At its core, marketing consists of reaching your target audience and informing them about what you have to offer – with the ultimate goal of lead conversion. Although this seems straightforward, due to the sheer amount of competition at every level, this can be a challenging task. However, by using MarTech, this intimidating goal becomes much more attainable.
The sheer amount of technology and software in today’s MarTech landscape is immense, and figuring out what tools will best serve your company’s needs can seem overwhelming. In this article, we will offer some clarification by answering the following questions: what is MarTech, what can it do, and where might we be headed in the future?
What is MarTech?
MarTech, or marketing technology, refers to the large assortment of tools available for use by businesses. Marketers use MarTech for a number of objectives, including running campaigns, building customer journeys, SEO, and content marketing. MarTech has many capabilities such as predicting customer behavior, measuring content performance, and analyzing data to increase ROI.
How Does MarTech Enable Marketers?
There is nothing more frustrating than putting time and money into a campaign only to have it underperform – especially if you lack insight into not why it was unsuccessful. This is where MarTech tools and software come in.
MarTech enables marketers to gain insight into what works and what doesn’t in their marketing strategy, all while giving them the power to fix it. This can be accomplished by having an optimal MarTech stack.
Building Your MarTech Stack
A MarTech stack is a group of MarTech tools that marketers use all at once to handle all parts of a marketing campaign. Since many examples of marketing technology are highly specialized, they work best when used together.
Think of a MarTech stack like a toolbox that provides everything your marketing team needs for success. A contractor wouldn’t show up on a jobsite with just a hammer or drill. Similarly, in today’s varied MarTech landscape, marketers can’t rely on just one type of MarTech. Building a quality MarTech stack can be the difference between achieving your goals and falling short of them.
MarTech software can fall into several categories, including the following.
Analytics and Reporting Tools
Marketers rely on data to understand and predict customer behavior, creating targeted campaigns to attract and ultimately convert their desired audience. The problem is that marketing campaigns generate huge amounts of raw data, which can be difficult to analyze without the right tools in place.
MarTech tools are designed to break this data down into an easier to understand format, allowing marketers to develop a data-driven strategy. MarTech tools can pull data from multiple sources instantly, so the effects of adjustments made to campaigns can be seen playing out in real-time.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is a critical tool for marketers to have. These MarTech tools identify customer information such as demographics (age, gender, race, etc.), behavior, and preferences.
Besides helping to identify desired customers, CRM software also helps businesses strengthen relationships with their existing customers by personalizing interactions, streamlining communication, and assisting with other key actions that create customer loyalty.
Email Marketing Tools
Despite the ever-increasing usage of social media, when it comes to marketing campaigns, email marketing remains a tried and true way to reach consumers. According to Hubspot, 73% of millennials favor email communication from businesses.
In today’s marketing landscape, data analysis and email automation work together like magic to help organizations send out highly-targeted messages automatically that increase retention and conversion rates. In addition, email marketing platforms can:
- Design and create messages
- Automate workflows
- Preview messages
- Schedule and send emails
- Manage data
Social Media Management Tools
With the sheer amount of social media users, businesses nowadays have to find a way to cut through the noise, fighting a flood of posts and content to be noticed by their desired audience. This requires consistent posting, creating engaging, authentic content, posting at peak hours across multiple channels, and on top of all that, monitoring engagement for every action.
Through the power of MarTech, many of these tasks become simple. We’ve already discussed how MarTech tools are capable of analyzing data, but by using social media management tools, marketers can also identify key times to post, schedule posts, and even post across several channels simultaneously.
Marketing Automation Platforms
Consistency is the key to running an impactful campaign, and consistency requires repetition. Posting on social media according to a schedule, sending emails at regular intervals with consistent messaging – these tasks are simple but can be time consuming. Not only that, but they use resources that could be put towards other more worthwhile actions. MarTech software is capable of automating these repetitive tasks, giving marketers time back to focus on the more high-level aspects of their campaigns.
Content Management System (CMS)
A good website is essential to effectively promoting your business, but managing a website can be an unwieldy task, requiring knowledge of computer design and coding. A Content Management System (CMS) is a form of MarTech that businesses use to manage their webpages and any other site content.
CMS platforms are easy for marketers to use, requiring no knowledge of coding or HTML. They are designed to allow workers to change their websites without requiring a developer or an extensive understanding of computer code. This enables quick, easy changes, allowing marketing teams to keep content up-to-date and post new content as required for their campaigns.
Ad Platforms
Similar to MarTech, AdTech is a type of software that deals with, as you may have guessed, advertising! These two sometimes get confused, but both play an important role.
MarTech helps marketing teams to manage and optimize campaigns, while AdTech is used to deliver ads to the right digital audience. With AdTech tools, marketers can analyze and manage their paid advertising campaigns across various platforms.
By utilizing AdTech, businesses can efficiently target specific groups and reach a wider audience through its social media and internet search driven ad capabilities.
The Future of MarTech
As is the case with many forms of technology, when thinking about the future of MarTech, we turn our attention to AI. The amount of MarTech tools that use AI has skyrocketed. These tools use AI for a wide variety of things including analyzing data, generating consumer insights, and personalizing communication for target audiences and individuals.
MarTech, embedded with AI, accomplishes what really matters – giving customers what they want when they want it, promptly resolving and mitigating negative experiences, and otherwise delivering desirable, personalized messaging in real-time, at scale.
Conclusion
By finding and utilizing the right combination of MarTech tools, you can revolutionize your marketing efforts, reaching your target audience and beyond. MarTech software has the power to analyze and predict consumer behavior, nurture leads with personalized messaging, and automate repetitive, time-consuming processes – and that’s barely scratching the surface of what it can do! When you identify your company’s goals and work from the top down to build your MarTech stack, so much more becomes possible.
Stefanini has the marketing solutions needed to optimize your campaigns and take your data-driven strategy to the next level. To maximize your martech, contact us to connect with one of our experts!
