Marketing Technology or Martech has become quite a familiar term today in the market. It is also a revolutionary term that is defining the future of marketing. Marketing technology, or Martech, has also played a key role in making the life of marketers much easier.
You might be thinking, why are we talking about marketing technology or martech like it is something new. So, in this article, we will get back to some basics, as the strong base leads to the construction of a world-class monument. Let’s begin with the basics,
What is Marketing Technology or Martech?
Marketing Technology, popularly known as Martech is the term used in reference to the technologies, tools, and software that are utilized to assist marketing teams in achieving marketing goals and objectives. The technology is majorly utilized in the sphere of digital marketing but is also used in optimizing marketing efforts across various marketing channels.
MarTech or marketing technology helps marketers in easily streamlining and scaling marketing activities. When a marketing team uses a group of marketing technologies, then this group of marketing technologies is known as the marketing technology stack or Martech stack.
Martech v/s Adtech
If you keep scratching your head trying to understand the difference between martech and adtech, we don’t blame you, because they really do seem pretty similar. And, in fairness, adtech is more or less a subset of martech or marketing technology. Think of it in this way. You are baking a cake so here in this process, martech would be the ingredients and recipe you utilized to make the cake. Adtech would be the foil or plates you serve it on. Still not clear? Bear with us, we will explain it to you!
The basic difference between these programs is similar to the difference between marketing and advertising sectors. While martech or marketing technology refers to technology that helps to create, communicate, and deliver offerings, adtech is strictly utilized to influence buyer behavior by promoting offerings. For example, platforms like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software or marketing automation are martech platforms, while social ad platforms are adtech.
How Martech or Marketing Technology Helps Marketers?
In 2012, Gartner predicted that by 2017 CMOs would spend more on marketing technology than CIOs. While this claim was initially very estranged, the gap in spending between the parties has narrowed significantly over the years. This is because technology is playing an enhancing role in marketing, particularly in assisting with efforts like attribution and allocating marketing spend.
The reason behind a lot of businesses are investing in marketing technology or Martech is simply down to competition.
As the businesses get the results of adopting MarTech solutions, other businesses mainly SMEs fear being left behind and see investment as an opportunity.
Efficient use of Data
The prevalence of big data in businesses, big as well as small, has brought with it a number of opportunities as well as challenges. As far as opportunities are concerned, more data means more information about customers, more information about the customer means better personalization and customer targeting.
Personalized Approach
Efficient use of data provides businesses the ability to offer a more personalized approach than they were able to in the past.
The more information you have about your target audience, the better you will be able to target your campaigns at specific, segmented groups across all your platforms. The better you’re able to understand your customers, the more effective they will be and the more leads you will be able to convert.
United Marketing and operations
Marketing Technology or Martech accelerates the collaboration between marketing and operation departments. When this happens, the promises made by the sales and marketing team and executing team work together with the same data.
With clear objectives and real-time data to help make more accurate decisions, teams can determine what efforts are working and where opportunities lie.
Top Software’s that are Comprised of Marketing Technology or Martech
Here we have listed some of the martech platforms that are a part of martech stacks of various businesses.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRMs are useful for aligning marketing and sales together and are commonly utilized by B2B businesses.
A CRM enables marketers and sales executives to have access to all the customer data they require to manage relationships and help prospects down the funnel.
Statistic to remember: Only 12% of businesses used cloud-based CRM in 2008; by 2020 this number increased to 87%.
Email Marketing Platform
Despite the popularity of other digital marketing areas, email marketing still remains a crucial and central aspect of marketing strategies. Data analysis combined with email automation makes a killer combo in the marketing environment today, empowering businesses to automatically send out highly-targeted campaigns that improve conversion and retention rates.
Statistic to Remember: 73% of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come through email.
Content Marketing System (CMS)
A CMS is what businesses utilize to manage their website pages, whether it’s a simple blog or a business site. CMSs are designed with ease-of-use in mind, meaning they need virtually no knowledge of HTML and can be utilized effectively by marketers who can’t code.
As content marketing is becoming a core part of the marketing strategies of many businesses, investing in a CMS is crucial to operating and managing those strategies as far as your content output goes.
Statistic to Remember: As per Marketing professionals and the CMI, 63% of businesses don’t have a documented content strategy.
Common Marketing Technology Challenges
Implementing, maintaining, and optimizing your marketing technology of the company is not a simple and streamlined process. Rather, businesses will have to prepare to overcome some challenges before they completely realize and leverage the benefits of marketing technology.
Choosing the Right MarTech Platform
Selecting the right platform is difficult since choosing a platform is more than just finding the right technology, it extends into finding the right partner. Integrating a new system is often a challenge, and the process of working with internal and external stakeholders to roll out technology can give unexpected hiccoughs.
Changing Company Culture
For many businesses, changing the way in which marketing functions can be a big challenge. Working with colleagues to get them trained on new platforms and workflows provides a hindrance to everyday activities.
Processing Too Much Data
There is a lot of data in today’s marketing environment. Calculating through data to determine what is and isn’t crucial could be a sizable challenge for your organization. Choosing the right vendor and working together with data scientists to help them in analyzing the huge amounts of data can help steer your marketing department in the right direction.
Businesses also often lack access to quality data that is clean and consistent across all the channels of marketing. And there can be issues trying to integrate data within a centralized platform to build unified views of customers. Without a strong data acquisition and integration strategy, it will be almost impossible to derive valuable insights from the data and achieve the pinnacle of personalization marketing at scale.
Top 5 Tips to be a Successful Marketing Technologist
As a marketing technologist, you carry a lot of responsibility on your shoulder. These responsibilities become light when you start spending more and more time with marketing technology. Here are some tips that will surely help you in becoming a successful marketing technologist.
–Explore new marketing possibilities with the help of martech tools.
–Be experimental while preparing your marketing strategy.
–Know your customers as well as your competitors.
–Remember creativity without conversion is of no use.
–Leverage data while making your moves.
We hope this article gives you some elementary insights into what marketing technology is, and what it takes to become a MarTech professional. It also clears important basics related to marketing technology, which has become more important in today’s world where martech is leading the marketing arena.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aashish Yadav
Content Writer, Martech Cube
Aashish is currently a Content writer at Martech Cube. He is an enthusiastic and avid writer. His key region of interests include covering different aspects of technology and mixing them up with layman ideologies to pan out an interesting take. His main area of interests range from medical journals to marketing arena.