How to Choose a PR agency for MarTech

By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026

In 2011 one slide held the whole marketing software trade, 150 logos, room to spare. A decade later the same slide became a poster nobody could read without zooming. Growth did that, and growth broke the old pitch. This guide judges agencies on whether they can make one vendor legible inside a field of thousands. In MarTech, being good is common. Being remembered for one clear job is rare.

15,384: marketing technology solutions counted in the 2025 landscape (chiefmartec and MartechTribe, 2025) 7.7 percent: average marketing budget as a share of company revenue in 2024 (Gartner, 2024) 33 percent: share of martech stack capability that organisations reported using in 2023 (Gartner, 2023)

I Limes

In MarTech the boundary between categories matters more than the quality of any single product

A limit drawn well is a story told well. Buyers do not shop for software in the abstract. They shop inside a budget line, a shortlist, and a category name their finance team already recognises. If your product sits across three categories and leads in none, an agency has to solve a positioning problem before it can solve a publicity problem.

The scale makes that boundary work urgent. The landscape reached 14,106 products in 2024, a net addition of 3,068 in one year and growth of 27.8 percent (chiefmartec, 2024). A press release that says you do personalisation, analytics, and engagement says what thousands of neighbours say, in the same week, to the same editors.

A sharp agency will push you to name the job you win, the job you lose on purpose, and the rival you are actually displacing in deals. That discomfort in the first workshop is a good sign. Comfort at that stage usually means the agency plans to sell effort rather than distinction. The background reading in the industry resources library shows how often that early choice decides the later result.

In a crowded field, a category is a promise about what you will refuse to do.

II Motus

Analysts and peer reviews move MarTech buyers while campaigns are still being planned

The motion starts long before a sales call, in documents most vendors never see. G2 found that public product review websites were the most consulted information source for buyers planning a purchase, cited by 31 percent, up from 23 percent in 2023 (G2, 2024). The same research reported that buyers rated independent review sites as more valuable than analyst firms at several stages of the journey (G2, 2024). That does not make analysts secondary. It makes the system two sided: analysts define the category, peers validate the choice inside it.

Gartner states plainly that client status is not a factor in determining inclusion or positioning in its research, and that analysts cover vendors based on end user requirements (Gartner, Office of the Ombuds). An agency that hints it can buy a better position is telling you it does not understand the system, or hopes you do not. What a good agency can do is prepare a briefing that survives hard questions, supply customers who can speak without a script, and keep a steady cadence of evidence between major reports.

A quadrant does not close a deal. It earns you the right to be doubted in person rather than dismissed on paper.

III Specimen

A category creation win looks like a new budget line, not a louder launch week

Take the pattern visible across the customer data platform years as the specimen. Vendors that reshaped that market did not win by claiming a better dashboard. They won by naming a job that had been scattered across IT tickets, warehouse queries, and campaign tools, then showing a buyer a cost for leaving the job scattered. Analyst briefings, customer stories, and trade coverage all repeated the same job language until procurement started using it in requests for proposals.

That repetition is the tell to look for in an agency past work. Ask for one client where the language of the market changed, and ask to see the before and after wording. If the agency only shows coverage volume, it ran a launch. If it can show a phrase that buyers, analysts, and even rivals adopted, it built a category asset.

The 2025 landscape reporting underlines why this prize matters. The count rose to 15,384 solutions, up 9 percent on the year, even as 1,211 products were removed (MarTech, 2025). New names keep arriving. A named problem with a named owner outlasts a feature announcement by years.

Name the problem so precisely that a buyer feels it before they see your logo.

IV Pretium

Weak differentiation is paid for in discounting, churn, and unused shelfware

The bill for vague positioning arrives in the sales ledger, not the press book. Gartner reported that organisations used only 33 percent of their martech stack capability in 2023, down from 42 percent in 2022 and 58 percent in 2020 (Gartner, 2023). That collapse in use is the context every CMO brings to a new purchase. A vendor that sounds interchangeable will be bought cautiously, deployed partially, and cut early when budgets tighten.

Budgets have tightened in plain numbers. Average marketing budgets fell to 7.7 percent of company revenue in 2024, down from 9.1 percent in 2023, in a survey of 395 CMOs and marketing leaders (Gartner, 2024). In that survey, 64 percent of CMOs said they lacked the budget to execute their 2024 strategy (Gartner, 2024). Your buyer is not being difficult. Your buyer is rationing.

