What is MarTech and why it is critical towards growing your business?

What is MarTech?

Marketing Technology, commonly known as MarTech represents the tools that marketers use to manage, execute, measure and improve their marketing efforts.

Unlike other business systems like Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERP) or Human Resources systems (HRS), which are often a single integrated tech suite from one vendor, marketers usually use multiple marketing technology solutions and tools that work together to address specific marketing challenges or business goals.

When you put multiple MarTech solutions and tools together, it is called a MarTech stack.

Why Is Martech Important to Your Business?

Today, business leaders expect marketers to test and experiment new marketing campaigns to deliver better business results, and to scale up the experiments that prove successful. On top of that, marketers are expected to do so with a reasonably lean headcount.

That’s where MarTech comes into play. MarTech provides the marketing automations needed to schedule and repeat successful marketing activities, to run on autopilot without human involvement.

For example, the marketing team has just tested a new onboarding campaign that allows new customers to learn how to use the product they have just purchased and ensure that they have a great experience using it. Now that it has proven success, MarTech is used to ensure that every new customer will enter the new onboarding campaign after purchasing and becomes a happy customer.

MarTech reduces manual work and increases efficiency for the business by allowing marketers to set and forget automations that is able to engage prospects and customers at the right time, on their preferred channel, with the right personalised messaging to achieve your business objectives.

Benefits That a Well-designed Martech Stack to Can Bring to Your Business

From the perspective of a value-based strategy, a well-designed MarTech stack benefits your business by creating value on both ends of the value stick.

Raise Customer’s Willingness to Purchase (WTP)

Willingness to pay is the highest price a customer is willing to pay for your product. Although people may prefer a lower price, this is the cost they would pay if they had to. If you raised the cost even one cent higher than a customer’s WTP, they would opt out of the purchase.

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The price of a product is always below the customer’s WTP and the difference between the two represents customer delight. Customer delight is part of the secret sauce that increases the loyalty of your customers.

A well-designed MarTech stack allows the business to build data-driven marketing strategies to engage its customers with:

  • Personalised communication that shows the customer that you care and understand what they need.
  • Introduce offers at the right time when the customer has demonstrated intent or need for a specific feature or service.
  • Rewards customers in meaningful ways to keep them delighted and loyal to your brand.

These activities are often automated with MarTech tools that enable these activities to be triggered once the customer exhibits a pre-defined behaviour or reaches a pre-defined lifecycle stage.

Lower Employee’s Willingness to Sell (WTS)

Willingness to sell is the lowest amount of money a business’s supplier is willing to accept for materials, or its employees are willing to accept in exchange for labor.

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Employee compensation is always above the employee’s WTS and the difference between the two represents employee satisfaction/happiness.

While marketing professionals seek to receive the highest compensation possible, their WTS can be lowered when the business is able to provide value other ways. Here’s where a well-designed MarTech stack comes into the picture.

  1. Remove mundane tasks from your marketer’s workload: Tasks like compilation of campaign performance reports can be automated using MarTech to refresh the data regularly and make these reports available on demand. This will allow marketers and business leaders to have real-time access to these reports to make data-driven decisions.
  2. Allow your marketers to be more creative with their work: Take performance marketing for example, it can be boring optimising paid media campaigns day in day out. But with the right MarTech solutions, performance marketers can make use of customer data to create better customer segments for targeted performance marketing campaigns.
  3. Help your marketers use innovation to create better content: The incorporation of AI with MarTech allows marketers to create better content. Copywriters can use AI to generate a draft article quickly and refine it to create the final output. Designers can use AI to create mockups and storyboards quickly and get feedbacks from their stakeholders before they start designing.

What to Consider When Incorporating Martech into Your Business

There are many criteria to consider when incorporating MarTech into your business but in this article, let’s focus on a few key areas.

Make a List of All the Users of Your Martech Stack

While MarTech stands for Marketing Technology, the users of the tools in the MarTech stack could also span across many cross-functional teams such as IT, customer service, business analysts, etc. Once you understand who will be using the MarTech stack, it will be easier to decide and prioritise the tools needed for the MarTech stack.

It will also be helpful to form a MarTech task force consisting of individuals from all the cross-functional teams to design the MarTech stack as this will aid the change management process that is critical to a successful MarTech implementation and post-implementation usage.

Your Organisation Needs to Have Data Capabilities to Power Martech

Understanding what data capabilities your IT team has will help you to assess what is needed from the MarTech stack to connect to your organisation’s data infrastructure.

A successful MarTech stack is not just about purchasing a bunch of tools. It is also about integrating them together and powering them with a clean and accurate unified customer profile.

Establish Clear Alignment of Business Outcomes

Having clear alignment on business expectations helps your team evaluate and prioritise the right tools for the MarTech stack.

For example, if your business is prioritising short term revenue, the team could consider MarTech solutions that can improve performance marketing and email marketing activities first.

If your business is eyeing scale and market expansion, then MarTech solutions that allow marketers to understand more about their customers, enriching the unified customer profile with useful attributes, and power marketing campaigns through automation, will allow marketers to be able to do more at scale.

Summary

What are the key takeaways from this article?
  • Marketing Technology (MarTech) refers to solutions and tools that address marketing challenges and business goals.
  • MarTech is important to businesses as it reduces manual work and increases efficiency with marketing automations.
  • A well-designed MarTech stack increases both customer loyalty and employee satisfaction.
  • When incorporating MarTech to your business, it is important to consider the users of the solutions, assess the organisation’s data capabilities and align business outcomes.