Marketing technology is growing in importance, breadth and complexity. While the number of vendors increases, so does the amount of information marketers need to wrap their heads around. We’ve found that the most commonly Googled martech questions are the most basic so, if you’re just starting out, here’s a lowdown on the essential info you need to know.
1. Why is martech important?
Marketing technology offers a fix for almost every problem. It can identify customer profiles, deliver personalised messages to them en masse and provide analysis on how well marketing is working.
Technology will continue to track your customers’ behaviour through the sales cycle so you can provide the right collateral and actions at the right time. This gives your marketing the opportunity to become more agile and hyper-personalised.
Alot of companies also hope the introduction of martech will irradiate departmental silos and replace it with a single, company-wide view of the customer.
What’s clear, particularly from martech’s extraordinary growth, is that the use of martech is now an expected standard. However there is a skills gap preventing organisations from achieving what they would really like to. A report by B2B Marketing and Clarasys found 70% of businesses were looking to digitally transform but the majority of B2B Marketing teams don’t have the required skills.
2. How many martech vendors are there?
Today’s martech landscape comprises of 6,829 marketing technology solutions from 6,242 unique marketing technology vendors, according to the widely used chiefmartec.com map. That compares to the 100 or so companies it mapped in 2011. The map not only gives a clear indication of the sheer scale of the martech industry but also the complexity of it. Here are just some of the types of technology now available to marketers:
Advertising and promotion
- Mobile marketing
- Native content
- Video
- Programmatic
- Social advertising
- PR.
Vendors include: Cision, Adobe, and Google.
Content and experience
- Email marketing
- Automation
- Interactive content
- CMS
- DAM
- SEO
Vendors include: IBM, Turtl, Mail Chimp, Demandbase, SAP and Act-On.
Social and relationships
- Webinars
- Social media marketing
- Advocacy
- CRM
- Chat bots
- Call analytics
- ABM
- Influencers
Vendors include: ON24, Triblio, Genesys, Oracle, Onalytica and Salesforce
Commerce and sales
- E-commerce marketing and platforms
- Sales automation
- Intelligence
- IoT marketing
Vendors include: Dun & Bradstreet, Agent 3, Digital River, Acquia and Fujitsu.
Data
- Marketing analytics
- Marketing data
- Mobile and web analytics
- Dash boards
- Compliance and privacy
Vendors include: Bombora, Localytics, Dell,Quick Pilot, and Tealium.
Management
- Collaboration
- Product
- Budgets
- Staffing
Vendors include: Linkedin, Cisco, BrandMaker, Workfront, and Mitel.
3. What is martech convergence?
A large number of marketing professionals have been Googling the question; ‘What is martech convergence?’. While the answer is simple, the problem it poses is far from it.
Most marketing teams have a wide variety of technologies that perform different functions, such as data management, personalisation, and real-time bidding. Convergence means that all these technologies are able to feed their data into one place, therefore giving the marketer the best possible view of the customer’s behaviour and touch points.
For most marketers, integrating their technologies in this way is their single biggest tech challenge. The current lack of integration causes duplicated processes and data, wasted time and inconsistencies. Most marketers will have to pull data from numerous reports, manually weaving them together and analysing them.
While there is no quick fix to this issue, there is certainly huge opportunity for those vendors that resolve this issue in the future. In the meantime, marketers are forced to research which platforms work well together and look for solutions internally.
The benefits of convergence are:
- A single view of the customer.
- Increased opportunity for acquisition and retention of prospects/customers.
- More accurate personalisation.
- Aligned KPIs.
4. What is dark martech?
Dark martech sounds more sinister than it actually is. It’s nothing to do with illicit transactions through dodgy online traders. It’s simply a term to describe marketing technology that a business has built for itself, rather than use ware from third party vendors.
The popularity of dark martech is rising as emphasis on tech increases. DIY tech also caters to the bespoke needs of the business, it can give them a competitive edge and address some challenges of integrating the many technologies a business may use, as discussed above.
"On one level this is really down to commercial need; if there’s no solution out there that meets your requirements and your need is great enough, you’ll obviously have to develop something."
Clive’s four reasons for building your own ‘dark martech’
- You have an amazing idea and someone has funded you in building a solution that is commercially viable.
- You’re already a software company and building tech is part of what you do.
- You’re an ‘enthusiast’ and just want to create tech.
- You can’t find a suitable solution for the particular business challenge or opportunity you face (this is the most common reason).
