Martech, or marketing technology, refers to tools that use technology to optimize marketing efforts. A grouping of marketing technologies is referred to as a “martech stack.”
What is MarTech?
MarTech describes the software marketers use to optimize their marketing efforts and achieve their objectives. It leverages technology to plan, execute, and measure campaigns and other marketing tactics. Essentially, it can help make marketers’ jobs easier. A grouping of marketing technologies is called a martech stack—we’ll touch on this more later. These tools are often used to streamline marketing processes in a multi-touchpoint, omnichannel environment.
What is the difference between MarTech and ad tech?
Just as marketing and advertising differ, the terms martech and ad tech, short for advertising technology, are not interchangeable. The key difference is that ad tech is only used to impact buyer behavior through promoted offerings, while martech is used to actually create, run, and manage campaigns and other marketing efforts.
More specifically, ad tech is an umbrella term for advertising tactics and management tools like supply side platforms (SSPs), ad exchanges, and demand-side platforms (DSPs), which help create meaningful connections between brands and customers. It’s more focused on technology that directly brings campaigns into the world. Martech, on the other hand, describes the use of customer relationship management (CRM) software, social media management tools, email marketing solutions, and more. It encompasses a wider variety of technology solutions that marketers use throughout the digital marketing process.
While both martech and ad tech are important for your brand strategy, we’ll be focusing on martech today.
Why is MarTech important?
Technology is playing an increasingly big role in marketing. The marketing landscape continues to shift because martech is becoming more sophisticated, enabling brands to better keep up with the ever-evolving—and fragmented—customer journeys. In short, marketing technology is essential to the future of modern marketing.
In addition, marketing technology is important because it considers execution needs from start to finish. It enables marketers to scale their marketing efforts holistically. Finally, martech is also important because it improves the way we communicate and collaborate with both counterparts and customers. Improving these B2B and B2C relationships has a positive snowball effect on the relationships you build with your customers, too.
What are the types of MarTech?
Martech can be categorized in a variety of ways, but we like to think about it in terms of marketing technology needs: management, social optimization, campaign reach, and insight generation.
- Management
Management is a broad category of martech tools that includes content management, vendor organization, product management, budgeting, and talent management. Optimizing these aspects of your business needs is the catalyst for the rest of your marketing strategy. The use of effective management systems ensures that organizations can pull marketing material quickly and easily, make thoughtful recommendations, and maintain accuracy in reporting. - Social optimization
- Organizing and measuring social media tactics may include influencer management, user-generated content (UGC), customer relationship management (CRM), and more. Systems that help automate social tactics enable you to connect with online communities in more efficient ways.
- Campaign reach
- This third type of martech enables brand campaign executions to reach audiences through remarketing. These solutions are all about helping cultivate business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) relationships and build new ones.
- Insight generation
- Analytics from sources like Amazon Attribution enable marketers to effectively and efficiently understand their campaign, content marketing, and social media performance. This data-driven category helps make sense of complex datasets.
The type of martech tools you choose will greatly depend on the type of business you’re operating, the kind of product you’re selling, your specific needs, and/or your desired outcome or goal. If your marketing team is struggling to pick just one—don’t fret. Luckily, martech “stacks” enable you to integrate multiple solutions at once. Let’s dive into what that really means for your marketing automation.
