What is Marketing Technology and How Does MarTech Help Marketers?

The fast expansion of digital technologies has led to changes in buying preferences, forcing marketing departments to adjust to new trends almost ‘on the fly.’ What worked perfectly yesterday may not work as well today, so it’s no wonder why new approaches and tools have started to replace the old ‘tried and true’ methods for market research, audience interviews and niche analysis.

While technologies penetrate deeper into the infrastructure of large companies — and, according to NASCOM, 52% of enterprises invested in digital marketing technologies this year — not all businesses (especially small- and medium-sized ones) keep up with the changes that take place. Martech adoption is especially crucial for small businesses to stay competitive, manage rapid changes, and optimize their operations alongside larger organizations.

In this post, we want to answer the question ‘What is marketing technology or Martech?,’ provide some tips on how to work with it, and explain the actual benefits that a company receives after Martech integration. Ultimately, effective Martech integration is key to achieving marketing success and driving business growth.

When it comes to a Martech definition, it’s important to be able to distinguish it from another very popular trend: Adtech. Let’s briefly go over the definition of each one and uncover what makes them different.

Martech, or marketing technology, refers to the software and tools that assist companies in achieving their marketing goals. In contrast, Adtech, or advertising technology, focuses specifically on the tools and platforms used to manage and deliver digital advertising campaigns.

The set of tools that a company uses to boost its marketing activities is called a Martech Stack. A Martech tech stack can be customized to integrate seamlessly with any existing technology environment, ensuring flexibility and ease of implementation. This adaptability allows businesses to enhance their marketing efforts regardless of their current systems.

So, what is Martech? It is basically a combination of the terms marketing technology, and this term emphasizes the different systems and tools that marketers use to get insights on their audiences, engage with customers, and build more effective marketing strategies.

Martech can work across a single marketing activity layer (such as data analysis), or a few at a time (customer segmentation, targeting, communications, etc). The set of tools that a company uses to boost its marketing activities is called a Martech Stack.

The type of technologies present in the Martech Stack will vary depending on type of business and niche. For example, B2B and B2C companies may use different channels to attract new customers. Thus, the marketing needs and Martech stacks for each of these businesses will differ.

In general cases, when talking about Martech stack, we refer to such solutions as CMSs, CRMs, website analytics, content intelligence, personalization software, etc. Modern Martech platforms can also process and unify unstructured data such as images, videos, PDFs, and social media posts, enabling real-time analytics and enhanced personalization.

The main goal of Martech is to help companies close the gap that formed due to the fast changes in customer behavioral patterns, rapid development of technologies, and inability of the business to quickly adapt to a new reality.

By relying on technologies, instead, marketers can automate repetitive and time consuming tasks, process data they gather more effectively, and increase in-team productivity. For Martech systems to deliver accurate insights and support effective decision making, it is essential to work with high quality data. These are the exact benefits that lay the foundation for Martech, so let’s get over them in a bit more detail here.

Data is the key to all marketing activities nowadays — according to Gartner, 76% of marketers base their decisions on the findings they get from the data analysis. As an asset, data needs to be accurately analyzed, refined, and visualized. Not all companies, however, understand how to use data. Martech tools can help companies gain valuable insight from their data, enabling more informed and effective marketing strategies.

Here, the use of the right Martech tools can help to embed data analysis into a company’s culture, remove bias out of the equation, and shift from guess-driven to data-driven decisions. As a result, businesses will be able to improve ad ROIs and build stronger relationships with their audience.

Customer communications are an area where lots of startups struggle the most. This happens for several reasons: limited resources, insufficient experience, and insufficient technology base. Prospective clients, on the other hand, have multiple options in terms of product selection, service choice, communication channels, etc. They will not wait for a company to put its customer service together, and will switch to the competition instead.

To prevent that from happening, businesses can integrate Martech solutions and start engaging with customers in those channels that suit them the most. Aside from automating responses to basic audience questions, marketing technologies allow for streamlined content creation activities, improved engagement and extended audience reach. By integrating content marketing strategies with Martech, companies can further enhance their online visibility and drive more targeted engagement.

What’s more, Martech gives marketers solutions needed for competition monitoring — to understand what communication strategy they should stick to, what trends to follow and topics to cover through their communication channels, etc.

The short answer to the question ‘How does martech help marketers?’ is:

Martech brings together everything that a company might need to build a comprehensive marketing strategy and establish a long-term presence on the market.

Depending on the size and type of a business, the Martech stack will vary. It may include SaaS platforms, different analytics tools, and link together various departments across the company (to ensure a smooth interaction at each individual level), or be comprised of a few social media and advertising tools — all will depend on the goals set to achieve.

To give you a better overview of the solutions you can choose for your stack, take a look at the following list where we have gathered the key types of Martech tools that companies benefit from today:

 – Marketing Attribution Software – allows marketers to identify and assess those channels, or campaign landing pages that contribute the most in terms of conversions and revenue generation. With the help of these tools, businesses are able to allocate budgets more wisely, and recognize potential performance issues at an early stage.

