The Marketing Technology Landscape: A Guide Where to Start
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Originally Posted On: The Marketing Technology Landscape: A Guide Where to Start | Above Promotions
Marketing is a broad and ever-changing field. Today, many people are dealing with marketing technology (MarTech), a term used for major initiatives that harness technology to achieve marketing goals and objectives. MarTech is the technology that can be used to create, communicate, and deliver offerings. It’s not to be confused with advertising technology (Adtech), which is used strictly for influencing buyer behavior by promoting different products. Marketing technology has changed the way we do marketing. Marketing campaigns are now more reliant on digital channels, and these channels will continue to evolve as time goes on. If you’ve ever tried to succeed in digital marketing, you know how hard it is to bring all the platforms together and measure your progress.
What is Marketing Technology?
MarTech helps marketers plan and execute marketing campaigns, collect and analyze the results of those campaigns. You can measure, track and improve your marketing performance by leveraging marketing technology applications. Marketing Technology allows you to do this at scale with an omnichannel approach.
So, what types of technology or tools are we talking categorizing as marketing technology?
- CRM (Customer Relationship Manager)
- CMS (Content Management System)
- Social Media
- AI and ML (Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning)
- Advertising (Cookies, GeoFence, IP Addresses, and more)
- SEO
- Landing Pages
- VR and AR (Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality)
- Marketing Automation
- Digital Signage
- Facial Recognition and Computer Vision
- Analytics
- and more.
The Marketing Technology Landscape
To make sense of the marketing technology landscape, let’s start with the technology itself.
There are many types of marketing technology, with specific subcategories such as marketing automation, CRM, and analytics. Marketing automation software is a beneficial way to keep track of leads and customer data and keep the process running smoothly. In other words, it allows the company to automate various processes and organize them based on specific criteria. When used correctly, marketing automation software is a powerful tool that can help generate leads, monitor campaigns, and automate the responses to marketing inquiries. CRM is used to keep track of customer relationships and organize the various elements of the lead-to-sale process.
What Does Marketing Technology Mean for Your Business?
Despite the changes COVID-19 brought to many companies, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are keeping marketing technology as 25% of their budget, per Gartner. This is not surprising since survey results indicated 80% of marketing budgets are on digital channels.
When looking at the industry and considering what companies you are competing with, you must know your customer demographic and set the strategy by considering your ROI from the costs to meeting 25% or more of your budget on marketing technology.
COVID-19 has pushed businesses to scale up their digital marketing efforts sooner than previously predicted. The fear of remaining competitive has drawn more leaders to consider how they execute campaigns and their interactions with customers for buying and customer service.
Because we know customers do not always purchase simultaneously and do not come to your brand through the same channels, it is essential to be sure no lead is lost. Making the most of your ROI and ensuring you do not lose a lead is another reason to solidify your strategy and not miss any valuable leads by not fully executing or connecting your marketing platforms and software.
It is essential to realize that marketing technology has a place in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) organizations.
What’s Next?
An IT investment that can transform businesses is just around the corner. The use of innovations such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), machine learning, and smart robotics is changing the way we do market research, provide information, and run campaigns. Many new platforms and technologies are already making their way into various industries and the marketing domain.
Let’s explore some of the trends that will revolutionize the marketing domain. Trends we at Above Promotions are implementing.
This technology is changing the way people understand and experience the world around them. AR enables people to engage with digital content that overlays digital elements into the physical world. Brand recognition, market research, and analytics are valuable benefits from using Augmented Reality.
This technology, although not new, allows people to learn and experience new things as well as for entertainment purposes. Storytelling, advertising, branding, sponsorships, market research, and analytics are benefits many brands are beginning to embrace through Virtual Reality.
Personalized and relevant experiences are a benefit of using machine learning. ML has become a valuable tool to help create connections to brands with fewer encounters. ML is helping companies to have more customer segmentation. This more in-depth ability to segment and tag leads and customers allows brands to deliver more relevant creative campaigns that can provide better performance when executed.
Internet of Things (IoT), voice automation, and chatbots are delivering immediate service to consumers. It allows for smart data discovery, meaning information is at the tips of the consumers without having to wait on a toll-free number or wade through the internet on their own. Setting up content for these types of devices is key in seeing the success in this area.
Conclusion
MarTech is not a new concept, and marketing professionals are now managing multiple activities to cover it. The interactions between IT departments, product management, sales, marketing, and management of the organization are increasing.
No matter the technology solution or marketing channel, the strategy should always be kept first. Then consider the analytics you could obtain from the technology. Finally, decide how consumers will engage with the technology or how the technology will support you in making their engagement better. By keeping these items at the forefront of your decision-making process, finding the technology to support your goals will be easier to locate and select.
Whether you have a portion of your marketing stack in place or you see the inefficiencies in your marketing technology, having an external expert to review your tools can save your organization money and help you to meet and surpass your revenue goals.
If you’re ready to jump in and connect with the possibilities of making real-time marketing decisions, contact us today.