Market Overview

The market size of domestic digital marketing tools for 2023 has been estimated at 301,990 million yen (based on the sales at businesses) and is projected to reach 344,250 million yen in 2024.

As deployment of customer relationship management (CRM) or sales force automation (SFA) tools and marketing automation (MA) solutions is on the rise not only in major companies but also in SMEs, depth of user companies has increased. Although the cases of major companies investing immensely like in the past are likely to decrease, untapped segment of customers is expected to expand the market hereafter. Customer data platform is in the growth period to seemingly expand furthermore.
Growing introduction of various digital marketing tools such as CRM, SFA, and MA software has caused data accumulation in variety at user companies. With AI applications promoted, increasing importance in in-house data for AI to learn has been advantageous for the market.

Noteworthy Topics

By Embedding into Existing Work Processes, Generative AI Applications Expanding

In digital marketing, companies create a vast volume of owned media contents such as blog, social media pages, email newsletters, etc. As generative AI goes well with digital marketing and is good at creating contents, it helps the work at user companies. It is reflected by contents generation including creating email sentences that generative AI implemented in digital marketing tools is most used for.

While generative AI can often be the topic of conversations, it has not been utilized enough in business. Despite its many user companies, ChatGPT, too, is dependent on the ideas by the users' side on how to specifically use it, though it creates excellent contents. Thus, generative AI has a challenge of not letting users to easily imagine the usage in business.
Digital marketing tool vendors, therefore, have strived first to remove reluctance of utilizing generative AI by combining generative AI functions into existing workflows. For sentence creation, for example, pre-set prompt templates facilitate using of prompts (instructions and questions for users to input). With a few clicks, users can generate meeting minutes or can use minute summaries. Therefore, users do not need to obtain new skills for generative AI.
This way, users feel that generative AI is a part of increasing work efficiency or improving sales performance, rather than a tool to fully use. This makes the results easy to understand and easier for users to overcome the initial usage hurdle.

Future Outlook

The market of digital marketing tools is projected to expand furthermore.
In the short term, it has a great advantage of a wider customer base, as digital marketing tools are accepted at SMEs unlike in the past when user companies have been mainly only large companies. This trend encourages local companies to promote digitization.
From the vendors’ side, it means that there still are a vast number of untapped user companies. Although unit price per company for deployment at SMEs is smaller than at major companies, the environment to facilitate many successful implementations is prepared with a plenty of use cases at vendors to refer to. It is important for vendors to accumulate many fruitful cases from early on by supporting the customers not only for the usage of tools but also throughout the entire digital marketing project.

What becomes important in the mid-to-long term perspective is utilization of generative AI and data. Every industry has started using generative AI since 2023. Digital marketing tools are one of markets that aggressive use it, with many approaches tried and addressed including contents generation.
Tech-sensitive user companies have commenced their original demonstrations. Though the number of such cases is still low, they have brought about some effective results, with some of which introduced as successful case studies by the vendors, leading more user companies to follow suit. Nevertheless, users are not likely to surge, due to high technological hurdles, but both the vendors and user companies are interested more in utilizing generative AI and data. These two elements are expected to continue stimulating the digital marketing tools market.

Research Outline