MarTech, aka marketing technology, is the new kid on the block in the marketing world. Marketing automation is only about 10 years old, but significant growth has already been seen in marketing technology companies. In this article, you will learn about marketing technology, including the various platforms that are available and how they may aid in the expansion of your business.

What is a MarTech Platform?

It involves the range of marketing tools and platforms that advertisers use to aid them in achieving all their marketing objectives. It can be helpful in many ways within an organization, including social media management, advertising, promotion, etc.

When marketers use a combination of these tools for marketing, it is known as a marketing technology stack. There are thousands of these platforms and solutions, and they cover different categories.

These MarTech tools help streamline marketing processes, collect and analyze data, and provide several innovative means of reaching and engaging your customers.

This is why brands that leverage this technology are experiencing a 451 percent increase in their qualified leads, according to an article by Annuitas Group.

Aligning MarTech with the Enterprise Digital Marketing Architecture

When working on your MarTech strategy, it is always a good idea to understand how the varying elements of your MarTech stack relate and share data. It is best understood when considering the 4 technology layers in the Enterprise Digital Marketing Architecture. These layers are:

Enterprise Data Foundation

Your MarTech stack relies heavily on the data and analytics you get from your marketing efforts. This includes business intelligence, product data, and customer data.

If your business uses different irregular data sources, it might be a good idea to use a customer data platform to unify them.

Major Marketing Technology Platforms.

You can probably understand how essential platforms like Microsoft and Google are to productivity at many organizations.

These marketing technologies are vital to any MarTech stack and form their primary execution layer. Examples of these MarTech tools include Salesforce, Adobe, and many others.

These platforms are helpful in many ways and provide marketing automation, social media management, content management system, customer relationship management, and digital asset management. Their function is to fuel higher-level services and technologies.

Prototypical Marketing and Sales Services.

The technologies here expand your marketing channels beyond what your primary MarTech platform can handle. They typically integrate with layers below to carry out some higher-level functions.

These functions include content delivery networks, e-commerce management, reward fulfillment, offer optimization, offer management, online video marketing technology, etc.

The majority of these services would typically require marketing teams to provide the content that would be needed.

Some, however, optimization platforms can get the content they require from the existing customer data and digital assets on your platform.

Major Channels.

The top layer of any MarTech stack includes all the touchpoints or channels where you can engage and reach your prospects and customers. Many brands’ key channels include email marketing, mobile app, website, and social media platforms.

Other marketing channels that can be included here are those that are used for advertising, including display ads and digital audio and video platforms like YouTube and Spotify.

You could also have print, television, and even kiosks. When considering the buyer journey, these channels can be regarded as touchpoints.

How does DAM fit in?

A typical MarTech stack is made up of a few core tools, although the actual tools that are used would vary from company to company.

For some organizations, their MarTech stack is complex and varied, while for some, it is simple, and they rely only on the essential technologies.

One important point is that your marketing stack should address all the marketing cycle stages: attracting first, then engaging, converting and managing, and finally understanding your customer.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) is one of the necessary tools to deliver these functionalities in your marketing operations is your Digital Asset Management (DAM).

A DAM is widely regarded as the heart of any MarTech stack. It is the point where your content is managed and aggregated.

Since content is the driving force behind marketing campaigns, it makes sense to have a unified platform for managing your huge number of digital assets. This is a key factor in whether your marketing will be efficient.

14 Top MarTech Platforms Every Marketing Team Should Have in their Stack

Rapidly changing consumer behavior has made it much more important for companies to tweak their marketing processes. One of the emerging ways to do that is to leverage the immense benefits of marketing automation tools.

Marketing technology is integral to this new way of reaching customers, and a few of them are must-haves for every marketing team. Here they are:

Optimizely

Running tests is one of the most essential parts of running marketing campaigns, product creation, and sales. But sometimes, A/B tests fail, and you cannot rely on your regular marketing tests to get the necessary statistical data.

Optimizely helps you to get the best from your experiments. With this software in your marketing technology stack, you can build better campaigns that accurately capture modern digital marketing trends.

You can even experiment across different channels, devices, and customer touchpoints.

You also have access to unlimited users which means you can collaborate with developers to build dashboards that will do wonders for your marketing campaigns.

There is a reason why this platform is power testing and does optimization for some of the largest companies in the world.

You get to set your tests simply and effectively while gaining actionable insights.

