Exploring the Diverse Martech Landscape and Why it Matters to Businesses

Martech - short for marketing technology, encompasses all of the software, technology, tools and platforms that marketers use to plan, create and measure campaigns. These platforms perform a wide range of functions, that include helping marketers automate processes, collect and analyze vast amounts of data, and reach and engage their target audience across many different channels and touchpoints.

With such broad reach within an organization, and across its customer base, success with Martech can mean success for the business.

What tools can you have in your martech stack?

As you’ll see, there are lots of tools that will make up your martech ‘stack’, which is just one way of describing all of the different technologies that come together to drive your marketing—and your business—forward.

The Martech landscape comprises over 11,000 platforms across a number of different categories and use cases. As shown in the latest marketing technology landscape by Scott Brinker (below) the field continues to grow, creating more challenges for marketing and business leaders that want to make the best and most strategic decisions for their organizations.

Source: Cheifmartech

Another way to look at the Martech landscape is by separating it into four main categories:

• Customer Information: Which helps businesses collect and store data to better understand their customers
• Content & Campaign Delivery: Which serves customers with content, offers, and experiences across multiple channels 
• Workflow & Automation: Which enables teams to more efficiently create content & campaigns, better managing projects and initiatives
• Analytics & Reporting: Which allows tracking & analysis of the success of marketing efforts

Any Martech platform can fit into one of the above categories, though there is a diverse range of solutions within each.

Adopting a Martech philosophy

In addition to the categories of marketing technology platforms, there are also different methods that can be employed in order to implement them and integrate them with your other tools and platforms. These include:

• All-in-one solutions: Where a single platform performs many functions across an organization’s marketing capabilities, with one or a handful of these platforms forming the foundation of an organization’s Martech stack
• Best-of-breed  integrations: Where specific platforms are chosen because of their unique characteristics and feature sets, and an optimal collection of platforms are integrated with one another to form a Martech stack

While each approach has its benefits and drawbacks, and most enterprises employ a combination of each, it can be important when making new investments to have a starting philosophy to guide decisions.

Regular auditing of Martech benefits the business 

Because of the pace that marketing technology moves, organizations need to continually have a current understanding of the challenges and opportunities available. Thus, regular audits are important to understand the following:

• Gaps: Where needed functionality and features are missing that might otherwise help the business better perform its marketing functions
• Overlaps: Where feature sets of related product conflict with one another, causing confusion or potential 

There is plenty more to discover about Martech in order to achieve true success. This course provides insights into how leading organizations have leveraged their Martech strategy to achieve winning results, as well as insights on how to develop a Martech strategy of your own. Learn more about the Martech course here.