Marketer’s Guide to Marketing Technology (MarTech)

Introduction

Marketing Technology, a.k.a MarTech, is revolutionizing how businesses approach marketing and is currently valued at USD 344.8 billion globally. With an ever-growing array of digital tools and technology at their disposal, marketers are better equipped than ever to design more individualized and successful campaigns. In this blog, we'll talk in detail about MarTech, as well as its advantages and practical applications for corporate growth and competitive advantage. 

What is MarTech?

The term "MarTech" is used to describe the platforms, tools, and technology that marketers utilize to coordinate and automate marketing initiatives, campaigns, and consumer engagement across a variety of media. It includes a wide range of digital marketing tools, such as marketing automation, content management, social media management, customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, and more. This set of tools & technology incorporated by marketers to streamline their marketing efforts is also known as the MarTech stack. To improve business results, marketers can use MarTech to better understand their customers, personalize experiences for them, and optimize their marketing activities. It has developed into a crucial component of contemporary marketing, assisting companies in remaining competitive in the age of the digital economy.

What is Digital Asset Management?

Digital asset management (DAM) is a software program that assists companies in storing, organizing, managing, and distributing their digital assets, which include pictures, videos, documents, audio files, and other kinds of multimedia information. DAM solutions give enterprises access to centralized, secure storage for their digital assets, thus, facilitating content search, retrieval, and sharing. By ensuring that all stakeholders have access to the right resources at the right time, businesses can use DAM to streamline their workflows, lower costs, and increase brand consistency.

Difference between MarTech & AdTech

AdTech involves the use of the final ad product to be served to users to influence their purchasing decision. On the other hand, MarTech leverages its diverse set of tools and software to plan, execute, orchestrate, and measure marketing efforts from scratch. 

AdTech works on the programmatic auction of digital ad spaces, in which publishers who are on the Supply-Side of the Platform (SSP) sell their digital ad spaces (inventory) to advertisers who are on the Demand-Side of the platform (DSP) via an Ad Exchange Network. With MarTech, marketers can go for custom online marketing such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Email Marketing, Social Media Management, A/B testing, Personalization, Customer Analytics, etc. 

Components of MarTech Stack

Different companies have different business needs & objectives. For fulfilling those needs they need to rely on multiple management, optimization, and distribution systems. When starting off their journey with MarTech, an enterprise should include the following technologies in their data stack.

1. Marketing automation software: These software automates repetitive marketing operations like lead nurturing, social media posting, and email campaigns, freeing marketers to concentrate on other facets of their jobs. Examples: Marketo, Hubspot, etc.
2. Customer relationship management (CRM) software: Software for managing and analyzing client interactions and data is known as customer relationship management (CRM), and it enables companies to better understand and engage their customers. Examples: Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, etc. 
3. Content management systems (CMS): Systems for developing, managing, and publishing material on a website or other digital channels are known as content management systems (CMS). Examples: WordPress, Magento, etc.
4. Social media management tools: By scheduling social media posts, keeping track of interactions, and analyzing data, these tools assist businesses in managing their social media presence. Examples: Buffer, Hootsuite, etc.
5. Email marketing platforms: These platforms offer tools for designing and sending emails, managing email lists, and evaluating the effectiveness of email campaigns. Examples: MailChimp, Zoho CRM, etc. Additionally, businesses can use an AI-powered link building tool to further strengthen their online presence and drive more traffic through optimized content strategies. These tools can help identify valuable backlink opportunities, improving search engine rankings and increasing the visibility of a website.
6. Analytics platforms and tools: These solutions enable businesses to make data-driven choices by providing insights into website traffic, consumer behavior, etc. Examples: Google Analytics, MixPanel, etc.
7. Mobile marketing tools and technologies: Through mobile apps, text messaging, and mobile ads, mobile marketing tools, and technologies enable businesses to connect and engage with customers using mobile devices. Examples: AppsFlyer, CleverTap, etc.

Importance of Martech

There can be many potential use cases of Martech, some of the important ones describing how it can be useful for businesses are:

1. Fostering Brand Consistency: Businesses can ensure that their branding and messaging are consistent across all platforms and touchpoints by using MarTech solutions. For instance, a global fast-food chain can leverage brand management software to ensure that all its franchises adhere to its brand rules and guidelines consistently, creating a more unified brand image.
2. Cross-functional collaboration: Teams can collaborate more successfully with the use of MarTech solutions, which will improve results and increase productivity. In order to improve collaboration and communication, an advertising agency can use a content management system to centralize and streamline the creation and distribution of marketing materials across different teams and channels.
3. Customer Acquisition & Retention: With relevant content and offers, businesses can find and target the ideal customers, increasing conversion rates and revenue. In order to deliver targeted campaigns and promotions for each category, a Beauty & Personal Care business can leverage a customer segmentation tool to classify clients based on their demographic and behavioral information. This would increase customer acquisition and retention.

How can marketers leverage ETL tools to gain a 360 view of their Martech stack?

To get a unified view of their Martech stack, marketers can leverage ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) solutions to aggregate data from multiple data sources into a single source of truth. After integrating data marketers can analyze their data to obtain insights into consumer behavior, campaign performance, and other metrics by defining data requirements. This allows them to optimize marketing strategies, enhance customer experiences, and boost ROI.

Let’s say you are using WordPress for content management. Using its advanced webpage creation & publishing features, you upload and design different types of media on your website. Now that your website has been built and optimized successfully, you want to watch the traffic it receives and keep an eye on the best-performing pages and/or events recorded. All this can be achieved via an ETL tool, you can start replicating all your event-level data (comments, users, posts) from WordPress into a database(MySQL, PostgreSQL) or a data warehouse of your choice (Google BigQuery, Redshift) to get a comprehensive view of your entire data. 

Different tools would also require different levels of technical expertise from the users. For instance, when using AppsFlyer, MoEngage, etc., if you want to analyze your marketing efforts you need to access the dashboards available on these platforms separately. Now, the technological complexity that these platforms demand might be above your level of expertise as a marketing professional, and the dashboards also only provide short-term insights into your data. However, with an ETL tool in place, you can migrate your data to a single destination to perform ad-hoc long-term trend analytics thus, facilitating both improved data accessibility and safe data management.

One of the most anticipated future development in MarTech is the adoption of MI/AL, however, in order to predict customer behavior, churn, and shopping trends accurately, you need historical data at your dispense. You’ll fail at predicting MI/AL trends reliably without a data warehouse at your dispense, and, ultimately, your marketing spend will go down the drain.

From integrating with MI/AL & Business intelligence tools to offering 100+ supported integrations, DataChannel can help you to build the single source of truth your business needs. Start simplifying your Martech Stack with DataChannel today. Schedule a call with us for more.