MarTech

Mapping the journey of customer interactions with your company encompasses analytics and personalization. By mapping user flow, from website to landing pages to subsequent pages, an idea is formed whether your goals are aligning with actual user experience. (Are they going to pages that have low value simply because of the way our navigation is organized? Conversely, are the most important pages hardest to find?)

The tools to map and understand these interactions, marketers use MarTech technology, platforms, software and tools.

The fusing of data analytics with the ability to deliver personalized content in the right digital form blends the principles of brand marketing and direct marketing. This requires core competencies in three areas: predictive modeling, martech stack creation, and content personalization at scale.

Thinking in these terms requires an extension of the traditional 4 Ps of Marketing: Product, Price, Place, Promotion. The extension is “Platform”.

What is MarTech?

MarTech, also known as marketing technology or marketing technology architecture, is a term used to describe the use of technology in accomplishing the predetermined set of marketing goals. It refers to the different tools, platforms and software that help marketers plan, execute, and analyze several marketing campaigns. These tools can collect data automatically and can provide different ways for the company to reach and engage with its target customers.

For most enterprises, the majority of customer interaction happens through their website. You can think of your website as the equivalent to your business’s storefront. Your website is the medium through which most prospects will form their first impression.

Now you’ve got a great website and you’ve invited your prospects to enter the marketing funnel. What’s next? You have to move your prospects down the marketing funnel and convert them to paying customers. An important tactic to keep in mind is to ensure that every interaction the customers have with you is outstanding.

Personalization, that is choices and interfaces that tell the viewer that their experience is uniquely theirs, guides each user individually based on what we know about them from their actions once on the site. This is accomplished by assigning a cookie to each visitor, which forms a history of where they go on the site, and then populates the next pages of the site based on that history.

This creates a truly “customized” experience for prospects.

Only by listening carefully to our customers — by seeking to understand their entire journey — can we serve customers effectively, by helping deliver what they truly need.

A critical element to your MarTech stack is the ability to measure, measure, measure! This means doing in-depth analysis of and reporting on key performance indicators that demonstrate how effectively an organization is achieving key business objectives.

Benefits of MarTech

Marketers and senior leadership teams well know of the shifts in buyers’ behavior (e.g. buyers don’t pay attention and do their own research) because they experience it themselves with every Amazon and Netflix interaction. They also know that traditional marketing is expensive and unpredictable. But knowing the problem is not the same as knowing what to do about it.

And, while there is a willingness to spend money, the gap between expectations for creating a personalized user experience (90% of customers expect one, while only 30% of companies deliver it), and the ability to know how to gather and apply data, and the right and proper use or architecture, strategy and technology is massive.

The opportunity for missteps and wasteful, misdirected spending is huge. Equally large are the opportunities for doing it right, such as:

What is a MarTech stack?

A martech stack refers to the collection of different software, platforms and that work together to retain customers and attract new ones.

The martech stack is analogous to a car wherein there are many different parts and uses several technologies. Still, collectively, they work to get the vehicle from one place to another.

Key Tools in the MarTech Stack

Building a great martech stack is essential since it can help streamline communications throughout the company. Marketers have to keep in mind that all of the programs must complement each other and work well together.  To realize the benefits of martech, o realize these types of goals, three things must happen.

First, marketing will need to shift their organizational structure to an agile ecosystem of internal and external partners. Second, they must scale personalized content through predictive modeling. And third, they need to build out a best-in-class martech stack with an open architecture that is future-friendly due to its Lego approach to connectivity.

• Identify the specific problem that must be resolved. Once they can do that, they can select the correct technology that can address that issue and provide a solution.
• Essentials. Before marketers can deal with a bunch of complex programs, they must have all the necessary and fundamental ones, such as marketing automation, content management system, analytics platforms, and customer relationship management.

Optimal MarTech Stack

The number of options for an optimal martech stack has exploded (below), and while there are single-vendor platforms, 80% of martech stacks are “best of breed”, that is , a combination of software, platforms, plug-ins and solutions.

To optimize a martech stack, one needs to think in terms of extending the traditional 4 Ps of Marketing: Product, Price, Place, Promotion. The extension is “Platform”.

Platform is the fusing of data, technology and content to deliver personalized user experiences to individuals.

Personalized Marketing

As consumers we already know the satisfaction (without being creepy) of properly anticipated desires such as when Netflix knows what we like to watch and Amazon knows what we might like to buy.

The digital marketing infrastructure producing these experiences are “omni-channels” requiring capabilities in things like SEO, PPC, social, programmatic, email, retargeting, and content management, all of which need to be closely coordinated to be effective. Experience using dashboards with KPIs, and predictive modeling to deliver personalization at scale with agile brand management is mandatory for an effective marketing organization.

The four foundational layers to creating a personalized experience are these:

Attract

Reach and connect with prospects with highest propensity to buy.

Convert

Move prospects to followers, customers and brand promoters

Nurture

Optimize customer experience and maximize their lifetime value.

Measure

Analyze efforts for insight to improve your marketing.

MarTech Trends

1. Customer data privacy and Customer Data Platform (CDP) personalization. Brands need to be mindful with how customer data is protected and stored. Many are concerned about how their personal data have been used for other purposes. Data-driven personalization continues to be a major privacy issue.
2. Integration of martech and ad tech. These two have coexisted in the sales funnel, though at opposite ends. The convergence of ad tech and martech is perfect since both rely on data.
3. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Sales Enablement. These two processes go together because the latter guides sales representatives in connecting with potential customers, while the former focuses on understanding the prospects. The company’s sales enablement strategy will not work well if CRM is not established through specific platforms.
4. Marketing Analytics. Companies need to analyze its marketing performance to ensure that they can achieve optimal performance.

Adtech

Adtech, also known as advertising technology, refers to software and several tools that companies make use of to plan out and conduct various advertising activities. It is dealt with by both advertisers and publishers since it helps them achieve their goals by providing them with different applications that can assist them.

The specific goals of advertisers are to run effective ad campaigns that can reach their target audience and measure ROI. On the other hand, publishers wish to cater to advertisers and generate revenue through displaying ads on publications, elevate ad impressions, and raise bids for the different ad slots. Both entities also hope to collect feedback and insights from their customers. They can meet these demands with the help of adtech.

Adtech Ecosystem

1. Media Agency – allocate its clients’ ad expenditure throughout multiple channels
2. Agency Trading Desk –  plans, purchases, and manages ads from different platforms
3. Demand-side Platform –  allows advertisers to check and buy ad placements in real-time
4. Data Management Platform – responsible for the collection of data from various sources
5. Ad Networks – the intermediary between publishers and advertisers
6. Ad Exchange – a platform where people can buy and sell ad inventories
7. Supply Side Platform – similar responsibilities to a DSP, but caters to publisher
8. Ad Server – applications where companies can run their ads