Martech (Marketing Technology) refers to manifold tools that come in handy for every marketer to accomplish all-important marketing objectives. Basically, marketing technology is the use of functional technology tools in the overall marketing strategy, the equal combination of marketing with technology. With today’s breakneck speed in tech developments, it’s more important than ever to properly navigate through the maze of available martech solutions and choose the winning marketing technology strategy for the specific project.
According to the findings from the annual Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2021-2022, marketing budgets have dropped to 6.4% of the general company revenue in 2021. What it means is that marketers have to think more carefully about how to get more value from each penny spent and which martech stack to use to get bigger ROI (return on investment).
Martech Stack
So, what is a martech stack?
Martech stack is a data ecosystem that marketers use for refining their marketing activities. The marketing landscape is rapidly developing, and there is an abundance of various martech tools on the market. The main purpose of utilizing such tools is to improve marketing processes, make them easier as well as measure all the marketing activities and monitor the spending.
Martech stack can be also described as a mix of various systems, services, solutions, tools that are used for addressing particular marketing goals. There are more than 8,000 various vendors in the martech terrain, so when it comes to the question which marketing software solutions are the best, the answer is simple: it all depends on the type of business and the main martech strategy defined for your business. The major difference in choosing particular martech business solutions lies in which type of business sector you are operating: B2C (business to consumers) or B2B (business to businesses).
Nevertheless, when you start setting up a martech stack for your business, first and foremost, you should think about the foundational technologies, and then add up specific sales and marketing technology tools tailored for your peculiar goals.
Key Components of Martech Solutions
Both B2B and B2C marketers should take into account the following vital marketing technology tools for building up successful marketing strategy:
Content Management System (CMS)
With the help of CMS, every marketer can easily and smoothly optimize, update, test (via A/B testing) the effectiveness of the overall content marketing strategy.
Email Service Provider (ESP)
ESPs allow marketers to set up and send marketing campaigns to the chosen recipients. Some more complex ESPs include personalization and segmentation capabilities, marketing automation features.
Digital Asset Management (DAM)
The main purpose of DAM is to keep track of many digital assets like documents, images, videos, etc. It helps to use the latest version of logos, and all the product details.
Analytics Tools
Such tools are essential in capturing all the necessary user activities. By utilizing web analytics tools, marketers can better understand user behavior, user navigation patterns, and the overall quality of the user experience.
Advertising Technology
AdTech is a valuable tool in acquisition of new customers as well as retargeting the existing ones. It’s also used for displaying ads, ad tracking, remarketing, etc.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is especially important in driving organic traffic to the website by ranking higher in search engines. SEO tools are also used in doing proper keyword research, optimize content, and grow backlinks.
Social Media
Social media is crucial when it comes to building a martech strategy. Modern martech stack includes necessary tools for managing as well as monitoring all the activities on social media. Social media helps engage with the customers, build relationships with them, and, thus, maximize the impact of the overall marketing campaign.
These are the most basic must-have martech tools that turn out to be useful for every marketer. Marketing specialists also tend to utilize martech automation platforms that help them get more qualified leads and build more effective marketing campaigns.
Top Martech Platforms for Marketing Automation
There is an abundance of marketing technology platforms and solutions in various categories. But the majority of marketing specialists agree that the most valuable martech solutions are concentrated around automation platforms.
Here we’ve prepared a short list of some of the top-rated marketing technology platforms for marketing automation.
1. Hubspot
Hubspot is best suitable for small to middle-sized businesses. It provides an excellent CRM (customer relationship management) platform. Hubspot CRM serves not only marketing purposes but it also caters to sales, web management teams, service and operations. Hubspot has great marketing automation capacities. Here you can create content for landing pages, emails, integrate mobile and account-based marketing as well as analytics. Hubspot also allows third-party vendor incorporation. For example, you can integrate Salesforce or other platforms that will be helpful in your marketing strategy. It’s very easy-to-use for marketers, as it has an intuitive interface and user-friendly design.
2. Adobe Marketo Engage (Marketo)
Adobe Marketo Engage is marketing automation software tailored to marketing products and services including content creation and SEO, native CRM integrations with Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamic CRM, and what’s more. This marketing automation platform is a preferable choice for bigger businesses. Marketo Engage is mainly used for marketing analytics, personalized display ads, interactivity with customers on the website, better communication with the customers using mobile devices, coordination of marketing and sales, as well as for creation, automation and measuring campaigns across various channels.
3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is digital marketing automation and analytics software. Even though Salesforce was founded back in 2000, it still remains one of the most significant martech players in the world. Currently, Salesforce supports various marketing dimensions like pre-campaign and post-campaign analytics, advertising and social media engagement, real-time customer engagement, push notifications and mobile messaging. Salesforce marked the start of the Customer Experience management concept. Customer Journey Builder embedded in Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps provide more personalized customer experience.
