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What is Mark...

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.

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.

What is Marketing Technology? The Definition of Martech

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

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.

Adtech

Adtech is a short form of advertising technology. This term is used to describe various customer acquisition techniques and tools used to set up and manage promotional campaigns

It covers all the processes, analytics (for views/reach/conversions/impressions), and other information that may help marketers better assess current campaigns.

For Adtech stacks, most marketers commonly use SEM (Search Engine Marketing, also referred to as paid search advertising), retargeting, attribution software, ad tracking, and DMPs (Data Management Platforms).

Another purpose of advertising technology is to help advertisers and publishers carry out media trading deals via DMPs (Demand-Side Platforms) and SSPs (Supply-Side Platforms) more effectively. The most prominent examples of such platforms are Mediamath, Adroll, Tapad, etc.

Generally speaking, Adtech can be considered part of Martech and, while Martech is focused more on the development of a holistic approach to marketing, Adtech concentrates on the processes directly related to the advertising company's offerings.

The Importance and Essentials of Martech

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. These are the exact benefits that lay the foundation for Martech, so let's get over them in a bit more detail here.

Improves Data Analysis

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.

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

Automates Marketing Workflow

Martech can help companies automate their marketing workflow, and increase the productivity and scope of marketing campaigns. Automation solutions make it possible to easily scale marketing activities and effectively connect with different target groups — which is almost impossible to do when trying to adjust all messages 'by hand'

With the help of Martech, businesses can segment their prospective clients and send them offerings that are tailored to their potential. Thus, you can equally and effectively target high-value clients (by giving them custom offerings and upsells) as well as low-value ones (providing free trials, demos, coupons, etc).

Optimizes Interactions with Customers

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.

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.

Smarter Product Marketing

Due to a dense level of information noise in today’s world, people have become immune to ads very quickly. It's no wonder that new products almost always have very little chance of succeeding, as 90% of people skip online ads. So, how can marketing technologies and investing in Martech help in this case?

Martech allows businesses to adjust their offerings based on the insights received from analyzed data. Instead of trying to break through a thick wall of generic ads to pique users’ attention, by using Martech instruments, marketers can simply go around this wall. That means working with pain points and needs of the target audience that normally fall out of sight for competitors.

As a result, companies shift from blindly investing in advertising and snowballing users with as many ads as possible (40% of which might be possibly wasted) to a more refined approach where quality prevails over quantity. That means users will receive ads that are 1) based on the user’s current position in the sales funnel, and 2) tailored to a specific need in a specific moment in time.

How Does Martech Help Marketers?

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.
  • 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

Martech Challenges

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.
  • 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.
  • 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.

How Can We Help?

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 — 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

Conclusion

The Digital world moves way faster than we do; however, it's our job to adapt to it. Those companies that will be able to rethink their marketing activities and merge them with up-to-date technologies will definitely gain a long distance advantage

The automation tools, BI, and AI, coupled with data analysis provided by Martech have already become a new norm for many organizations around the world. So, if you are interested in understanding marketing technologies and the Martech landscape on a deeper level, or want to build a Martech stack, reach out to our team.

At WTT Solutions we have vast experience providing Martech development services for businesses of different scales. Simply, fill out the form in the top right corner of the page and one of our customer representatives will get in touch with you within one business day. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our newsletter in order to receive regular helpful insights on software development!

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

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We are a small company and are not sure whether we need to have a sophisticated Martech structure. What would be your advice in our case?

The goal of Martech is to help you find weak points in your strategy and improve them, and that doesn't necessarily mean you have to use dozens of tools to get the results you're aiming for. In some cases, a few instruments can be enough to successfully implement Martech.
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I've set up a Martech stack. What's next?

Once the Martech stack is built, it's time to start using it to better understand your market. In order to do that, we suggest companies take these next steps: build up a customer base, break it down into segments, capture journeys for each group individually, and deliver personalized messages for each.
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How do I assess the effectiveness of my Martech stack?

Normally, we would suggest you trust the Martech evaluation process to a professional team that has experience building and auditing Martech stacks, since this process includes numerous steps to perform. In general cases, however, to understand whether the marketing technologies you use fully meet the needs of your business, answer these two main questions: 1) Are there still any gaps that prevent your company from effectively connecting with individuals and segments?, and 2) Do you still experience any missed revenue opportunities
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Can I integrate a Martech stack by myself?

On a basic level, companies can set up a Martech stack without assistance; however, if your customer journey map is complex, and includes lots of touchpoints, we advise you to seek professional help for designing your system. Contact us for more information.
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