Google AdWords

For any business, reaching new customers is a major goal, and there are only a few places where you can do that better than Google AdWords.

Even though Facebook is very popular, Google AdWords is still the most widely used advertising platform worldwide.

It is important that AdWords certification is required for many entry-level digital marketing positions.

Where AdWords beat the competition is the focus. For instance, when you go on Facebook, you are probably there to look at pictures and connect with friends and family. You might not necessarily be there to see ads or to find products.

This is not the case with AdWords. People go there specifically to find solutions to problems they are facing. They want a solution as soon as possible, which works perfectly for you as an advertiser because your marketing teams can get right to sell.

Add to this the fact that Google handles about 40,000 searches every second, which amounts to a mind-boggling 3.5 billion daily and about 1.2 trillion yearly.

That is not all. With AdWords, you also have access to advertise on YouTube, which has active users reaching 1.5 billion every month.

As far as support goes, several dedicated account managers will help you with everything you need. You will also not be lost when trying out the platform, as the dashboard is quite easy to use.

AdWords will always be a useful addition to your marketing stack.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is simply an organizer that helps advertisers to arrange and organize their content effectively on several social media platforms.

The average modern customer operates about 7 different social media accounts. From a marketer’s point of view, this provides a great opportunity to engage with them on multiple platforms simultaneously, but from a backend point of view, it is a nightmare.

Social management tools like Hootsuite makes it easier for you to manage all your social media channels in one place

You can manage, schedule, and create reports for all social media content. You can pull reports for your campaigns easily with their integrated analytics dashboard. It is also a great tool to use in engaging with your customers.

Hootsuite is a content management system on steroids. Your sales teams will perform better will the real-time reporting that Hootsuite can provide for them.

Hubspot

This marketing technology is a great all-in-one tool for your inbound leads, customer relationship management, and sales.

As one of the leading customer relationship management software, it offers impeccable services for your sales, service, operations, marketing, and website management teams.

Hubspot CRM helps you with your customer journey, from creating personalized landing pages to email marketing to attract visitors to converting those leads and closing the deals.

Slack

Communicating within your teams and departments is necessary for every type of organization and should not be a tedious process.

The more aligned your marketing and sales teams are, the better your growth. Slack is the perfect solution for this.

With this software, you can have your team’s communication all in one place. You can create groups, and Slack channels, or message your team members directly.

Slack also integrates with basically every MarTech Tool that you can think of. Trello, Dropbox, Google Drive, and GitHub integrations are all possible.

Salesforce

Managing your customer relations is a pillar for developing your current marketing processes.

Generally, it is 5x less costly to keep an existing customer than sell to a new one. This does not mean that it is easy to resell or upsell to an existing customer.

Because someone bought your product or used your service does not necessarily mean they will keep doing that. This is where marketing technologies like Salesforce come in.

It is a CRM gift that keeps giving with a suite of customizable functions that any marketer can do short work of.

Another significant advantage of this marketing technique is that it has integrations for almost every use case you can think of, which AppExchange facilitates.

AppExchange makes it easy to integrate with other applications, almost as easy as installing plugins on WordPress.

In addition, this software offers lead management, marketing automation, sales data, and partner management features.

The visual flow is excellent as well, offering a workflow that lets you drag and drop expenses and discounts

These are some reasons that several businesses love and use Salesforce regardless of their size. Whether a small business or a huge organization, this marketing software has a use case for you.

Agility

This software helps you to manage all marketing activities easily.

It is intuitive, efficient, and collaborative. You can organize many activities with your teams and managers and allow customers to follow your brand story.

Sprinklr

Customer experience management (CMX) is the touch of engagement you need in your marketing stack.

CMX helps you show your customers that you care about them. It gives you control over the entire customer experience process.

Can you imagine having over 25 social media channels aggregated in one spot where you can reach and listen to what your customers are saying? That is what Sprinklr does for your marketing strategy. Connectivity to other tools on your stack is also not an issue.

AdRoll

This software started as a retargeting platform but has since transformed into a full-funnel DSP (demand-side platform).

All the fancy English means that this marketing technology helps you attract new customers while also converting them. It will also do you one better and help you to maintain a great relationship with them.

With over 30,000 users, AdRoll is taking programmatic marketing by storm and making it work.

Their plans for the future will enable them to figure out which particular ads are making customers buy a product or service using big data and machine learning. This will make them even more attractive to social media management teams.

Marketo

This is one of the analytics tools in your stack that helps you integrate tasks like social media, emails, and automation.