4. Oracle Eloqua
Eloqua is a SaaS (software as a service) marketing automation platform. It is offered by Oracle, and its main purpose is to assist in increasing conversions, sales as well as in better understanding of customers. This marketing solution is mostly used in big enterprises that operate in the B2B sector. It offers advanced lead scoring, integrated sales tools and allows marketers to create adaptive multi-step or simple campaigns, better engagement with mobile messaging, and help with automating repetitive tasks. Eloqua doesn’t have its own CRM but it allows for integration of other CRM tools like Salesforce, Oracle’s CRM, Microsoft Dynamics.
Of course, there are many other martech platforms for marketing automation on the market. Before choosing and purchasing the specific marketing technology platform that will be best suitable for you, try to schedule a demo for several platforms, -in such a way, you can be sure that this particular marketing automation platform will best serve your needs.
Create a Winning Martech Strategy with Custom Martech Solutions
Using martech has tons of advantages, among which are creating better relationships with the customer, nurturing new leads, making smarter content, doing more things faster, automating mundane tasks and saving time for more creative work. But as you’ve seen by now there’s an abundance of martech services on the market. So, how not to get lost among these services and get the most out of them?
First of all, you need to build a clear-cut martech strategy for a specific project, then –use custom martech solutions.
Here are some pieces of advice on building effective martech strategy:
- clearly identify your marketing goals and the necessary means for achieving them
- make a thorough audit of the tools you are currently using
- visualize your martech roadmap
- recognize and make a list of the gaps you have
- do preliminary planning taking into account customer journey, conversion, and analytics
- think about short and long-term KPIs
- prioritize and choose the martech stack that will align with your goals
And if you want to create a winning and impressive martech strategy, gain a competitive edge over others, win the customers’ attention, then you should definitely opt for bespoke marketing software development.
Choosing the Right Martech Solutions for Your Business
1. Define Your Goals
Before diving into Martech, clearly define your marketing goals. Whether it's lead generation, brand awareness, or customer retention, understanding your objectives guides the selection process.
2. Scalability
Choose Martech solutions that align with your business's growth trajectory. Scalability ensures your tools can evolve alongside your expanding needs.
3. User-Friendly Interface
A user-friendly interface is crucial for efficient utilization. Ensure your chosen Martech solutions are intuitive, enabling your team to harness their full potential without extensive training.
Building Custom Martech Stack
When using a martech custom software solution, you will get martech services tailored to your individual needs. On top of getting the essential martech tools, you will have all the tools needed for your specific marketing campaign. With a customized approach, you can add new top-notch functionalities to your existing solution, for example, AI-based martech solutions, referral management, planning, and so on.
And in case you wonder where to start from and how to build a martech stack, you can hire a professional experienced team that will take care of it. At A-Team Global, we can provide you with professional expertise regarding building and implementation of the martech tools and martech platforms that will be best suitable for achieving your marketing goals. Our experienced engineers can either build a custom martech stack from scratch or enhance your existing project. We have been on the market for 10 years, and have helped a lot of companies to achieve their goals.
Case Studies
The number of martech app subscribers increased by 15% after its update
The A-Team Global experts reviewed and successfully redesigned a martech app so that it could better fit the customer’s business goals. Our team also re-powered the app with newer technology to increase security and scalability of the solution. On top of that, we added several additional features to make the app even better tailored to the customers’ business needs.
As a result of our work, the app gained traction and allowed the users to cope with their marketing tasks much more effectively. The number of subscribers to the app has increased by 15%. We continue our collaboration with the customer on other projects.
The conversion rate increased by 13% after the creation of new email marketing platform
A-Team Global specialists offered the creation of a new email marketing platform as the response to the client’s problem of having many emails hit the spam folder. Our team worked on the platform taking into account all the customer’s requests and even going beyond.
Eventually, the company received a professional email platform with such functions as: customization of email design, email personalization, convenient template creation, quick and simple access via web browser, thorough data analysis, and others.
Such a platform made it possible to run mass mail campaigns without losing emails in the spam folder. As a result, the click rate increased by 15%, new leads increased by 36%, and conversion rate –by 13%.
Conclusion
Another significant reason for using a martech custom solution is that it will help you create highly personalized superb customer experience, understand your buyer personas much better, segment them properly, and, thus, offer the best solution to each of them. And in the world of harsh competition for customer attention, it will bring you a significant competitive advantage.
Only customized martech software will make it possible to utilize the most functional tools geared towards your individual marketing goals and help successfully achieve them.
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