Crack The Marketing Technology Code

What do you think a marketer wants?

They want to tell a brand story, inspire consumers and increase company sales. That's not a lot to ask, is it? To achieve all those things as a marketer, you need to understand consumer behavior, be present on all the online platforms out there, engage with potential customers and analyze customer data.

Do you think you can do all that manually without breaking a sweat? Of course, not; in reality, it's impossible to conduct all marketing activities without the help of Marketing Technology. This suite of technologies help you create content, publish it on different channels, analyze the results and repeat the whole process while enhancing the customer's buying journey.

In fact, that’s just scratching the surface, the scope and potential of MarTech are way beyond that. Read on as we cover the present, past and future of MarTech!

Let’s begin with answering the most fundamental question – the what.

What Is Marketing Technology?

Technology aside, we first need to learn what marketing is. Is it the class you attended in college for some extra credit? Is it the business department where Mark browses on Facebook every day? Marketing is a difficult concept to describe and frame. Marketing encompasses all activities responsible for defining, predicting and meeting all your consumer requirements - while being an aid in increasing your business's revenue. #YouAreOnBothTheSides
 
With that in mind, Marketing Technology or MarTech (a cute portmanteau!) is a set of tools that help you market your business offering to your target audience in the best manner possible. MarTech tools assist you in planning and executing marketing campaigns, automating repetitive tasks, handling and analyzing marketing data, measuring & tracking the said campaigns' success and using the intelligence gathered for future campaigns. Essentially, it includes all technology required for conducting end-to-end marketing campaigns.

However, that’s not how it started – MarTech indeed had humble beginnings. Let’s find out what they were.
 

Marketing Technology Over The Years – The History

 
If you walk the lanes of marketing history, you will notice that marketing and technology have historically worked together. You will also see that when marketing was young, it was primarily used to maintain the campaign's look and feel and of course, the right message. It existed under its bubble and the value it generated was consistently underestimated because marketing activities could not always be linked to sales results.

Even when ignored, MarTech kept evolving, in terms of channels, tools and data available. It was only post-industrialization that MarTech grew to cater to the new channels including mass print, direct mail, radio, television and telemarketing. However, data and MarTech tools were still on the back foot till then.

The day of reckoning came with the digital transformation of marketing thanks to the advent of computers and the Internet. The tacky billboards and pamphlets were replaced with the rise of digital channels like social media and the World Wide Web. Innovations such as marketing automation and Content Management Systems, aided in creating marketing technology stacks to reach, map and engage consumers through these new media platforms.

Today, companies realize that keeping clients is just as critical as acquiring new ones. New technological tools assist in the development of consumer satisfaction and the maximization of customer lifetime value (LTV). This allows marketers to motivate consumers more efficiently while still closely linking their work to sales. MarTech today has evolved to an extent that over 5000 marketing technology tools are available, with more in the making and no end in sight. Yikes!

Are you wondering what these 5000 tools would be like? Well, while we can’t give you an exact list, we can definitely share the major categories these tools belong to!
 

Types Of Marketing Technology

 

While the potential of MarTech is beyond any listing, here are the 5 key types of tools that fall under this umbrella:

• Email Marketing Tools

  First off, you have tools like MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and Customer.io that help you leverage the benefits of effective email marketing. These tools help you plan, send, manage and monitor all your marketing emails. Quite frankly, we, at TechDogs, can’t do without an email marketing aid by our side!

• Social Media Tools

  These monitor your social media campaigns, whether it's toggling between multiple campaigns, coordinating updates on one or more platforms simultaneously, curating content from various sources, replying to the top comments or analyzing the campaign results. Social media management tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer save you a lot of time and stress.

• Customer Relationship Management Software 

  The hero of the majority of marketing and sales activities, CRM is the perfect tool for you to have a ‘360-degree view’ of your customers, have all their data in a central repository that your team can access anytime and anywhere. With all that data, your marketing team will have a field day while creating personalized marketing campaigns that hit the goal every time. Some of the best ones are SalesForce, Hubspot CRM and Sugar CRM.