 – Content Management System (CMS) – enables users to create, modify, and manage web content. Aside from the basic editing functionality, CMSs may also include reporting features, role-based administration access, multilingual capabilities, analytics, and multichannel scalability. These systems are normally designed to be used by non-technical people, i.e. no programming knowledge is required by a user to start using and publish content via this tool.

 – Customer Experience Software  – allows for the collection of customer feedback across different channels. It collects and aggregates information from various social mediums (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) to provide businesses with important insights into their customer experience. With the help of Customer Experience Software, marketers can influence the churn rate, increase customer engagement and satisfaction rates.

 – Customer Relationship Management Software  – helps companies collect, organize, access, and track their customer data, all in one cohesive system. CMSs allow different departments within an organization (sales, marketing, customer support, etc) to stay updated regarding all the communication activities that take place for each and every customer. CRM systems also enable the sales team to monitor and evaluate their performance using integrated customer data.

 – Email Marketing Platforms – enable companies to design and distribute engaging promotional newsletters. These platforms allow marketers to segment their email campaigns and tailor messaging to each particular user group. The importance of email marketing can’t be overlooked, as it is able to provide the highest ROI among all other marketing channels — $38 for each $1 invested, according to Hostpapa.

 – Social Media Management Apps – make it possible for businesses to better control and analyze their social media accounts. With the help of such solutions, marketers automate social media posts and improve the company’s online presence. Social management tools normally include scheduling, reporting, and engagement functionality.

 – Web analytics tools – used by companies to view all the data ‘behind their websites’.’ Marketers utilize these solutions to understand how sites are viewed, how long users stay on a website, how many of them interact with product pages, abandon carts, etc., and then break down all this information into actionable reports. Web analytics tools also help track key marketing metrics and allow marketers to adapt their strategies as AI agents increasingly influence customer interactions.

Marketing technologies bring lots of benefits in terms of understanding customers and providing them with better services; however, there’re also some challenges that business owners need to account for if they decide to integrate a Martech stack:

• Lack of Competent Technical Marketing Talent – the ideal candidate to implement a Martech would be a person who has a background in marketing, databases, integrations, APIs, or SQL. Unfortunately, there’s still a huge gap in the market for the demand and supply for these professionals. Expertise in both marketing and AI is essential for successful Martech implementation and to fully leverage advanced technologies.
• Data is Dispersed – in order to be able to apply advanced technologies and conduct thorough analysis using Martech, marketers need to have data collected all in one place. Lots of companies, however, are challenged with the problem of getting all their data together as all their data streams are commonly dispersed or siloed.
• Over-automation – overdoing Martech is guaranteed to cause nearly an opposite effect on your advertising campaigns: instead of getting a personalized experience, users will be bombarded with poorly targeted content. This is why, when automating marketing activities, the priority should always be on balancing data and creativity. Traditional automation relies on preset rules and strategies, while AI-driven approaches enable more dynamic, learning-based personalization and optimization.
• Integration – the inability to put together disparate tools into a unified system way too often gets in the way of Martech integrations. Another common problem that arises from the integration process is that companies struggle to identify which marketing tools and tactics are truly driving sales in their business. This makes it harder to set the integration priorities right.

Additionally, many marketers face challenges with data quality and readiness, which can hinder effective AI adoption in marketing.

The Future of Marketing Technology

Looking ahead, the future of marketing technology promises even greater integration of AI-powered solutions and a shift toward more personalized customer experiences. As AI adoption accelerates, marketing professionals will increasingly interact with AI agents—automated systems capable of making complex decisions and managing aspects of marketing campaigns across multiple channels. To support these AI agents, marketers may need to develop new types of content, such as structured data and APIs, that enable seamless communication and decision making.

Staying ahead in this evolving landscape requires a commitment to continuous learning and adaptation. Marketing teams should keep up with the latest industry insights, trends, and best practices to fully leverage the capabilities of AI and Martech tools. By focusing on real-time data, marketers can gain insights into customer behavior as it happens, allowing them to deliver personalized customer experiences and optimize campaigns for maximum impact.

Ultimately, the next wave of marketing technology will empower businesses to drive growth, improve customer engagement, and maintain a competitive edge in the market. By embracing AI-powered tools, prioritizing actionable data, and delivering value across multiple channels, marketers can ensure their strategies remain effective in an ever-changing digital environment.

If you want to skip the tedious process of looking for a technical marketing talent, dealing with numerous installation and Martech setup steps, trust this process to an experienced team who has the relevant know-how to integrate Martech on time and within budget. At WTT-Solutions we know how to create marketing systems and fine-tune them to particular business needs.

For example, SEO Bangkok — a Martech solution for lead generation, scoring, and nurturing to optimize the likelihood of a sale through advanced lead scoring — was developed by our team from the ground up. We developed a design, found ways to integrate the solution with existing APIs, streamlined the data collection process, and ensured that all the components of the product worked flawlessly.

Our team can also assist with creating and optimizing longer-form documents such as white papers to support your marketing strategies.