The Essential Guide to Marketing Technology (MarTech)

Table of Contents

1. Defining Marketing Technology (MarTech)
   • Types of MarTech Platforms and Tools
   • Dependencies on Goals and Target Market
2. Key Benefits of Adopting MarTech
   • Improved Efficiency and Productivity
   • More Personalized, Customer-Centric Marketing
   • Data for Campaign Optimization and Proving ROI
   • Support for Both Digital and Traditional Marketing
3. Core Capabilities Provided by MarTech
   • Marketing Automation
   • CRM Management
   • Web and Marketing Analytics
   • Testing and Optimization
   • Omnichannel Personalization
4. The Role of Digital Asset Management (DAM)
   • Centralized Management of Digital Assets
   • DAM System Components and Capabilities
   • Integrating DAM with the MarTech Stack
5. Building a Powerful MarTech Stack
   • Determining Needs and Identifying Gaps
   • Auditing Current Tools and Evaluating Integrations
   • Weighing All-In-One vs Specialized Tools
   • Budgeting and Selecting Providers
   • Implementation Roadmapping
6. Implementing a MarTech Strategy
   • Gaining Buy-In and Coordinating Teams
   • Training and Support Processes
   • Developing Data Infrastructure
   • Continual Testing and Optimization
7. The Importance of Data in MarTech
   • Informing Decisions with Analytics and Insights
   • Integrating Data Across MarTech Systems
   • Ensuring Privacy and Transparency
8. Emerging MarTech Capabilities to Watch
   • Expanded Analytics and Predictive Intelligence
   • Automation of Routine Marketing Tasks
   • Sophisticated AI-Driven Workflow Orchestration
   • Next-Generation Identity Management
9. The Future of Marketing Technology
   • Omnichannel Data Integration
   • Intelligent Workflow Automation
   • Proving the ROI of MarTech Investments
   • The Rise of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and AI

Defining Marketing Technology (MarTech)

Marketing Technology, commonly referred to as MarTech, encompasses all of the software, platforms, and tools that marketers utilize to execute, optimize, and analyze their marketing efforts across channels. As digital transformation continues accelerating across all industries, the MarTech landscape has expanded enormously – by some estimates there are now over 8,000 distinct MarTech solutions available from vendors to address various capabilities.

Some major categories of MarTech tools include:

Marketing Automation Platforms:

Facilitate personalized workflows, lead scoring, and journey orchestration

CRM Platforms:

Manage customer and prospect data as well as sales team engagement

Web Analytics Platforms:

Monitor traffic, behavior, conversions, and performance

Content Management Systems:

Enable centralized creation and publication of content

Email Marketing Platforms:

Manage campaigns, customize messages, and analyze results

eCommerce Platforms:

Power online stores, transactions, and customer engagement

SEO Tools:

Improve site visibility, traffic and search ranking

Social Media Management Tools:

Streamline posting, monitoring, analytics and engagement

Testing and Optimization Tools:

A/B test content variations and offers to maximize conversion and ROI

The ideal mix of MarTech solutions for any given organization depends heavily on their target markets, typical sales cycles, overall customer journeys, and marketing objectives.

For B2B companies, CRM and sales automation, account-based marketing capabilities, and mature analytics platforms tend to take priority.

B2C brands focus more heavily on tools for personalization, omni-channel content distribution, community engagement, and mobile optimization to address their buyer journeys.

But regardless of industry, MarTech now plays a mission-critical role in helping entire marketing organizations execute scalable, measurable initiatives to fuel pipelines and revenue growth.

Key Benefits of Adopting MarTech

There are a multitude of compelling ways modern Marketing Technology empowers organizations to substantially improve performance across these key dimensions:

Improved Efficiency and Productivity

• Marketing automation platforms radically streamline repetitive and manual tasks
• Content reuse, revisions, and governance are enabled through Digital Asset Management (DAM)
• Dashboards and reporting provide visibility to optimize budget and resource allocation

Task	Old Way	With MarTech
Email Campaigns	Manual segmentation and sending	Automated workflows based on behavior
Social Media Posting	Manual posting across channels	Centralized multi-channel publishing
Campaign Analysis	Manual data consolidation	Automated reporting dashboards updated in real-time

More Personalized, Customer-Centric Marketing

• Individualized content recommendations and experiences based on interests
• Predictive lead scoring identifies sales opportunities earlier on
• Unified customer data from CRM and other systems enables consistent messaging across touchpoints

Data and Insights to Optimize Campaigns and Prove ROI

• Quantify impact on pipeline velocity, deal size, and revenue achievement
• Continually optimize performance based on attribution and predictive models
• Demonstrate clear contribution of marketing programs to accelerating revenue

Supports Both Digital and Traditional Marketing Channels

• Events, tradeshows and field marketing integrated with digital campaigns
• Print ads, radio spots and more coded to enable attribution modeling
• Common metrics and clean customer data across all on/offline initiatives

By providing these game-changing advantages, MarTech solutions have become the essential connective tissue enabling modern marketing teams to maximize their reach, productivity, and overall business impact.

