Over the years marketing has evolved. With the growth of technology, comes a new way to do marketing and a new term coined; MarTech (Marketing Technology). MarTech gives businesses various methods of reaching and engaging with their target consumers by providing them with the tools to plan, create, execute, and measure their marketing campaigns.
What is MarTech exactly?
Basically, MarTech (Marketing Technology) is the software that enables marketers to do their jobs in the digital age. It’s so much more than what it used to be. MarTech helps marketing teams to understand who their consumers are, what they want, when they’ll buy, when to reach out to them, or even how to reach out to them. There’s much more that it can do. Essentially, MarTech is making marketing measurable. MarTech Today puts it best:
“Martech is the blending of marketing and technology. Virtually anyone involved with digital marketing is dealing with martech, since digital by its very nature is technologically-based. The term “martech” especially applies to major initiatives, efforts and tools that harness technology to achieve marketing goals and objectives.”
What’s all the buzz?
It’s about the customer.
1 – Accurately Attributing The Buying Experience
We’re not just buying products and services anymore. We’re buying experiences.
The best way for marketers to engage with consumers is through experiences. MarTech helps us, as marketers, understand customer personas, map their journeys, and create marketing programs that align with what our customer base is expecting. Phew! That’s a whole bunch of marketing terms. Let’s simplify it.
2 – Strategic Marketing Investment and Less Media Wastage
MarTech allows companies that invest strategically in a good set of software tools, to automate processes, save a lot of time, and makes it possible for them to manage multiple marketing channels easily.
Still not sure if it’s worth it? Let’s put it this way. MarTech is cost-efficient. I can see your wheels turning. It’s done this by enabling us to continue to collect and analyze data to inform our decision making. It’s not like in the past when we would just run campaigns for ages and hope that after a few months the data we collected would show that it worked. This usually meant that even if the data showed that the campaigns didn’t work, it was already too late to save ourselves.
3 – Harnessing the Power of Data for Valuable Insights
Thankfully, because of MarTech, we have tons of data at the tip of our fingers. We can use it to give us insights into our audiences like never before. And, the software even gives us insights. It’s not easy to extract this from all the data collected.
4 – Speed with More Certainty
Oh! And what’s even better? Much of the time you’re receiving those insights in real-time. This allows you to change your strategy and actions immediately if necessary.
In the digital age marketing is all about being online. It’s no longer just about billboards, newspapers or magazines, and television commercials. It’s about social media platforms, websites, and video sharing platforms. Without MarTech, there would be no marketing. It’s going to keep changing, but it’s going to be around for awhile. And, it’s going to be critical for organizations to begin using it.
So.. How Does MarTech Enable Marketing Independence?
MarTech enables marketing independence by giving businesses themselves the software and technological tools to plan, create, execute, and measure their marketing campaigns in order to reach and engage with their target consumers.
In the past, many marketing work involved specialized skills such as designing creative banners or heavy data work on multiple spreadsheets to categorize customers and data sets for marketing insights. The growth of technology and marketing tools such as Canva or MailChimp has equipped marketers with means to complete materials and marketing work without having to depend on certain specialized skills, but through smart platforms.
With the boom on AI (artificial intelligence) and machine learning, we can only expect that these marketing technologies and tools will become smarter and even more advanced; further enabling digital marketers with the speed, flexibility and independence to launch various campaigns.
What’s more interesting is the advancement of the use of marketing technologies from stand-alone tools to becoming integrated and what many businesses have started to look into for their digital transformation: MarTech Stack. If you’re not sure where to start with selecting your marketing toolkit and building your MarTech Stack, start here.