An agency that understands this cost will build proof of use, not just proof of purchase: adoption stories, time to value, and customers who expanded after a narrow start. An agency that does not will keep proposing awareness work while your pipeline leaks at evaluation.

Unused software is the loudest negative review in this market.

V Cardo

Time to value is the hinge on which MarTech credibility now swings

Features impress in a demo. Value proven quickly decides the renewal. G2 reported that 57 percent of global B2B buyers expected return on investment within three months of a software purchase, based on a survey of more than 1,900 buyers (G2, 2024). Hold that expectation against the utilisation figure in the section above. Buyers demand fast value from tools in a market where most capability goes unused. The gap between those two facts is where PR either helps or exposes you.

Test an agency on that gap. Ask how it would handle a customer who bought six modules and uses one. Strong agencies treat that as a narrative and product education problem, building enablement stories and honest scope guidance. Weak agencies treat it as a reason to launch the seventh module louder.

The hinge also changes which spokespeople matter. Implementation leads, marketing operations practitioners, and customers who can show a workflow in production carry more weight than a visionary keynote alone. Brief your agency to collect that operational proof from day one, with consent and numbers you are allowed to publish. The service structure for doing that work in sequence is described in the public relations services page.

A promise with a date beats a vision with a decade.

VI Tribus

MarTech buyers split into tribes that trust different evidence

Segment by the job the buyer owns, because titles hide the real divide. The growth leader wants pipeline and speed, and reads peer proof plus founder stories. The marketing operations leader wants data integrity and low maintenance, and reads documentation, integration depth, and failure postmortems. The CMO wants board level cover, and reads analyst positions, recognised customer brands, and risk signals. One campaign speaking to all three in the same tone satisfies none of them fully.

Review behaviour proves the peer tribe is growing. G2 EMEA reporting found professional colleagues and professional networks ranked as the most influential source in the purchasing process for EMEA buyers, ahead of salespeople and vendor supplied content (G2, 2024). That finding should change your agency brief. Customer voices are not garnish for a press release. They are the main channel for a large part of your market.

Ask finalists to map one story three ways, for the three tribes above, without inventing new claims. You will learn more from that exercise than from any credentials deck. For a useful contrast in audience logic, read the sibling guide on choosing a PR agency for developer tools, where the user and the buyer split in a different way again.

One fact, told three ways, is strategy. One slogan, shouted three ways, is noise.

VII Fenestra

Consolidation opens a short window for credible challengers to take enterprise accounts

Windows in this market open when incumbents merge, retire products, or force migrations. The 2025 reporting found real churn beneath the growth: of the products removed, a large share were older tools, and CMSWire summarised that over 1,200 tools disappeared in a year, many of them pre AI products that could not keep pace (CMSWire, 2025). Separate reporting on the same report noted that 84 percent of removed products were shut down entirely rather than acquired (State of Martech, 2025). Every disappearance strands customers who must move, explain the move internally, and choose a replacement under time pressure.

That is a PR moment with a deadline. The agency you want has a migration narrative ready before the news breaks: comparison honesty, data portability proof, and references from customers who already switched. The agency you do not want needs six weeks to draft a thought leadership piece about change.

AI claims make the window narrower and riskier. CMSWire reported that 77 percent of new tools in the 2025 landscape were AI native (CMSWire, 2025). When nearly every entrant claims intelligence, a challenger that specifies what its system does not automate gains an odd advantage: it sounds like the adult in the room.

When a rival exits, silence is a decision, and usually the wrong one.

VIII Paritas

Evidence parity lets a mid sized vendor stand beside a platform giant in evaluation

You cannot outspend a platform. You can out specify it for one workflow. Enterprise buyers build shortlists from analysts, review sites, and peer calls, then defend the list internally. A mid sized vendor with ten detailed, current, and consistent proof points can survive that defence as well as a giant with a famous name and generic claims. Parity is not about matching the giant everywhere. It is about matching it completely on the criteria for the one use case in play.

Consistency is the hard part. Your G2 profile, your analyst briefing, your customer story, and your trade interview must describe the same customer, the same deployment, and the same result, within the limits of what each customer approved. Agencies earn their keep by policing that consistency across quarters, because drift reads as invention to a careful buyer.

There is also a discipline in what not to claim. Gartner noted in its generative AI survey release that 63 percent of marketing leaders planned to invest in generative AI within twenty four months (Gartner, 2023). Riding that wave with a thin feature invites the AI washing label, which sticks to a brand longer than any single campaign. Say what shipped, name the customer using it, and date the claim.