Core Capabilities Provided by MarTech

Beyond just improving existing tactics, MarTech also equips teams with entirely new capabilities that can elevate their marketing strategies:

Sophisticated Campaign and Lead Scoring Optimization

Advanced segment construction powered by machine learning models that automatically track engagement, behavior, and profile attributes to assign tiered lead scores. Enables hyper-targeted, automated campaign sequencing.

Multi-Armed Bandit Testing

Algorithms that dynamically allocate higher traffic to better performing content variations in real-time - enabling faster automated optimization.

Account-Based Marketing Orchestration

Playbooks to sequence targeted campaign touches aligned to buying committee contact roles within target accounts.

Predictive Analytics and Intelligence

AI and big data uncover patterns in historical deals to provide insights on propensity to buy, likely deal size, key buying factors, and recommendations.

Omnichannel Personalization

Unified data and analytics combine with customer journey mapping to enable 1:1 tailored messaging and experiences across platforms.

While individual tools may excel at specific functions, combining platforms like CRM, marketing automation, and analytics provides integrated capabilities to take marketing strategies to the next level. But an integrated martech stack alone isn’t enough...

The Role of Digital Asset Management (DAM) In MarTech

A vital component of modern martech ecosystems is a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system providing centralized storage, management, and governance of all the digital content flowing through marketing technology tools. This includes both media assets like images, videos, and graphics as well as document files like PDFs, presentations and Office documents.

On their own, DAM systems provide significant value:

Centralized Library

Consolidates all digital asset files in a cloud-based repository with role-based access controls instead of fragmented across folders, email inboxes or hard drives.

Automated Tagging

Leverages AI to classify assets, identify objects/themes, assign relevant metadata so files become easily discoverable.

Personalized Portals

Customized asset libraries for particular teams, campaigns or initiatives to provide easy self-service access.

Multi-Channel Publishing

Output multiple file renditions tailored to the technical requirements of web, email, digital ads etc.

But the full power of DAM for marketing gets unlocked as a connected hub for broader MarTech ecosystems:

Seamless Integration

APIs connect DAM with content management, marketing automation and sales tools so files can flow directly into campaigns, emails, collateral and more.

Embedded Access

Find, preview and add assets from DAM directly within content editors, without disrupting workflows.

Centralized Metrics

Asset performance tracking provides intelligence on engagement levels across regions, campaigns and buyer stages.

Integrated DAM minimizes repetitive searches across fragmented archives and instead fuels productivity through centralized, reusable content that accelerates execution across MarTech solutions.

Building a Powerful MarTech Stack

Assembling the right combination of complementary technologies tailored to an organization’s marketing objectives, budgets and capabilities involves several pivotal steps:

Determine Business Goals and Identify Gaps

Interview leadership, operations and analytics teams to outline current business objectives, KPIs, challenges and data disconnects. What problems need solving?

Audit Existing Technologies

Catalog all existing marketing tools utilized by department, brand and region to surface redundancies or gaps relative to goals. Assess usability and adoption levels.

Evaluate Potential Platform Integrations

Determine what data and functionality needs flow between platforms like CRM, DAM, marketing automation and analytics. Will APIs or common SQL databases align systems?

Weigh All-In-One vs Specialized Tools

Consolidated suites can provide convenient unified hubs but often specialize only in 1-2 functions. Best-of-breed point solutions sometimes excel for targeted use cases but can create data silos - evaluate tradeoffs closely.

Map Budgets to Priorities

Audit licensing models, hosting fees, services and internal costs across tech stacks/headcount. Determine build vs buy approaches for new tech. Align budgets to business goals.

Research Leading Solution Providers

For priority segments, analyze vendors on capability breadth, ease of use, implementation services offered and total cost of ownership models.

Define Implementation Roadmap

Phase rollout balancing business priorities, budgets and organizational bandwidth - while ensuring stakeholder alignment. Prioritize value-driving integrations upfront.

Regularly revisiting these planning elements enables continuously optimizing a martech stack aligned to evolving business imperatives.

Implementing a MarTech Strategy

Beyond just selecting the right mix of marketing technologies aligned to business objectives, fully activating MarTech investments depends on sharpening several foundational elements:

Gaining Executive Buy-In

Demonstrating how MarTech ties directly to overarching revenue goals and cost efficiency KPIs is essential for leadership endorsement and budget.

Designating Clear Platform Ownership

Coordination across marketing ops, IT, and business analysts is crucial for outcome alignment. Explicit platform ownership models by team enable accountability.

Providing Ongoing Training

Specialized learning paths ensuring user proficiency across analyst roles to leadership. Combine instructor-led bootcamps, online courses, and internal certifications focused on workflows.

Developing Data and Integrations Infrastructure

Connecting platforms via unified SQL databases, building ETL data pipelines, and providing holistic dashboards necessitates tight collaboration with IT teams for foundational architectures.

Instituting Continuous Optimization Cycles

Rather than a one-time project, exceptional MarTech strategies involve quarterly success reviews analyzing adoption data to right-size investments or realign to evolving imperatives.

