Why MarTech Needs to Be at the Heart of Your Strategy

Marketers that combine technology and traditional marketing activity in some way (which can of course include elements that we readily refer to as ‘digital marketing’) are dealing with MarTech already.

Marketingland describe MarTech as applying to:

Read on to find out:

• Why MarTech should be at the heart of your strategy
• Three powerful MarTech capabilities
• The issues (if any) with MarTech

MarTech allows marketers to build relationships with potential customers, and it has been widely reported that its adoption has been pivotal to the accelerated growth of many businesses. For example, Dave Helmreich, LiveIntent Chief Operating Officer, writes for Venturebeat that the clever use of MarTech was instrumental to Unilever acquiring Dollar Shave Club for one billion dollars. He says that: 

Quintessentially, MarTech allowed a brand that sold “mildly molded steel to shave faces, a technology that has been around since at least the Roman era,” into a unicorn (a start-up company valued at over $1 billion).

To tackle this complex technology set, it helps to think about the three A’s of MarTech: Analytics, Automation and Authenticity.

Analytics:

Digital analytics are now incredibly advanced and sophisticated, and if harnessed well they can enable marketers to make educated optimization efforts. This can significantly impact on conversions and in turn, ultimately the bottom line.  Tomasz Borys, Director of Marketing at Kissmetrics, says that:

In order to truly enable data to inform marketing strategies, marketers need to ensure that they are using an analytics tool that allows for the level of data interrogation that is available to them. Setting up a robust tool that allows for contact, cultivation, prospecting, retargeting and communication often takes a significant investment of time to set up, but once implemented will allow for real time insights that can inform real time reactive campaigns.

Automation:

Marketers can harness MarTech products and services to automate increasingly personalized and effective campaigns.

There are many marketing automation tools that have varying USPs but most can assist marketers with customer modeling, calendar-based triggers, multi-channel automation and real-time campaign tracking via visual dashboards. Some of the key providers include: Marketo, Hubspot, Salesforce Pardot, Oracle Marketing Cloud and IBM Marketing Cloud etc.

Authenticity:

One of the challenges that MarTech brings with it is the distancing from authenticity. If companies move towards an increasing (perhaps over) reliance on marketing technologies, the human element faces the risk of being lost.

Tyler Douglas, Chief Marketing and Sales Officer at Vision Critical and author of ‘The Enterprise Guide to Marketing Technology’ says that: 

As databases grow, customers and prospects can become faceless lines in a spreadsheet. In an age when in one breath marketers are urged to stop selling and start engaging on customers' terms, but are then presented with technological advancements that have the power to (almost) entirely remove the human element, marketers need to ensure they strike an authentic balance.

Customers expect the experience MarTech can deliver

Although many might be unaware of the intrinsic detail associated with MarTech, consumers now expect the experience that MarTech can deliver.

For example, those looking to fill up their business calendar with networking events in Brighton, expect to be presented with content about the Brighton networking scene, not exhibitions in Dublin.

Customers now demand ‘super relevant’ content and communications, and there are many brands that are delivering it to them. If your message isn’t hitting the right notes, it will go unnoticed (or noticed for the wrong reasons and dismissed as irrelevant).

Ginger Conlon, Editor in Chief of DMN news says that customer expectations are at an all-time high, and they are becoming familiar to immediate user-friendliness and will assume that their brand experiences should be tailored and accessible. She adds that with:

It is for this reason that MarTech must be an integral element of any marketers’ strategy, allowing them to lean on cutting edge technologies to engage customers on their terms.