MarTech Decoded: – MarTech is Marketing
Martech is the amalgamation of marketing and technology & it uses all Digital tools and technology to help attain marketing goals. Marketers & digital agencies uses a lot of technology to plan and execute campaigns, evaluate the results of those campaigns, measure campaign performance, and apply those learnings to forthcoming campaigns. The group of technology tools & solutions that assists and supports marketing team/digital agencies are stated as ‘MarTech Stack.
MarTech Stack has considerably influenced the way we do marketing. It has given us the ability to interact with target audience at each of the customer journey, make quick decisions and leverage the power of digital to grow our businesses. With google announcement of third party cookies phased out by 2022 it is imperative for organization to build their own data strategy & invest in MarTech stack, as it is a need of the hour. Martech should be viewed a continuous journey where all consumer touchpoints needs to be effortlessly incorporated & build a unified experience for customers & prospects.
Fundamentally, every marketers involved with digital marketing is dealing with martech, since digital by its very landscape is technology based. Organizations that make deliberate investments in MarTech are able to build a wide-ranging suite of tools that integrate seamlessly & offers benefits, such as automating processes & saving cost. As per Forrester study, using a Martech Stack can increase conversions & found that marketers implementing marketing automation experience a 10% increase in their sales-pipeline contribution.
A baseline understanding is necessary in order to build your own martech stack & here are the four areas that Martech addresses:
Digital Advertising: – This layer of Martech encompasses all forms of digital advertising, which we do to reach out to customers like SEO, SEM, programmatic, social media, marketing automation like email/sms & content marketing. While there are different ways in digital advertising to reach out to customer, marketers need to have a clear understanding of their business, product, and target audience before choosing one or many form of digital marketing channels. All of the above digital channels are a separate area of expertise and marketers need to ensure that they have either a digital agency or internal team to manage this successfully. In Martech Stack, there are enterprise and free tools that can be used to automate & scale like in social media your team can use Hootsuite, Adobe Social, Salesforce Marketing Cloud & email marketing tools like Salesforce exact target.
Digital experience: – Digital experience layer of Martech includes things like website, mobile apps, e-commerce platforms & tools that you need for measurement, optimization, and personalization. In digital age, it is imperative to be present on the relevant platform with more personalized experience as you never know if you are going to find target audience on a phone, desktop, or any connected household appliance in the near future. Connecting this digital experience with web analytics tools, personalization tools, CMS and more allow marketers to take these experiences a step further. The quicker and more efficient you make your digital experience, the more customers you will win & as per Jim Rohn, “One customer well taken care of could be more valuable than $10,000 worth of advertising”.
Data & tech: – Marketing needs to be data driven hence this is a backbone of Martech &includes data and tech platforms like Customer relationship management (CRM), Data management platform (DMP), Back office technology i.e. (finance & accounting, supply chain management, customer service & IT services ) & Enterprise Data warehouse (EDW). Marketing data will help build all-inclusive understanding of your existing and potential customers & is essential if you are to provide best possible product or service. Data-driven marketing in its core is a strategy that is based on the analysis of big data, collected from audience interactions and engagements. All companies must comply with the Data Protection Act before you store any personal information about your current or prospective customer.
Analysis & activation: – This layer of MarTech tools helps evaluating marketing performance with the use of accurate analytics that gauge the success of your marketing campaigns. Marketing analytics tool not only give single view of customer but also provides actionable audience segments for targeting and personalization with use of A/B and Multivariate testing. This layer also include data driven attribution modeling which analysis each consumer touch point of path to purchase. This layer of MarTech not only help us understand how past campaign is performed but also help us improve our future campaigns by using those learning’s.
Martech Stack is a necessity for companies today; however, implementing it is a subtle process that requires evaluation & understanding of your organization roadmaps. One of the most important step is to diagnose technologies, talent & process gaps of your organization and then build a roadmap for timing of different Martech Stack adoption. MarTech Stacks cannot be emulated as it is going to be different from company to company & will depend upon business requirements. Chief Data officer (CDO) & Chief Technology officer (CTO) becomes the hottest new role in marketing because organizational internal challenges when it comes to technology adoption – such as the lack of understanding by senior management, budget constraint or lack of talent to understand importance of data. While the MarTech landscape matures each year, it becomes critical to continuously research MarTech and evaluate ways to improve your Stack to reduce inaccuracies, save time, and increase ROI. Martech is not a magic potion, nor is it something that marketers can overlooks hence make sure your marketing & tech squad is well aware of everyone’s role in the roll out of your MarTech solutions.
By Prashant Nandan, Associate Vice President- Digital Trading & Buying, Amplifi India