How to Use Marketing Technology to Optimize Your Strategy - Stefanini

How To Use Marketing Technology To Optimize Your Strategy

Choosing the right modern marketing technology for your company’s efforts can be overwhelming.

For instance, take Scott Brinker’s famous marketing technology (martech) landscape slide, which is populated by 8,000 solutions from countless software companies that run the gamut from advertising and promotion to data and management.

How do you become a marketing technologist? Which tools will give you the most ROI? Further, which tools do you even need to drive engagement, send personalized content, attract your target audience, and more?

In this blog, we’ll break down the types of technology you should look for to bolster your marketing operations. Let’s get started!

Which digital marketing trends should you know for 2022? Check out our list here!

What is Marketing Technology?

Often shortened to “martech,” marketing technology refers to any piece of software used by marketers to perform marketing activities. These types of specialized applications help marketers plan and execute marketing campaigns, collect and analyze the results of those campaigns, measure and track campaign performance, and ultimately, apply insights learned to future campaigns. All of these activities take place at scale in a multi-touch, omnichannel, majority-digital environment.

With martech’s help, your marketing team can more effectively create, execute, and measure the success of marketing assets and campaigns, giving them more time to focus on creativity.

How Technology Changed Marketing

Let’s look at the statistics: in 2013, 47 percent of U.S. marketers focused on creativity to drive marketing strategy. By 2018, only 29 percent of marketers relied on creativity to support planning. Next year, in 2022, both creativity and technology will play an equal role in determining where and how 56 percent of marketers engage with their customers. Further, it is expected that 30 prioritize will prioritize technology over creativity.

So, why the shift? While creativity is still an important part of the marketing process, technology and the digital world are where people get their information, entertainment, and shop. In fact, there are about four billion internet users online, meaning that 50.8 percent of the global population is connected. Further, more than five billion people have mobile devices, and over half of those connections are smartphones. Those smartphone users are likely watching videos online as one-third of online activity is spent consuming video content.

How are companies using artificial intelligence in marketing? Learn more here!

Top 6 Marketing Technologies

When building a “martech stack” (the collection of marketing technology solutions, marketing platforms, and tools that support the marketing team), here are several technologies you should consider:

1.      Analytics – Everything today is trackable, from the performance of channels to the performance of technologies, ads, and other offers. When it comes to tracking analytics, data platforms consist of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Data Management Platforms (DMPs), while analytics platforms pertain to web analytics, tag management, and predictive analytics. Remember – to track anything, you need to have web analytics programs set up, and have people on the marketing team who know how to use data.

Recommended tool: Google Analytics allows you to know where your website visitors are coming from, how they found you (perhaps from a social media ad?), what content they viewed, and how long they stayed on parts of your site. All these capabilities supply limitless insight into your buyer personas and other data-backed optimization opportunities.

2.      Conversion Optimization – With conversion optimization, you’re trying to get people who come to your website to do what you want them to do as much as possible. At the very least, this typically involves filling out a form so you have their email address. Once you have someone’s email address, you can then focus on getting them to convert.

Recommended tool: With Hotjar, you can effectively learn who your visitors are and what they are doing on your website. The platform combines a range of essential analytics features (like conversion funnel analysis) with user feedback tools (screen recordings, surveys, and others) into a single platform. One of the most used tools that Hotjar offers is their Heatmaps, which visually represents your visitors’ clicks, taps, and scrolling behavior, allowing you to understand which areas of your website people are visiting the most.

3.      ABM – Email marketing can be tricky, but it is super essential for your digital marketing strategy. Today, the must-have strategy for email in the B2B space lies within account-based marketing. This B2B marketing strategy focuses on specific customers or accounts and targets each as a market of one with highly personalized 1-to-1 experiences and content. According to Salesforce, ABM now accounts for 28 percent of total user marketing budgets. Further, 77 percent of ABM users achieve an ROI of 10 percent or greater.

Recommended tool: If you already use Salesforce, Pardot is an obvious choice. It allows you to start generating more leads and revenue quickly, to organize and analyze all of your data across sales and marketing to make data-driven decisions, and more.

4.      Search Engine Marketing – Search engine marketing includes paid search ads and search engine optimization (SEO) to try to get high organic search listings for your website content. Since most people, even B2B buyers of big ticket items, search is an invaluable way to find people who are looking for your services and solutions. With search ads you can test and optimize on keywords, ad copy, offers, your website forms, and more.

You can also track the people downstream if you integrate your Google Ads data with your Google Analytics data and CRM. This way, you know not just which ads are clicked on the most, but which ads lead to the most opportunities and revenue. In the SEO space, it remains important that you regularly create high quality content so you have a better chance of ranking highly on Google.

Recommended tool: With Google Ads, you only pay for results like clicks to your website or calls to your business. Use Google Ads to appear on Google when someone is looking for products or services like yours. Further, its smart technology will help you improve your ads over time for better results.

5.      Remarketing – Remarketing occurs when you go to a website and then, after you leave that site, their ads appear on other sites that you visit. This strategy is both easy to set up and cost effective because you’re only advertising to people who have already expressed enough interest in you to come to your site. Remarketing can also be customized to show ads for the particular products or services your visitors looked at.

Recommended tool: Once again, Google Ads wins out. When it comes to driving qualified traffic to your site, Google’s search, video, and display ads are still the fastest way to get results. Not only are you targeting people who show a specific interest in what you’re selling, Google’s ads act as a first point of contact for lead nurturing tactics like remarketing.

6.      Marketing Automation – Marketing automation includes analytics, online forms, tracking what people do when they come to your website, personalizing website content, managing email campaigns, facilitating the alignment of sales and marketing through lead scoring and automated alerts to sales people, informing these activities with data from your CRM and third party sources, and more.

Recommended tool: Marketo is the second most popular product in B2B technology stacks today. It allows users to automate their marketing processes by creating personalized campaigns that scale, identify top prospects, and boost customer experiences. If you’re looking to grow and market to a large audience with a high degree of segmentation, this might be the tool for you.

Accelerate marketing activities and increase ROI today – learn how here!

What Do Marketers Want From Technoloy?

When it comes to building a partnership between technology and marketing, marketers are interested in tech’s ability to assist with the following:

  • Personalization at Scale: In a 2019 study conducted by Monetate and WBR Research, 93 percent of businesses with advanced personalization strategies reported an increase in revenue in 2018.
  • Experiential Marketing: Compared to digital marketing, experiential initiatives that create emotional bonds between consumers and brands can have ten times the return on investment, building measurable loyalty in the process.
  • Accountability and TransparencyOf the $63.4 billion that brands spent on programmatic ads in 2017, as little as 27 percent made it to working media. Up to 12 percent of those dollars were lost to ad fraud, and an astounding 55% fell victim to the tech tax that is applied at each stage of a programmatic buy.

Technology-Backed Marketing Solutions for You

When marketing and technology collide, cutting-edge ideas emerge. Connect with your audience at the right time by leveraging Stefanini’s nerd-tested, creative-approved solutions backed by data science, technology, and strategy.

Our digital marketing solutions focus on strategy, data science, media, and advertising and leverage data intelligence to boost business, connect people, and create experiences. Using our expertise, best practices, and statistical techniques, we produce actionable business insights based on data mining and predictive models. Our insights are further solidified through research and analytics.

Reach out to us today and consult with an expert!

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