Understanding the what, how and why of Marketing Technology

As we enter a new year, the single most visible change has been in ‘the adoption of technology’ especially in the e-commerce space. There is a fundamental and long-term change in the way we now shop and make our purchase decisions.

Given this evolution of marketing; it is imperative for us (marketers) to be creative, agile and most importantly, be comfortable with technology; to better service our target audience. For example, we now use communication tools such as Zoom, WhatsApp and Slack to communicate and collaborate on work related projects with different departments. In fact, you would have noticed that most websites use AI and chatbots to help answer our queries in real-time -these are couple of samples of what Marketing technology may consists of.

So, what is Marketing technology?

Marketing technology (aka MarTech) is a range of software and tools that a marketer uses in achieving marketing goals. For example, apart from Adobe/Google Analytics for analysing the company website, the marketing department may use Google Ads platform for managing online ads and/or Salesforce for CRM et al. MarTech is used at every stage of a buyer’s journey from awareness to purchase (remember, the inverted sales funnel). The use of a combination of these tools is known as a MarTech stack.

MarTech tools can help streamline the marketing process, analyse data and provide valuable information on when and how to target customers.

Some of the most common tools and technologies in the MarTech Stack include:

• Digital asset management (DAM) is widely considered the heart of the MarTech Stack. It’s where your content (including images, video) is stored and managed. As content is the driving force behind marketing, having a single, centralized resource for managing a large volume of digital assets is the key to marketing efficiency and effectiveness. The most common is Google Drive which most of us use to manage our data.
• Data analytics helps quantify the data into real solutions, this can help you convert potential customers to sales. Examples include R and Python, Microsoft Excel, Tableau etc.
• Social media and content management allows interaction and control of users on digital platforms, including social media, landing pages, websites, blogs, and email. Buffer, Hootsuite and Sendible are some commonly used tools.
• Business management: these are non-marketing tools that assist in managing finances, streamlining workflows/processes and developing new strategic plans. Eg. Salesforce, SAP

Why is technology important in modern marketing?

1. Advertising and promotion: In the world of AdTech, programmatic advertising has revolutionized marketing through ‘personalization at a mass scale’. Programmatic advertising directs relevant adverts to the intended audience based on the demographics such as gender, location, preferences, and social activities data insights.

Fun Fact: Nike was one of the first to introduce the concept of mass customization, back in 1999. The company launched the industry’s first successful platform with NikeiD, enabling its potential customers to purchase shoes through adding a personalized look and feel to it in terms of comfort, colour and style (refer to the image below).

2. Commerce and sale: This refers to the use of various marketing tactics to drive awareness and traffic to a website or/and physical stores through referrals, SEO, organic searches, social media platforms. Currently ‘Social Commerce’ which is already booming in countries like China, has been gaining momentum in India and will be a leading trend in 2022. For example, Pinduoduo (Chinese app) offers prices that get increasingly discounted the more items a group purchases — thus merging commerce + sales.

3. Data Mining: Data-driven marketing allows us to make more informed choice, enhance targeted broadcasting by acting on the consumer trends. Additionally, you can also help identify which of your marketing efforts are working and those that need tweaking. For example, Amazon uses sophisticated mining techniques to drive their ‘People who viewed that product, also liked this’ functionality.

4. Social and relationships: CRMs provide a centralized database, where you can perform various customer-related tasks, as well as gain access to relevant customer information. Customer service associates can easily deal with customer complaints by instantly accessing that customer’s entire touchpoint history and therefore respond accordingly. You can choose from an array of Marketing Automation software like Semrus, Salesforce, WebEngage as a marketing automation platform to help you craft contextual and personalized campaigns to engage your users through mobile, email, display, push, web and IVR channels.

In a nutshell, MarTech not only is the key driver for your business growth, but also is evolving continuously in the areas of AI, customer experience, personalization and user journey.

Hence, we as marketers need to be aware and agile enough to drive innovations in marketing strategies; thus creating a MarTech stack that provides even more personalized customer experience and achieves business excellence.

Sources:

Meet the team!

Author
Rowena Fernandes

Editor
Mridula Saravanan

We at CaratLane are solving some of the most intriguing challenges to make our mark in the relatively uncharted omnichannel jewellery industry. If you are interested in tackling such obstacles, feel free to drop your updated resume/CV to careers@caratlane.com!