MarTech, the marriage of marketing and technology, is an essential competency for companies looking to enable customer-centric, personalized marketing. However, much like modern art, many people appreciate the idea of MarTech but don’t fully understand it.
The MarTech landscape continues to evolve as startups and existing companies join the fray—staking claims and carving out niche offerings across a variety of categories. So the question arises, “How can we make sense of all that MarTech has to offer?”
In this article, we’ll answer that question and give you a few strategies for capturing value in a MarTech world:
What is MarTech?
To understand MarTech, we first need to define the building blocks of the word—"marketing" and "technology."
Marketing is the art of growing a business through a competitive understanding of customers and their needs.
Technology is the ever-changing collection of tools that empowers us to accomplish our tasks.
Combine these words, and we have a collection of tools designed to help us better understand our customers and meet their needs.
While some interpret this to simply mean “digital advertising,” MarTech encompasses far more. The MarTech ecosystem supports automated functionality ranging from privacy-compliant customer data ingestion and predictive analytics to content creation and content delivery across channels. Accordingly, brands that effectively utilize MarTech can gain deeper understandings of their customers and deliver personalized experiences and effective customer engagement at scale.
The key takeaway: When implemented properly, MarTech can span entire customer journeys—collecting data, providing insights, and delivering content tailored to specific customers through an orchestrated ecosystem of tools to deliver personalized experiences.
Why does MarTech matter?
MarTech matters because it enables personalized experiences that customers demand. The following key findings from a study conducted in 2019 by RedPoint Global and The Harris Poll highlight the importance of enabling personalized marketing:
63% of consumers expect personalized experiences as a part of their standard service.
53% of consumers expect brands to know and anticipate their buying habits, preferences, and needs.
43% of consumers expect to be recognized across all touchpoints.
37% of consumers claimed that personalization increases their brand loyalty.
Furthermore, 37% of the respondents reported they would no longer do business with companies that don't provide personalization—pointing to frustrating experiences like receiving offers for recent purchases, receiving offers for irrelevant products, or failing to be recognized as existing customers.
The key takeaway: Customers expect personalized, cohesive experiences and brand interactions across channels. MarTech is important because it provides the tools necessary for meeting and exceeding these expectations.
Where do I start?
One could start unraveling the MarTech world in multiple places, ranging from advanced data analytics and content management to customer journeys and look-alike targeting. The diagram below, Credera’s MarTech reference architecture, depicts how all MarTech components work together to enable one-to-one marketing use cases like personalized landing pages, emails, and targeted paid media ads:
In this diagram, data flows from left to right. Consumer data is collected from first- and third-party sources and processed to a centralized storage location with customer consents in mind. Then, using this single view of the customer, decisioning takes place to determine what content to deliver to the customer via the optimal channel.
Surrounding this process, tools are used for marketing activation across owned (e.g., website, email, text, mobile app) and paid (e.g., media, social, search) channels, while measurement and analytics tools provide a feedback loop to inform where future investments should be made.
While this ecosystem may initially seem overwhelming, we recommend beginning your understanding of the MarTech ecosystem with the customer data platform (CDP), the home for storing and unifying customer data in a MarTech solution stack, as the foundation for your MarTech knowledge.
What is a customer data platform (CDP)?
According to the CDP Institute, a customer data platform is simply “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to other systems.” CDPs collect and store customer data, unify that data into customer profiles, segment customers into audiences based on similarities for determining next best actions, then make that data accessible to other marketing systems such as content delivery platforms, data management platforms, or analytics engines.
The following diagram highlights the CDP’s role in a MarTech stack:
Using personal identifiers, CDPs can maintain individual customer profiles, including customer behaviors and preferences over time and across channels. Then, established business rules may invoke artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to determine the next best action for each customer based on their data. As customers receive and interact with personalized content, data is sent back to the CDP that can be used to optimize future touchpoints based on positive and negative customer reactions.
An analogy about why CDPs matter:
Imagine we are designing a greeting card for someone. We can select from a range of colors, materials, quotes, funny jokes, and celebratory phrases. We buy all the content, the tools to organize the content, and even the stamps and envelopes for shipping the card. But, when it’s time to make the card, we realize that we don’t know who the recipient is, what they like or dislike, or whether they are even celebrating a special occasion. The same concept applies in marketing. We can buy all the MarTech tools for creating, organizing, and delivering great content, but these investments are wasted unless we can easily access information to know who our customers are and what they want.
Accordingly, the CDP stores and unifies customer information—serving as our foundation for creating personalized, cohesive experiences for customers across channels and devices.
For additional context on CDPs and how they differ from data management platforms (DMP), see Credera’s take on “CDP vs DMP: What’s the big deal?”
The Bottom Line: Customer data platforms are essential to understand because they serve as the foundation for creating real-time, personalized, customer experiences across channels at scale.
Can I implement MarTech today?
While the value of delivering personalized customer experiences is clear, successful implementation of MarTech tools like CDPs requires the right resources, processes, and organizational alignment. Before investing in an implementation, we recommend assessing your organization’s readiness for MarTech enablement across people, process, and technology to identify gaps between current state and desired future state—avoiding unforeseen obstacles that could impede successful implementation.
For example, here are a few of the common challenges we’ve seen as companies strive to implement MarTech solutions:
Assessing current capabilities, prioritizing gap-closing initiatives, and creating an implementation plan lays a solid foundation for building a MarTech ecosystem to remain competitive in the fast-changing marketing landscape.
A case study: Developing a MarTech roadmap
A large, national insurance provider engaged Credera to help assess their marketing technology capabilities and become more customer-centric. To understand both their current state and desired future state, our specialists conducted a series of workshops and interviews across the organization, highlighting current performance and opportunities for improvement.
From these findings, we scored the provider’s MarTech capabilities from “not present” to “market leading” and identified areas where investment was required to deliver personalized customer experiences at scale. We then provided a detailed roadmap outlining key initiatives needed to enhance one-to-one marketing capabilities and overall marketing effectiveness to help them achieve their customer-centric goals and improve marketing ROI.
The bottom line
At Credera, we’ve partnered with companies across industries to build the MarTech foundation needed to enable remarkable customer experiences. Reach out to one of our MarTech specialists to get the conversation started.
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