Specificity is the small vendor equaliser that giants struggle to copy quickly.

IX Praescriptum

Choose the agency by the decision it helps your buyer defend internally

The prescription is to buy internal defensibility, not external noise. Use the decision table below in your final meeting, with sales leadership in the room. The right choice depends on where deals currently die: before shortlist, during evaluation, or at the internal business case. Hire against that stage first.

Close with three practical checks. First, ask who will attend your analyst briefings and customer calls in month six, by name, and put the answer in the contract. Second, agree which claims the agency may never make on your behalf, especially on AI capability and customer results, and write that list down. Third, set a quarterly consistency audit across reviews, briefings, and coverage. Background on the team approach behind this guide is on the about the industries team page.

Your buyer has to defend you in a room you will never enter. Hire the agency that writes for that room.

Frequently asked questions

1. Do we need analyst relations if most of our deals come from inbound? Yes, once deal size grows, because inbound interest gets checked against analyst and peer sources before sign off. Analyst work does not replace inbound. It removes the objection that a larger rival is the safer documented choice.

2. How many review profiles should we actively manage? Start with the one or two profiles your buyers actually consult in your segment, and keep them current, detailed, and consistent. Ten stale profiles with thin reviews signal neglect, while one strong profile with recent, specific customer detail supports the sales conversation.

3. Is category creation realistic for a company of our size? It is realistic only when narrowed to a job, a buyer, and a measurable cost of the old way. Broad category claims from a small vendor read as ambition without evidence, so scope the claim until customers and analysts can repeat it credibly.

4. What should we do about AI messaging if our AI features are modest? Describe exactly what shipped, who uses it, and what it saves, with dates. Modest and provable beats grand and vague in a market where buyers have heard every version of the AI pitch and have started discounting it on sight.

5. How long does an analyst cycle take to affect pipeline? Plan on quarters, not weeks, because briefing, validation, and report publication run on the analyst calendar. The early returns are better briefing feedback and sharper positioning, with shortlist effects following once your evidence base is consistent.

6. Should our agency also run our customer review programme? It can coordinate the programme, but customers must speak in their own words and approvals must be explicit. Scripted reviews that sound identical across profiles undermine the very trust the programme exists to build.

7. What is the most common MarTech PR budget error? Paying for a rebrand launch while the review profile, analyst briefing, and customer proof are a year out of date. Buyers check those assets during evaluation, so funding the launch before fixing them spends money to send people to evidence that hurts you.

How this guide was built

This guide is based on the published landscape counts, spend surveys, and buyer research listed below, checked in October 2026. Its limits should be stated plainly. Landscape counts measure products that exist, not revenue or quality, survey samples skew toward larger companies in several sources, and buyer research from a review platform reflects the buyers who use such platforms. Use the figures to frame decisions, not to promise an outcome in your segment.

Partnering on a MarTech story

Frontier Industries helps marketing technology vendors sharpen category position, prepare analyst and review evidence that stays consistent, and turn real deployments into stories a buyer can defend internally when budgets are tight.

Begin your industry campaign and speak to the team on 401-219-4207.

Sources

1. https://chiefmartec.com/2024/05/2024-marketing-technology-landscape-supergraphic-14106-martech-products-27-8-growth-yoy/?_hsenc=p2ANqtz--_Dz0Fc8a_NkEqFhWYZQVzk9zkibd67m6AIsUB9y4C3YmIJZ6kJ4_0GCIedOVJXb-0sYFS 2. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-13-gartner-cmo-survey-reveals-marketing-budgets-have-dropped-to-seven-point-seven-percent-of-overall-company-revenue-in-2024 3. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-08-23-gartner-survey-finds-63-percent-of-marketing-leaders-plan-to-invest-in-generative-ai-in-the-next-24-months 4. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240612200283/en/G2-Report-AI-Fuels-Software-Spending-But-Buyers-Expect-Fast-ROI 5. https://research.g2.com/hubfs/2024-buyer-behavior-report.pdf?+Preferences+settings=undefined 6. https://martech.org/the-number-of-martech-tools-is-now-15384/ 7. https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/the-martech-supergraphic-has-grown-up-15000-plus/ 8. https://martech.org/marketers-are-only-using-one-third-of-their-stacks-capability/ 9. https://chiefmartec.com/research/ 10. https://www.gartner.com/en/about/ombuds/news/gartner-client-status-is-irrelevant-to-research-positioning