What Is MarTech? And Why Is It Important to Your Business?
Discover what MarTech is, why it's important to be using modern marketing technology, and examples of tools you should be using today.
Blog Post
12 minute read
Oct 02, 2024
Marketing technology, or MarTech, is a term that refers to the tools businesses use to automate, streamline, and optimize their marketing efforts. The use of marketing technology has become increasingly important in recent years as businesses seek to engage with their target audience more effectively, improve their marketing performance, and drive growth and revenue.
The power of marketing technology is more evident today than it ever has been with things like targeted campaigns, personalized messaging, and fully automated workflows. Join us below as we explore the wide world of MarTech in depth.
Marketing technology facilitates stronger connections with your target audience, allows you to communicate with consumers no matter their platform of choice (a specific social media account, email, text, etc.), and allows employees to focus on strategy rather than menial repetitive tasks.
Using the latest marketing technology can also give you additional insights into and use cases for your data, allow you to deliver a better customer experience, and make prospect tracking much easier.
By leveraging modern marketing technology to foster stronger relationships with the audience leads directly to a higher market share and stronger conversions. By investing in the quality of the audience relationships, you can nurture loyalty which is proven to create repeat customers with higher lifetime values, and personal references which remains one of the strongest forms of organic marketing.
Making the Investment
Investing in marketing technology can revolutionize the way businesses engage with their customers and grow their brand. Tools like CRM platforms, marketing automation software, and advanced analytics give companies the ability to manage campaigns with precision, track customer interactions, and deliver personalized experiences that resonate.
With these technologies, businesses can create highly targeted campaigns, ensuring that their message reaches the right audience at exactly the right time. Study after study shows that leads to higher engagement and more meaningful customer relationships.
Beyond driving better connections with customers, marketing technology enhances agility and scalability. By automating repetitive tasks—such as email scheduling, social media posting, and lead nurturing—marketers free up time to focus on strategy and creative innovation.
The ability to gather real-time insights from data helps businesses quickly adapt to market trends and customer preferences. This not only leads to smarter decision-making but also ensures resources are used efficiently, optimizing budgets and improving overall ROI.
Make Greater Use of Your Marketing Data
The prevalence of big data has brought with it a number of challenges, like cybersecurity and learning how to structure and report on it. But with that also comes huge opportunity.
AI and machine learning tools like a CRM give businesses the chance to aggregate, analyze, and then put to use the vast quantities of data at their disposal.
Additionally, modern MarTech solutions are typically compatible with systems in other departments, helping marketers leverage data across the whole business that was previously inaccessible, ultimately improving productivity.
MarTech Helps Businesses Offer a More Personalized Approach
The point of using all this data is the ability to offer a more personalized approach. The more insights you can draw from your data, the better you’ll be able to target your campaigns at specific, segmented groups across all your platforms.
76% of consumers said that they are keener to buy from brands that offer personalized marketing experiences. This means that the better you’re able to understand your prospects (and customers) and target your campaigns, the more effective they’ll be and the more leads you’ll convert.
Current Trends in MarTech
It’s also important to note that marketing technology is evolving rapidly, with a significant focus on data-driven personalization and artificial intelligence (AI). Personalization has moved beyond generic segmentation to hyper-targeted experiences powered by predictive analytics and AI.
Brands can now anticipate customer needs in real-time, delivering tailored content, offers, and communications across multiple channels. AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants are also integrated to enhance customer support, while AI-driven insights optimize campaigns based on detailed consumer behavior patterns that can be identified through granular data analysis.
Another key trend is the growing importance of omnichannel marketing automation. Marketers are using integrated platforms that consolidate social media, email, SMS, and in-app messaging to provide seamless, consistent experiences across touchpoints. These tools streamline campaign management, allowing for data collection and analysis from every interaction.
Lastly, data privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA are shaping how MarTech platforms handle data. When a customer fills out a form, how is their information handled? That question is leading to the adoption of privacy-first strategies that ensure compliance while maintaining personalization.
What's In a MarTech Stack?
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are central to many tech stacks, as they store customer data and track interactions across different channels.
Email marketing platforms enable personalized campaigns based on customer preferences while social media management tools allow marketers to schedule posts, monitor engagement, and analyze performance.
Additionally, analytics platforms such as Google Analytics or more advanced business intelligence tools provide insights into campaign performance, customer behavior, and ROI.
Together, these components create a cohesive system where data flows between tools, enabling more efficient marketing strategies and real-time optimization.
