic to a baseline capability, with buyers evaluating how it improves efficiency and outcomes.
Together, these shifts point to a more commercially grounded MarTech buyer focused on accountability, integration and long-term impact.
Market snapshot
Here's what our latest MarTech intent report reveals about the current market:
- Interest is strongest in the ecommerce, finance and healthcare industries.
- Traction is highest among enterprises with 1,000–5,000+ employees.
- Marketing, sales and product management functions show the greatest engagement with MarTech topics.
From insight to impact, here's how to apply our insight in your campaigns:
Targeting and segmentation action points:
1. Segment enterprise organisations in surging industries and geos into priority tiers.
2. Within these tiers, filter intent signals among trending job functions to inform topic clusters.
Why?
Segmenting your market into priority tiers helps to focus go-to-market teams on the accounts most likely to convert. Further segmentation techniques such as topic clusters opens up opportunities to tightly align content to specific audience segments. The result? Relevancy at scale.
Research patterns at account level
5 hot topics dominating research in the MarTech space (over the last 3 months), are:
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Data analytics – Rising interest reflects a stronger focus on performance measurement and proving ongoing value from SaaS investments.
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Customer relationship management – CRM research signals pressure to improve retention, lifecycle visibility, and cross‑team alignment.
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Business intelligence – Increased demand points to a need for clearer decision‑making, reporting, and executive visibility.
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Cloud security – Security is now a baseline expectation, with buyers seeking clear proof rather than generic reassurance.
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Collaboration tools – Growth here reflects sustained demand for productivity and alignment across distributed teams.
The topic showing the greatest decline in popularity is:
- Account-based marketing with a 10% MoM decrease
What do these insights mean for your content strategy?
To keep your strategy aligned to market demand, we recommend:
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Anchor op of funnel content in practical content marketing and SEO guidance, paired with AI automation explainers that show how efficiency and scale are achieved.
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Build MOFU assets around optimisation and orchestration across owned channels, with clear examples of how email, content and automation work together.
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Create BOFU tools that help buyers compare and select attribution models, quantify impact, and link marketing activity directly to revenue outcomes using calculators and frameworks.
Pro tip: Use AI/NLP tools (topic modelling, entity extraction, semantic clustering) to audit your content library against competitor coverage. Flag underserved subtopics and build differentiated assets where demand is growing fastest.
Buyer group analysis
For marketing technology buyers, data privacy, integration complexity and long-term value now dominate decision-making.
What does this mean for your persona development?
Tailoring content to buyer role nuances is critical for engagement and conversion. Here's how you can translate these insights into accurate personas.
Persona A: Influencers and researchers (typically Marketing Executives or digital specialists)
- Concerns: data privacy concerns, budget constraints and customer retention. Their focus is on understanding risk, value and feasibility before solutions progress further into evaluation.
- Content preferences: they want educational blogs, best‑practice guides, industry benchmarks and early‑stage explainers that help them assess credibility, build internal narratives and support business cases upstream.
Persona B: Mid‑level decision makers (such as Marketing Managers and Sales Managers)
- Concerns: changing algorithms, data privacy concerns, and customer retention. They're responsible for making tools work day‑to‑day and balancing performance demands with operational complexity.
- Content preferences: they want to see practical implementation content, including platform comparisons, optimisation guides, use cases and walkthroughs that show how tools integrate and perform across channels.
Persona C: Senior budget holders (such as CMOs, VPs of Marketing, Heads of Digital)
- Concerns: data privacy concerns, measurement challenges and integration issues. Their priority is ensuring investment decisions reduce risk, deliver measurable outcomes and can be supported by the organisation long‑term.
- Content preferences: they need concise, decision‑ready assets such as ROI models, measurement frameworks, integration roadmaps and executive summaries that support confident investment and governance decisions.
Action point: Create a persona matrix aligned to job functions. Map their pain points against the funnel stages they are most likely to participate in. For example, Marketing Executives may engage early with trend reports, while CMOs and will respond to BOFU tools such as ROI calculators.
Recommended reading: How to map content to the new buyer journey
3 MarTech demand gen plays:
Our AI Buyer Intelligence platform is able to interrogate research patterns by buyer stage. Here's how to action these insights into a full-funnel demand gen strategy aligned to real buyer behaviour:
Tip: Keep the exact keyword phrases in page titles, H2s, alt text, and internal links so performance teams can tie content to intent spikes and prioritise syndication/remarketing accordingly.
Ready to activate these insights?
Why not try our demand gen planning framework? It’s a collection of templates and planning aids, including:
- Buyer group intent mapping
- Multichannel campaign blueprint
- Funnel‑aligned strategy shortcuts
Everything you need to turn category intent insights into campaigns that convert.
