Shriya is the co-founder and CEO of Content Ninja. Prior to starting Content Ninja, she worked with Price Waterhouse as a Chartered Accountant and has a deferred admit from ISB, Hyderabad. She is an SLP Fellow and a Quora Top Writer. When she’s not fielding client calls, she can be found cleaning cat hair from her clothes. ContentNinja, now a part of BlueVector, is a full-service B2B marketing communications agency that focuses on emerging technologies (big data, AI, ML, blockchain, 5G, among others) as well as fin-tech businesses in the US.
When Scott Brinker published Martech5000 in 2017, who knew that by 2021, there would be more than 7,040 marketing software companies fighting for market share in a 121 billion dollar industry?
For the uninitiated, Scott Brinker is the Godfather of Martech. He is also the VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot. In 2017, he created a marketing technology landscape supergraphic, MarTech 5000 – named after the 5,000 companies competing in the global marketing tech space – which quickly became the most cited reference of all time.
In 2020, Brinker had to update the slide with more than 2,000 companies – making it nearly 7,040 marketing software companies fighting for market share.
The bottom line: The MarTech industry is GIGANTIC
The pandemic sparked a rapid digital shift in every industry and accelerated the adoption of digital technologies by an average of seven years. Applications that were “nice-to-have” became “must-have” as nimble-footed companies grappled with rapidly evolving customer behaviours and an influx of marketing communications, making MarTech the lifeblood of the marketing world.
Your marketing technology stack can either propel your business forward or can hold it back. MarTech helps you close the digital gap that seems to get more prominent with the evolving user behaviour. Advances in artificial intelligence, analytics, and automation fuel the modern marketer’s speed to adapt to the changes. Simply put, MarTech is the final piece of the puzzle that helps you pivot marketing from ‘outreach’ to ‘growth’.
So, what exactly is MarTech? It’s an ecosystem of sales and marketing tools interconnected to track and engage users throughout their digital journey. It encompasses analytics tools, SEO tools, marketing platforms, CRMs, CDPs, DXPs, experience platforms to help marketers design and personalize communications for the user at any stage of their journey. MarTech has become a staple in digital marketing campaigns but can also help in optimizing marketing efforts across channels.
Good MarTech like HubSpot and Marketo cover sales enablement and customer feedback as well, helping you build a continuous flywheel of leads that turn into valuable customers. This ranges from simpler automation like scheduled posting, email automation to complex workflows – like sharing hyper-personalized resources with buyers at different stages of their journey, mapping their behaviours and segmenting them based on their interactions with your digital platform.
So, the real question is, how can companies slingshot to hyper-growth with MarTech?
Marketing is no longer manual. No-code MarTech helps you convert marketing into a purely strategic activity eliminating the need for A/B testing emails, posting assets based on timezones, manually tracking BANT scores and more. One element that stands out is the ability to handle extensive data and completely automate reports for marketers. Marketing attribution is a challenge in all cases, but you can gain instant visibility into your marketing efforts and ROI with the right platform.
Before we dive into why a dynamic MarTech strategy is so important today, let’s take a look at the top three trending MarTech tools you can invest in for the next two years.
- Customer advocacy management tool – Also known as referral marketing software, it is used to enable customers to promote content or products through word-of-mouth. This tool is quite useful to gather information for prospect users and can also motivate companies to engage with clients, test new products, provide feedback and share news.
- Marketing automation platforms (MAPS) are used to automate core marketing processes for reputation building, demand creation, sales enablement, and user lifecycle management.
- Marketing resource management (MRM) – These tools manage the planning, budgeting, projects, assets and communications, and analytics.
MarTech implementation and investment are on the rise. More and more organizations are leveraging MarTech tools to navigate through the rapid changes in user behaviour. MarTech enables your teams to harness the power of data and build relationships with your customer base.
- Unleash data with analytics
Data is key, and a brand strategy well-oiled with data is a surefire way to attract and convert users. Analytics play a pivotal role in improving the effectiveness of marketing initiatives and increasing ROI. Marketing campaigns that utilize data-driven hyper-personalization produce 5-8x more ROI. In fact, companies need to bring analytics into the heart of the company to make their decision making efforts more data-driven. This can help marketers optimize everything from social media and PPC to email marketing and SEO.
- Increased efficacy with marketing automation
Today’s purchasing decisions are influenced by multiple touchpoints and micro-moments. Brands need to maintain a strong presence in the user’s mind. But this is a massive challenge for marketers in a digital world where there is already so much noise. The only way to scale and engage consumers in this digital landscape is to automate. Marketing automation helps companies scale up and increase the scope of their campaigns. You can design and execute strategies to increase the brand footprint and drive revenue at every stage. Automation also helps you segment your user base according to spending so you can send exclusive deals to high spenders and automate re-engagement campaigns for low spenders.
- Reach the furthest of users with better social management
Social media has become a vital channel for brands to connect with their customers. And yet, many companies are failing to leverage the power of social media in their marketing strategies. Creating bite-sized and fresh content, engaging with users, and increasing reach and visibility is much more achievable with the right MarTech solution. Marketers need to have a solution equipped with social media management tools to optimize interactions with consumers. Interestingly, social listening is becoming an increasingly essential tool for social media campaigns and analytics. You can see what people are saying about your products, brand, and your competitors. With the right social listening and analytics tools, you can access data-informed insights to enhance your marketing and business strategies.
In conclusion
Companies need to integrate the right MarTech tools to achieve mad progress in this rapidly evolving digital consumer landscape. MarTech tools help you unleash the power of data and gain visibility into consumer behaviours to optimize the customer experience in real-time. Automation and machine learning within MarTech can help marketers scale campaigns while hyper-personalizing interactions with today’s user demands.
With thousands of companies being launched annually, globally, it only makes sense that the competition is increasing rapidly. Marketing has become a staple in the budgets of companies of all sizes worldwide because they understand that without marketing, there is no creative edge to their business that will set them apart from their competitors in the customer’s eyes.
We are also seeing a rising number of working professionals learning marketing operations as a skill. While getting onboarded with this technology can be challenging, using service vendors like HubSpot’s tiered solution partners can help you onboard better.
With this, the shift in trend is quite clear – MarTech is the best investment you can make for your marketing.