You also get to measure your marketing activities while analyzing your visitors based on demographics and behavior.

The features you get with this modern marketing tool include content marketing, lead management, and customer base marketing.

MailChimp

There are several modern marketing tools to choose from in the email marketing world. You are spoiled for choice, but choosing the right platform for your email marketing campaigns is a great way to hit the ground running and get the best results.

Some of this software is amazing, but they cost an arm and a leg to use, and then there is MailChimp.

This simple-to-use marketing tech allows any company to start an email marketing campaign in minutes, regardless of size.

You also have access to a dashboard that provides accurate data and analytics clearly and concisely. You can set up your email campaigns quickly, but it will look like you used the most expensive and sophisticated software.

If you run a B2B business model, email marketing is one of the influential information sources.

Also, like most MarTech tools, MailChimp integrates seamlessly with almost every app you can think of. Open this platform, set up your email campaign, and watch your results come in.

Zapier

When you need some diverse, detailed, and very precise multi-channel automation in your marketing stack, then Zapier is your go-to.

You can connect anything to anything, and doing that is as easy as clicking a drop-down menu, choosing what you want, and, voila!

The best part, once you have set it up, just let it run in the background. It will make mincemeat of your daily tasks that always seem to take up all your time.

Uberflip

One major focus of marketing technologists is to serve the right content to the right customer at the right time.

One of the social media management tools in your stack that can do that seamlessly is Uberflip.

It pulls all your content library, which would include blogs, videos, newsletters, and more. It makes it easier for marketers to categorize, organize and optimize the perfect tailored content for the consumer.

With this technology, you can create content hubs organized by topics. This is useful because it helps your consumers find answers to their questions and problems easily.

This software has been known to improve customer experience and boost lead generation. It is not cheap to acquire, but if your marketing strategy is dependent on getting the right content to your consumers, then this is the tool for you.

Wrike

It is important to keep every one of your busy marketers, lead management, and marketing teams on the same page.

Your teams should be well connected, working together, and sharing information and data the easiest way possible.

Wrike is the software that can make this possible. It has the reputation of being one of the leading product management platforms worldwide.

If you need your MarTech to keep working smoothly and all your campaigns organized while also managing communications between your teams, Wrike is the way to go.

Building a Smarter MarTech Stack

Leveraging data to power automation and personalization.

For many businesses, creating seamless, personalized experiences for their customers and website visitors is a major focus.

This is why many of these businesses put some money behind improving their data collation which can help them create real-time experiences for their customers.

They can use the visitor’s or user’s information or activity to create a profile that will aid in communicating effectively with them.

Planning to utilize data-rich tools in understanding customer journeys enables businesses to deliver perfectly tailored experiences and content to the right customer with perfect timing.

This modern marketing tech adoption has a lot of potential to create new and improved ways of reaching customers.

The rise of flexible platform ecosystems.

There are so many different tools available for your MarTech stack these days.

These tools typically are great at communicating with one another and even other software outside the stack.

This ease of communication between both internal and external MarTech tools and software has created an agile ecosystem that needs to be nurtured.

It is the best way to ensure you wring the most value from your carefully curated MarTech Stack.

Streamline your MarTech Stack.

MarTech is about finding the right tools to help you attain specific results.

Reducing those tools to only the necessary ones will not only help you have firm control over your budget, but it will also help you extract a lot more value from each tool.

Not all the time, every new and shiny technology will give you a better result than you are getting now. You do not necessarily need to keep adding new tools to your already crowded stack to stay ahead of competitors.

More is not always better. Make sure to grasp your current stack and its capabilities before adding any more, if at all.

Conclusion

Building a MarTech stack is interestingly similar to shopping, although it may not be as much fun.

You’ve learned how to integrate MarTech with enterprise digital marketing architecture and why digital asset management (DAM) is a key tool for delivering these features in your marketing operations. When building your stack, it is a good idea to try and ignore your personal opinions and choices. Try to think about how the choices you make will fit into your company’s process and how they will aid your workflow.

Also, think of your teammates, the people who will be this software’s end-users. Will it be easier for them to use? And if it won’t, are there provisions for adequate training?

Answer these questions and watch your business grow and your customers leave every interaction with your company satisfied.

It does not matter if your company runs based on a B2B or B2C model. There is at least one tool in this piece that can take your business to the next level. Take advantage of it and remember to make only good decisions that benefit your company, not yourself.