The New Dawn of the MarTech Era
Over the last several years, we have all been witness to the melding of marketing and technology – and it now has a name, very much like Brangelina. However, we’re sure MarTech will last a whole lot longer than Brad and Angelina.
According to MarketingLand, there were about 150 companies in 2011 geared toward marketing technology. In 2016, there were almost 4,000, and by February of 2018 there were over 6,000 tools and products to enhance marketing within a business. It has been predicted that in the near future marketing technology budgets will begin to exceed IT budgets. And companies like CISCO, IBM, and Apple are investing millions in their MarTech frameworks to keep ahead of the curve.
So what exactly is MarTech anyway? MarTech is the use of technology to deliver marketing messages automatically, measure impact, analyze buyer behavior, and drive more efficient spending. Using technology to understand trends, markets and buying signs is crucial. It’s not all about the bass, it’s all about the data. More importantly, it’s about understanding the data once you get it.
It’s an era of new technology that makes it easier to enable marketing initiatives with visibility into data and trends. Long gone are the days of a “one size fits all” promotional or marketing strategy – the modern marketer is a technology marketer. We now must know how to utilize, create, and integrate a customized stack of technology to deliver personalized, contextual content to customers that will convert leads, and in turn, help achieve a better bottom line. What this means for us is allowing a client to see their marketing ROI and the results of their marketing campaigns. Pointing to graph lines isn’t enough anymore. Analyzing the data and understanding how that graph line was created in the first place is critical to learning and improving ROI. Long gone are the days of getting away with a lack of technical knowledge, understanding how to integrate technology, and more importantly, how to analyze the data. Why? Because MarTech helps marketers evolve with the changing needs of our clients.
This isn’t about picking all the new tools that a Google search yields. This is about combining a solid technology framework that enhances and enables a marketing strategy that will drive revenue for your business. So often clients pick technology based on their most urgent need. By doing this, what you end up with are solutions that don’t relate to your other business tools or worse, don’t integrate with each other. How do you know if you have a solid marketing technology stack? You will know you have defined a good marketing technology stack when it creates a snowball effect. Solid marketing technology will build on each other, driving scale, efficiency and creating a flow of data. By building a solid framework it prevents you from ending up with 3 landing page platforms, 4 email marketing providers, and 3 analytics snippets, 3 databases, and so on – which eventually you’ll have to pay someone to clean up. Having the tools within the right stack will efficiently and effectively get the right message in front of the right customers – at the right time.
MarTech and understanding the underlying data is not a trend – it’s here to stay. For companies that still haven’t tapped into the power of it, now is the time to improve efficiency and take control of understanding the data that this technology can provide. For those who continue to wait, you will only continue to fall behind. C-leveled is a company that was built on MarTech. We’re happy to start the conversation about how to approach (and spend on) a marketing technology stack to start driving toward better ROI today.
