What Is MarTech?
MarTech (short for Marketing Technology), refers to the use of technology to support and enhance marketing efforts. It encompasses a wide range of tools and techniques, including data analytics, automation, customer relationship management, and advertising technologies.
MarTech is becoming increasingly important in today's digital landscape, where businesses must constantly adapt to new channels and consumer behaviors. By leveraging MarTech tools, businesses can better understand their customers, create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns, and optimize their overall performance. For example, a business might use MarTech to track website visitors, analyze their behavior, and personalize their experience with targeted content or promotions. MarTech is a rapidly evolving field, with new technologies and platforms emerging all the time. Keeping up with the latest MarTech trends and best practices can help businesses stay ahead of the competition and drive growth.
Why Is MarTech Important for Businesses?
MarTech is important for businesses because it enables them to leverage technology to enhance their marketing efforts and stay competitive in today's digital landscape. By using MarTech tools and techniques, businesses can gain insights into customer behavior and preferences, personalize their marketing campaigns, and optimize their overall performance. MarTech can also help businesses automate routine tasks, streamline workflows, and improve collaboration across teams, which can lead to greater efficiency and cost savings. In addition, MarTech can provide a wealth of data and analytics that businesses can use to make more informed decisions about their marketing strategy and resource allocation. Overall, MarTech is a critical component of a modern marketing strategy, helping businesses to stay relevant, targeted, and effective in reaching and engaging their audiences.
What Is the Difference Between MarTech and AdTech?
Some may confuse MarTech with AdTech, but there are some fundamental differences between these two concepts. One key difference is what they stand for—MarTech is marketing technology while AdTech is ad technology. While MarTech helps with marketing strategies and assists with the management and optimization of marketing efforts, AdTech relies on advertising to influence consumer behavior.
In short, AdTech has a narrower focus on advertising. It utilizes a variety of tools such as ad exchanges and networks, supply-side platforms (SSPs), and demand-side platforms (DSPs). In the process, AdTech is more about launching ad campaigns using a smaller set of tools.
Meanwhile, MarTech comprises a wide range of solutions that help with every aspect of a company's marketing strategies. Your MarTech stack could include everything from email marketing tools and social media management solutions to customer relationship management (CRM) software. The goal is to effectively move people from the top of the sales funnel to the bottom with a smooth and efficient journey.
To get the best of both worlds, it pays to use a combination of MarTech and AdTech if you want to connect with your audiences.
Types of MarTech
There's no shortage of technology you can use to enhance every aspect of your marketing. Some of the many types of MarTech you can implement include the following:
Analytics Tools
You can use Google Analytics and other analytics tools to measure the progress of your marketing campaigns. These solutions provide actionable insights and accurate metrics that help you determine what's working and what could benefit from improvement in your marketing efforts. By collecting this data, you'll be able to perfect your campaigns by improving targeting and the customer experience on every platform.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
If you want to build a better relationship with your customers, good CRM practices and reliable tools are a must. Effective CRM software will enable you to manage communication with customers at every touchpoint while facilitating orders and payments. The right tool will consolidate all aspects of the customer relationship in a central platform, making it easy to connect with new and existing customers at every level.
In addition to CRM solutions, businesses may use lead management tools to bring on new prospective customers and move them toward conversion. Once those leads convert, you can manage them as customers through your CRM solution.
Email Marketing
MarTech could also help optimize email marketing efforts. For example, you might have tools that automatically send emails to recipients based on where they are along the buyer's journey. These emails could include welcome emails, abandoned cart reminders, product recommendations, and other emails that encourage initial sales and repeat purchases. Emails could also use templates that make it easy to personalize them for each recipient.
Additionally, email marketing technology can help you clean up your email lists and ensure you're not wasting resources on recipients who aren't interested in your offerings.
MarTech for email may also include analytics tools that help you measure the success of email campaigns. They may help you monitor metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and more and combine this information in frequent detailed reports. Other solutions may help you conduct A/B split tests that allow you to test two variations of an email and measure the results.
Content Management and Creation
Content is crucial for marketing, which is why you need the right tools to help manage your content in one place. A content management tool will give you the ability to manage all of your website content, including all text and visual content. You'll be able to easily make updates to your existing content, upload new content, review all content, and add tags that help categorize and organize your content. Every member of your content team can access this tool to make any necessary changes and updates to content.