While intuitive, user-friendly tools help drive adoption, MarTech performance ultimately depends on addressing foundational elements of stakeholder alignment, team coordination, skill building, data unification, and improvement processes. Leadership engagement proves critical in mandating the necessary culture of mutual responsibility across marketing, analytics and IT to actualize MarTech investments to improve outcomes.

The Importance of Data in MarTech

As MarTech suites expand in sophistication, one ingredient proves truly essential for elevating marketing strategies: high quality, actionable data. Some key opportunities created by tightly integrating information flows across tech stacks include:

Informing Strategic and Tactical Decisions

Executive dashboards centralize campaign, lead, account, and revenue metrics to highlight opportunities and steer budget decisions. Similarly, deception analysis identifies bad data before it derails planning.

Powering Predictive Analytics

Machine learning pattern detection within unified customer data identifies behavioral signals correlated to conversion, expansion or churn - enabling tailored predictive lead scoring, recommendations, and segmentation strategies.

Automating Personalized Experiences

Event triggers based on CRM data instantly activate tailored follow-up messages and workflows via marketing automation to accelerate engagement.

Tightly Quantifying Campaign ROI

Multi-touch attribution assigns pipeline and revenue credit across initiatives to scientifically optimize spending towards top performing strategies, offers and segments.

Unifying Online and Offline Insights

Integrating POS, offline event participation, and other real-world data sources with ad spend, web analytics and more provides complete intelligence on buyer journeys.

But activating data to enhance MarTech performance introduces several considerations around integration, quality, governance, and managing consumer transparency expectations:

Connecting Data Across Technologies

Attaining a unified view requires connecting CRM to other databases like analytics platforms or data warehouses, via SQL joins, ETL pipelines or aggregated dashboards.

Ensuring Consistent, Accurate Information

Data hygiene processes detecting duplicates or anomalies are essential, as is contextual data literacy across teams to drive reliable analysis.

Coordinating Governance Policies

Documenting guidelines for data ethically across collection, storage procedures, access permissions and consumer transparency enables consistency balancing insights and privacy.

With innovation dramatically expanding MarTech functionality, marketers’ abilities to harness data ultimately represent the key to driving maximal value by informing strategy, guiding decisioning, personalizing messaging, and quantifying impact.

Emerging MarTech Capabilities to Watch

The dizzying pace of innovation across the MarTech landscape continues accelerating annually. Beyond current solution portfolios, new capabilities on the horizon that marketing teams must prepare to incorporate include:

Expand Marketing Analytics

More robust visualization capabilities provide self-service accessibility. AI-driven diagnosis identifies improving / worsening metrics. Custom hierarchical metadata simplifies categorization for reporting.

Automate Routine Marketing Tasks

Intelligent process automation bots handle high volume repetitive tasks like campaign setup, tagging, list imports, and report generation to boost productivity.

Sophisticated AI-Driven Workflow Orchestration

Next-generation scenario modeling and decision logic creation tools empower marketers to build advanced, self-tuning workflows and customer journey maps.

Revolutionize Identity Management

Augmented identity graphs leverage machine learning to connect known and anonymous users across devices, enhancing personalization while preserving privacy.

Accelerate Testing via Intelligent Experimentation

Algorithms dynamically launch content variations across audience micro-segments and self-optimize based on performance. Significantly faster experiment cycle times.

Harness Predictive Intelligence

Causal machine learning algorithms process hundreds of attribute permutations to uncover not just correlational drivers but actual causal interdependencies amongst metrics and dimensions. Enables optimal resource allocation.

Rapid innovation introduces complexity in constant prioritization across emerging technologies. But maintaining focus on addressing tangible business challenges, while balancing adoption capacity and people capabilities, represents the best path to maximum ROI.

The Future of Marketing Technology

While MarTech capabilities continue rapidly advancing, the biggest paradigm shifts center on deeper interconnectivity across the marketing technology ecosystem itself:

Omnichannel Data Integration and Intelligence

Shatter data silos through embedded, augmented intelligence (machine learning models) within infrastructure to create unified profiles in real-time across all online and offline channels. Enables true 1:1 personalization.

Hyper-Automation of Marketing Execution

Sophisticated no code / low code scenario modeling empowers marketing teams to automate multi-step workflows, lead assignment rules, and journey decision logic without IT bottlenecks. Plus intelligent process automation handles growing volumes of repetitive tasks.

Proving ROI Across All MarTech Investments

Business scrutiny will drive CMOs to move beyond superficial software adoption metrics towards quantifying how platforms directly accelerate pipeline velocity and revenue achievement – enabled by multi-touch attribution.

The Rise of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and AI

To meet individualized customer expectations within a growing data landscape, future MarTech ecosystems will all run on integrated customer intelligence platforms - amplified by artificial intelligence - to inform messaging, decisions and experiences.

The ability to develop competencies in leveraging data for analysis while building connected, scalable and flexible technology architectures ultimately represents the keys to maximizing MarTech capabilities into the future. With people, processes and integration all progressing hand-in-hand alongside innovation advancements, marketing technology mainstream adoption will accelerate faster globally - unlocking new dimensions in customer-centricity.