With the explosion of technology, internet presence, and big data, MarTech has become increasingly important for companies of all sizes and types over the past decade.
Similar to new “hip” terms like FinTech, InsureTech and SecTech—MarTech stands for marketing technology, while MarTech Stack refers to the full software stack being used to handle, measure and enhance your marketing and communication endeavors.
Whether you’re a PSP, MSP, commercial, trade, packaging, or wide-format printer (to name a few), your customers turn to you for immersive, tangible experiences that boost brand recall and convert more buyers.
However, while you may be helping your clients, it’s easy to forget (or often ignore) your own needs. MarTech software enables you to market your own business as well as your clients’, gaining customer and business insights about who’s buying what, who isn’t, and what your quickest time to money is when it comes to drumming up more business.
Three Factors Driving the Explosion of MarTech
The Cloud
Advances in internet capabilities have resulted in many cloud-based solutions coming to the fray, offering connectivity, integration, easy collaboration and ultimately increased marketing productivity and ROI. With so many people shopping, browsing and using social media, technology helps capitalize on these new buyer hangouts. From advertising to analytics, there are a myriad of online and mobile solutions to help you attract and engage your ideal buyer.
Reduced Attention Spans
In the age of social media and instant streaming, getting and maintaining prospect attention is more difficult than ever. Hyper-personalized strategies are becoming a must, inclusive of interactive and engaging content that reaches audiences across their favorite channels and platforms. Fusing print to the digital mix through QR codes, custom maps, embellishments, imagery, and hyper-personalization boosts response rate by 63%. Software solutions that are designed to assist, innovate and streamline your workflow help cut through the clutter and noise.
Data
To truly target who you help, how you help and why it matters, your company requires organized, accurate data. With the right dataset, you can pinpoint your quickest time to money and attract those customers most likely to buy in the shortest amount of time.
CRMs, SEO, integrations, analytics tools and even project management and collaboration solutions all ultimately help you do more with less by efficiently managing data. With thousands of solutions offering different businesses the ability to collect information around purchases, customer behaviors, demographics and so much more, there is no longer any excuse for bad data—only bad habits.
How to Build Your MarTech Stack
As with any other aspect of business, planning and building the technology stack that’s right for your business involves strategy, research and trial and error. A large majority of solutions have a trial period that lets you play with all the bells and whistles before whittling down your must-haves from your nice-to-haves.
The Essentials
- Website Analytics (aka: Google Analytics)—Set up right, this will tell you everything you need to know about the comings and goings on your website.
- Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress—So you can create, manage, modify and publish website content with little to no coding knowledge required.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system—You all should know this one! It’s where all your contact data is sorted, analyzed and prioritized throughout the prospect to customer journey.
- Marketing Automation Platform (MAP) such as MailChimp—Integrated with your CRM and CMS, your MAP automatically collects contact information that you can segment for email blasts, newsletters, digital campaigns, etc.
Always keep the bigger picture in mind as you navigate through learning about what each of these technologies can do for your business. And remember, you get what you pay for.
Seven Questions to Ask When Choosing Marketing Technology
Once you know what stuff does, the next step is asking the right questions to help you choose a solution that will help you now, next and later.
- What solutions will help my business realize its short-term goals?
- Is our current setup working optimally?
- What’s the budget?
- How will our MarTech Stack provide us with ROI?
- What resources are required to implement, run, maintain, etc.?
- How long will this setup support our current needs and long-term goals?
- How will success be measured?
The clearer the answers, the easier it will be to identify what solutions you should be looking at and how they are going to improve your business.
Read in full: A PSP’s Guide to Choosing Marketing Technology – written exclusively for WhatTheyThink
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