Apart from content management tools, you may also want to use tools to assist with content creation. These solutions can help with the creation of video, audio, graphics, and more. They can make it easy to produce high-quality content and distribute it on nearly any platform, including your website, social media channels, and others.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you want to get to the top of search results, you need effective SEO. There are many types of SEO tools you can use to improve your performance on search engines such as Google. For example, keyword research solutions will help you identify the best keywords to use in your content based on volume and competitiveness. Other tools will help you keep track of rankings and determine whether you're climbing or dropping in rankings, while others will help you gauge the health of your backlinks, enabling you to fix broken or low-quality links.
Using the right SEO tools, you'll be able to optimize your content to ensure it helps you achieve the highest possible rankings. This will help you dominate search engine results pages (SERPs) as you rise above competitors.
Customer Experience
Using customer experience software, you can create the perfect experience that carries customers along the buyer's journey. These tools allow you to optimize your website to ensure it's easy to navigate and appeals to visitors. They can also help you optimize the customer experience on apps and interfaces. The right solutions will make it easy to personalize experiences for different types of customers and allow you to conduct A/B tests.
Advertising
MarTech and AdTech can come together to optimize advertising campaigns. You can use digital ad tech to promote your brand and offerings, hyper-target your ads on social media and other platforms, and develop ads that truly resonate with your audiences.
Social Media
Certain tools will enable you to take full control of your social media marketing strategies. They'll make it easy to manage multiple social media accounts, contribute new posts, schedule your posts, and optimize content to ensure it's formatted correctly. Other social media tools will measure the engagement and other metrics that help you measure the performance of social media campaigns. Based on the details collected, you can learn more about how to appeal to your followers and build an even larger following.
What Is a MarTech Stack?
While there are plenty of tools you can use to enhance your marketing capabilities, the specific technologies you use will depend on what you need. Not every business requires the same tools, making it important to put together a unique MarTech stack that consists of the right combination of tools. By developing a MarTech stack that's right for your business, you'll be able to avoid spending money on solutions you don't need while equipping your business for success.
With the help of the right stack, you'll have the chance to connect with your audiences and significantly boost conversions and sales. The key is knowing which tools to include in your marketing tech stack based on your individual requirements.
How to Build Your MarTech Stack
If you want to put together your marketing stack, there are several items to consider. The following are some of the steps you can take to help you build the perfect stack according to your needs:
- Establish Goals and Corresponding Metrics
To start with, you should determine what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. What short- and long-term goals do you want to set, whether it's to build brand awareness or increase conversions? Once you've set clear and realistic goals, you can determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics to monitor as you progress with your campaigns. You can then determine which analytics tools will help you measure these KPIs most effectively.
- Determine What Your Brand Has to Offer
When setting your goals, think about what it is that your brand brings to the table that other competitors don't. How can you differentiate yourself from the many other brands in your industry? Based on your unique value proposition, you can select the right tools to add to your stack that help you stand apart.
- Assess Your Current Toolkit
You may be tempted to add more tools when possible as you expand your marketing capabilities, but it's important not to overlook what you currently have. Consider the tools you're currently using (or not using) and determine if these solutions can benefit from more utilization. You might find that you're not using certain features or that you can use your existing tools in a different way to move you toward your goals. If you discover that you're in need of tools to supplement your existing toolkit, search for solutions that can help you make the most of what you have.
- Paint a Clear Picture of the Buyer's Journey
Take a look into the journey your customers take when interacting with your brand at every touchpoint. What is the specific process that your customers go through when moving from interested prospects to satisfied customers? If you know where those key touchpoints are and how to make full use of them, you can determine which tools to use to streamline the journey from start to finish.
Each of these elements can help you construct the perfect marketing stack for your business. You'll be able to choose the tools your business truly needs and use them to their full effect. Subsequently, you'll be able to continually improve your marketing strategies as you build lasting connections with customers.
Stay Ahead of Competitors and Connect With Customers With MarTech Behind Your Business
Marketing tech is crucial for your business to succeed online and offline. With the right technological solutions behind your marketing strategies, you'll have an easier time dominating your industry and building meaningful connections with customers. You'll have complete control of your marketing campaigns and materials, enabling you to perfect them. At the same time, you'll gain in-depth insights into your campaigns' performance to identify opportunities for improvement.
The fact is that every business today needs a customized MarTech stack to flourish. With the right approach, you can determine which tools your business specifically needs based on the goals you have in place. You can also shop around for the best tools available and determine which solutions will yield the best results. There are plenty of solutions out there to boost your marketing efforts.
One innovative solution you can add to your marketing stack is Storyly, which enables you to use personalized Stories on your mobile app and website to reach your audience. Stories consist of engaging images and text content that can stand out from push notifications and other marketing solutions, allowing you to reach your customers uniquely and compellingly. Combined with other tools in a comprehensive marketing stack, Storyly will help you streamline the customer journey and experience success online.