Let’s explore what a full marketing tech stack might look like from content management systems to advertising tech, and of course, CRMs.
Content Management System (CMS)
A CMS is what businesses use to manage their website pages, whether it’s your home page, blog, glossary, product page, or anything else.
CMSes are designed with ease of use in mind, meaning they require virtually no knowledge of HTML and can be used by marketers who can’t code. The goal of the most popular CMSes (HubSpot, WordPress, Drupal, etc.) is to give marketing teams the ability to make website changes without having to call upon a developer or have a huge knowledge of coding and website design.
Email Marketing Platforms
In spite of the popularity of other digital marketing areas, email still remains a central aspect of strategies. In fact, HubSpot reports that 77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement in the last year.
Data analysis combined with email automation makes for a killer combo in today’s marketing environment, allowing businesses to automatically send out highly-targeted campaigns that improve conversion and retention rates. It’s common for email marketing platforms to come included with general inbound marketing solutions offered today.
Advertising Tech
AdTech is a form of MarTech that handles the management of digital campaigns. These solutions allow advertisers to serve targeted ads to the most preferable audiences, measure the success of those campaigns through tracking engagement and clicks, and then use that information to dictate the direction of future campaigns.
Using a platform that can track data allows you to focus on which ads worked and which didn’t, meaning you can further optimize your budget for ad spend and get your advertising in front of prospects most likely to convert.
Social Media Management Programs
Social media is a central part of engagement for a modern business, making technology that helps manage these platforms a must-have. Not only are social media platforms a useful tool for your content strategy, but they are additionally an important resource for prospects and clients for customer service and other queries.
Measuring your engagement on social media with a MarTech solution gives you an opportunity to see which content trends perform best across your platforms and gives you an insight into how effective your interactions are with users.
Of course, social media is a vital source of advertising, so it additionally helps to be able to see how well the specific campaigns you’re running through LinkedIn, Google, or Facebook ads are performing.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tools
SEO tools are a critical component of a marketing technology stack, helping businesses optimize their online visibility and drive organic traffic. These tools assist in keyword research, competitive analysis, and content optimization, ensuring that websites rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Platforms like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz provide insights into keyword opportunities, search volume, and ranking difficulty, enabling marketers to create content that targets the right terms.
SEO tools also play a significant role in monitoring and maintaining a website’s health. They provide analytics on site speed, mobile-friendliness, and crawl errors, which can negatively impact search rankings if left unchecked. These platforms also include backlink analysis features that help marketers build a strong link profile by identifying high-quality sites for link-building opportunities.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
MarTech software like CRMs are useful for aligning marketing and sales. A CRM allows your marketers and sales reps to have access to all the customer data they need to manage relationships and help prospects down the funnel.
50% of teams improved their productivity by using a mobile CRM.
This is typically presented to stakeholders through a single dashboard, where they have access to everything they need like a customer’s previous history with you, outstanding orders, customer service issues, and even things like their social media activity regarding yourself and competitors.
This makes cultivating and retaining better relationships easier, with the added benefit of a more streamlined system for employees that improves productivity and satisfaction.
Outlook of Marketing Technology Going Forward
As businesses shift their marketing to digital, the emphasis on implementing technologies that aid these means will become more pronounced.
With these implementations becoming a more important aspect of marketing initiatives, businesses are frequently asking themselves what MarTech equipment they need and why MarTech will benefit their specific objectives.
This is even more the case when the importance of data is considered in informing campaigns and strategies. In this way, the ability of MarTech tools to aggregate and analyze information is key.
Moving forward, expect more businesses to bolster their MarTech stacks as investment in digital marketing continues to rise, and as advanced technologies, including AI and machine learning, continue being developed.
Wrapping Up on Modern Marketing Technology
The ways in which technology is implemented into business operations is going to continue to evolve as organizations become better at adopting and integrating new technology while the technology itself also becomes more sophisticated and capable. Since marketing often acts as one of the core driving forces at the heart of an organization, it goes to reason that marketing technology is currently booming.
By integrating a full MarTech stack that features a CRM, CMS, social media management tools, email marketing platforms, and business intelligence tools that allow you to derive powerful insights, you can create a stronger customer experience that ultimately leads to more conversions.
Marketing technology is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to developing winning campaigns online. Explore all the marketing resources you need to stand out today. Get instant access to our eBook, The Ultimate List of Marketing Resources for Any Campaign, now!