• Analytics Tools

  They are used to assess the success and efficacy of the other marketing tools rather than to build a data-driven marketing strategy in the first place. Good analytics tools such as Google Analytics, KissMetrics and Mixpanel can be a great marketing asset, especially when it comes to conversions and customer experience.

• Content Management Systems 

  Every marketer's end game is to create content that will help sell some goods or services. If the company cannot locate or publish marketing content effectively and on time, all your marketing efforts are a moo point (Joey would know!). That is why an efficient Content Management System is critical for maximizing the value of the marketing content. Adobe Experience Manager, WordPress and Microsoft's Share Point are examples of great CMS that get the work done.

The big question now is – do you really need all of these? Let’s find out.
 

Why Marketing Technology Is A Must-Have For Any Business?

There is a silo effect in many firms, where separate departments, such as sales, customer service and marketing, have limited perspectives of customer interactions and access to only a subset of data. All divisions can't cooperate toward common company goals to create a unified and ideal customer experience if they don't have a holistic picture. We all remember the words of the great George R.R Martin, "the lone wolf dies but the pack survives," - so how do you make sure business wolves all join a single pack? The answer is MarTech - it can help you bridge these gaps by providing a consolidated platform that keeps data in one place and allows all departments to see not only the individual parts of the marketing jigsaw but also the larger picture.

Your marketing teams can analyze customer interactions across all touchpoints by combining MarTech with other major platforms and systems typically utilized in business. You will be able to immediately pivot and target areas that need improvement or modify the strategy to engage customers throughout their journey better, using the insights gained from this data.

Not just that, in the digital age, MarTech lets your marketing team reach your customers promptly; on channels and platforms where the customers are most active and receptive.

Now that you know that Marketing Technology can bring your whole business together, let’s learn about how it actually benefits your marketing team.
   

Benefits Of Marketing Technology

The right set of MarTech tools will provide the following advantages:
 

• Automated Workflows 

  Most Marketing Technology solutions automate operations such as data gathering, data cleaning and data analysis that are too time-consuming and pretty herculean to do manually and ain't nobody got time for that.

• Simplified Communication

  The majority of MarTech services will improve communication within teams (and outside) with tools that allow teams to track project status and collaborate more effectively.

• Data Insights

  MarTech solutions do more than just collect data; they also derive meaningful conclusions that aid in improved decision-making, campaign optimization and the search for opportunities and shortcomings.

That’s just a quick summary of what MarTech can do for your business today, there’s a lot more it has to offer in the future! Let’s find out.

The Future Of Marketing Technology

Though no one actually knows what fresh and exciting marketing trends are waiting over the horizon, we can obtain a basic notion of what to expect based on what has worked in the past.

Artificial intelligence in Marketing Technology is gaining a lot of traction right now. It now enables marketers to automate the process of obtaining, evaluating and deriving insights from data. It automates filtering through huge volumes of data that businesses collect via their campaigns to assist companies in understanding their consumers' journey. We think the best part on this front is yet to unravel!

Secondly, we predict a lot of development in terms of advertising technology (AdTech). It includes the world of ad buying, direct and real-time bidding, supply-oriented tools like Supply-side platforms and demand (brand, media agency) oriented tools like Demand-side platforms, as well as platforms that manage the data that makes advertising efficient. 54 percent of respondents to the Walker Sands survey agreed to adopt AdTech into their plans, making it one of the most-used categories of MarTech. Seems like the future is bright!
 

Summing It Up

Finding, analyzing and building an ideal Marketing Technology stack for your business is no walk in the park. However, it all comes down to combining technologies that function together rather than individually. When your MarTech becomes a big happy family is when you get the fruits of your labor in the form of a more holistic view of customer journey and marketing efforts. After all, you need to make the most of marketing dollar bills!