MarTech is the blending of marketing and technology. It makes the lives of marketers easier by automating many marketing tasks. MarTech frees up time, allowing marketers’ to focus on how to better engage with customers by streamlining, measuring and scaling marketing activities. Companies tend to leverage a suite of tools for their marketing processes. This suite is your MarTech Stack.
Think of MarTech as a plane
Let’s take a plane. Its job is to get you from one point to another, but that plane is made up of a huge number of parts, systems and of course technology. When you are a passenger, you don’t notice all the parts during your travel, but when you land you’ve been on a highly-customized journey: deciding on a destination, when to travel, choosing how to purchase your ticket, selecting your seat, receiving communications prior to take-off, deciding on what meal, drinks and media to consume en-route, and finally landing at your destination. After exiting the airport you would have a very clear picture of whether you’d endorse your trip or not.
The plane is MarTech. A selection of tools to attract and retain happy customers who were led through a perfect buying experience to a perfect post-purchase destination. MarTech gives you wings for smoother data management, workflows, automated content, social media, analytics, customer satisfaction surveys and more along the way.
So how does one achieve the perfect MarTech stack? Is it one giant piece of software promising to ‘do it all’? Or should you be bolting together the crème de la crème of each tool you need? Where to start?
Your pilot
A role you should consider is one of the Marketing Technologist. A newly emerging role, this person combines information technology knowledge with creative marketing skills. The role seeks to create a streamlined relationship between information technology and marketing. The primary focus is to ensure the marketing strategy can be executed through digital tools so you’ll find this role collaborating between IT and marketing – selecting content management systems, publishing tools, workflow tools, data analytic tools, A/B testing tools, creative tools…all the while ensuring the tools are compliant, secure, and user-friendly.
What do they need
Each MarTech stack is typically built around a core such as Adobe Experience Manager, Marketo for example. From there, the tech branches out to include automated content, social media management, customer data, digital assets, content review and approval, net promoter scores, campaign sales tracking, just to name a few.
The marketing technologist will have skills in automation, search engine optimization, CRM systems, Adobe tools, and can creatively solve problems – making different software ‘talk’ to each other is not like putting a jigsaw together with the guidance of what the end picture should look like. On top of this is ultimately being a great communicator since the biggest requirement is bridging the gap between IT and marketing professionals, and often external creative agencies too.
What is this all for?
Why are we searching for the perfect MarTech stack? Because every dollar spent on advertising should be leading to the perfect customer attraction, acquisition, and retention experience – not wasted. With the right MarTech stack, visibility of the input and output quickly become apparent and the data doesn’t lie – everything that went into producing the end-to-end journey for that customer can be seen, tracked along with the end result.
Investing in a Marketing Technologist is money well spent to achieve the perfect MarTech stack.