Marketing Technology (Martech) is comprised of the tools and technologies available to connect you to your target audience. It allows companies to automate marketing campaigns and processes, collect and analyze data, and more effectively build and maintain customer relationships. If you’re sending marketing emails, monitoring your website traffic, or using a project management platform to coordinate your campaigns, you have a Martech stack. But are you using it to its full capability? Many organizations haven’t given much thought to what their Martech could be accomplishing for them, because they may not know how to use it or why Martech matters.
It matters because marketing is changing so rapidly. Marketers today need to be students who continually learn, research, and test. They need to be data analysts, and proactive rather than reactive strategists based upon what the analytics tell them. Our society is mobile, with short attention spans and myriad distractions. That means marketers have had to change the way they design to be mobile-first with a nod to psychology. Our projects and campaigns need to be carried out based upon user behavior signals. SEOs are constantly adapting to keep up with the ever-changing world of search engine marketing. Google changes its search algorithm between 8-9 times per day. Even the way we search is changing. Siri and Alexa are the results of a strategic focus on natural language processing which yielded the need for marketers to optimize for voice search. These are just a few examples of why we need Martech.
There are currently over 7,040 Martech tools available. The key to an efficient Martech stack is strategically selecting the right tools from that pool to accomplish your objectives. At the core of your Martech stack should be a central platform that keeps all of your tools connected and communicating, such as Hubspot or Salesforce-Pardot. The power of this connection is the ability to determine the most effective and efficient ways to reach your audience at the right time, via the right channel.
In order to grow your business, you need to find, interact with, and convert customers. These three initiatives rely heavily upon Martech. When your systems are integrated, your internal teams will become more synergistic in accomplishing these goals. In an organization without this integration, the sales team could be asking for “leads,” the email marketer wants a “list,” the PPC agency talks about an “audience,” and the website developer measures “traffic.” They’re all talking about segments of the same group of potential clients. Yet if the aforementioned teams and people are using different tools, each tool will treat the data around these segments differently. Martech tools allow you to look at all of that data holistically. It can then segment, score, and respond to each lead’s needs based on the level of interest and engagement. It can choose the sales qualified leads that are ready for a demo, identify who should be rolled into an email list for lead nurturing, and retarget website traffic with paid advertising.
Martech integration allows you to visualize the entire customer journey from the first encounter to conversion. The sheer amount of insight you can gain will enable you to optimize and scale your marketing efforts. You’ll know which channel attracts the type of clients who convert, down to a single ad or piece of collateral. Additionally, you’ll know how to use Martech to focus your efforts to accomplish goals such as lead generation, customer engagement, and retention.
SEO, paid advertising, and content marketing can help you find your customers where they’re actively searching for solutions. Remarketing, geofencing, lead nurturing, and abandonment strategies can help convert leads and drive continued engagement. Retention and loyalty can be influenced by personalization, social campaigns, and dynamic content. All of these elements are foundational to Martech and illustrate the powerful ways it can impact your bottom line.
To be able to see how leads find you, what spurs them to engage, and what converts them to a customer is pure gold for any organization. Martech can bring order to chaos and tell your organization a much-needed story: how to grow your business.
According to Gartner, Martech accounts for nearly one-third of marketing budgets. Companies making this investment have inevitably realized the power of strategically using Martech to connect to customers, collect data to drive decisions, quickly respond to changes in the market, adapt based upon customer behavior, understand their target market, and make sense of the data critical to their organizations. Martech is changing the game and if you don’t invest in it, you don’t have the pieces to play.
If you have already invested in a Martech stack, make sure you’re auditing it for efficiency. Gartner found that there is still redundancy and underutilization within Martech. Marketing teams often maintain multiple solutions in one category of Martech spend. Look for areas you can consolidate, freeing up budget to grow in areas that could benefit from enhancing your Martech toolset.
Equally as important to the selection of your Martech stack is the team of marketers you employ to run it. Meld exists to bring expertise, education, and clarity to build, audit, or enhance Martech for businesses. We can work with your current team or help you build a team to transform your business. Contact us today to start a discussion about how your organization can strategically use Martech to drive results.