Long gone were the days where a marketer will conduct research and campaigns manually. The current marketing industry relies primarily on technology. These tools, known as MarTech, simplify most marketing activities, including media trading. In this post, we’ll explore what is MarTech and how it makes media trading a breeze.
In this post
What Is MarTech (or Marketing Technology)?
MarTech is an umbrella term for the group of software tools marketers use to plan, execute, and measure marketing campaigns. These tools are used to simplify marketing processes through automation. They collect and analyze data, streamline campaign management and engagement with your target audience. The group of tools the company uses for marketing activities is called a MarTech Stack.
Why is Marketing Technology Important?
Modern marketing wouldn’t be possible without marketing technology.Every time you use an email platform to distribute an email campaign or analyze your website analytics, you are using MarTech. Here are some reasons why MarTech is important:
MarTech integrates marketing and operations
Marketing technology fosters collaboration between the marketing and operations departments. MarTech tools, teams get real-time data to make data-driven decisions.
MarTech enables you to assess the entire customer journey
When you integrate MarTech you get to look at the customer data from the first visit to the purchase. MarTech enables you to answer questions about your customer like:
- How do they find you? What was their first interaction with your brand?
- Which of your channels convert better?
- How can you improve your marketing strategy and help your customers convert?.
MarTech helps you market smarter
When you use MarTech tools, you can automate efficiency, streamline data and processes. As a result, leveraging technology enables you to market faster and smarter.
What Is MarTech Used for?
The combination of digital tools you use to optimize your work is called the MarTech stack. It addresses most marketing activities and several use cases such as:
Data and analytics solutions
Marketers collect statistical data, analyze it and use it to determine trends and actions.
The marketing technology helps marketers to plan, and run marketing campaigns. Digital analytics software helps marketers analyze consumer behavior by gathering and understanding data. They also allow marketers to measure and understand the performance of the campaigns.
What type of solution do you use for this use case? Digital analytics software (think Google Analytics)
Commerce and sales
Another part of the marketing stack is sales automation solutions. These technologies include the automation of the sales process from lead acquisition to purchase. MarTech tools enable collaboration among marketing, sales, distribution, and logistics, across the supply chain. By doing this, MarTech tools then help bridge the gap between marketing and sales, driving lead generation, and improving customer experience.
Solutions you may use for this case: CRM software, sales software (for example, Salesforce, Shopify)
Content and experience
Marketing tools can help companies manage their content efficiently and create a holistic experience for the customers. Content and experience tools that help marketers even build a website so they can manage their web presence and deliver engaging and informative content. Other tools help with search engine optimization, search marketing, or social media.
Customer relations
Customer relations implies strategies and practices which manage the relationships and interactions with customers across their journey. These solutions help automate repetitive tasks, increasing efficiency and giving a personalized experience to customers.
Marketing management
There are marketing solutions too to manage marketing talent, collaborations, and product management.
MarTech Best Practices
As the organization’s digital marketing needs grow, the solutions also multiply. As a result, marketers often struggle to find the right tool from thousands of different platforms. The growth of the Internet made the number of digital marketing solutions explode exponentially..
While in 2011, the number of companies was around 150, now this number surpasses the 5000.
With such a dynamic environment, marketers cannot afford to make mistakes. Therefore, to gain the best ROI from the marketing stack, here is a list of best practices:
- Audit your existing stack
Before adding new technology, check what solutions you already have. If you don’t, you risk overlooking errors and ending with several solutions that don’t talk to each other. By doing this, it will help you assess the capabilities of your stack and prevent issues.
- Ensure the new marketing technology integrates with your existing solutions
Once you choose a solution candidate, consider how the new technology will integrate with your existing stack. Lack of integration is one of the most common issues mentioned by marketers. The new solution needs to align with your business and marketing goals, support your use cases and business needs.
- When outsourcing, choose a company that takes charge of the implementation
If you choose to buy the tool and implement it by yourself, make sure your team knows the fine details of implementing and running the tool. Otherwise, you can outsource the technology. In this case, ensure the vendor will take care of the setup and training.
- Monitor marketing metrics
Monitoring and tracking metrics such as open rate, conversion rate, and such, can be time-consuming if done manually. Moreover, you risk missing the mark. Choose a solution that automatically tracks and measures your metrics and offers recommendations on how to improve your campaign for best results.
- Leverage automation
To make the most of your MarTech, you should use it to automate your marketing system as much as possible. Automation helps you streamline your system, create more leads in less time, analyze customer data, and overall work faster and more effectively.
- Don’t tamper with your marketing strategy
With the many tools available for your stack you will surely get a lot of recommendations to improve your strategy. However, don’t be tempted to change your entire strategy at once. This might create more problems than solutions. Build your MarTech stack around your sales and business goals and not the other way.
- Leverage your data
Accurate data is like gold for marketers. To benefit from your data, the data center should have not only a lot of available data, but you should use the right tools that help you make sense of it. Keep in mind to segment your data and label your customers so you can maintain the data integrity and simplify accessing it.
Difference Between AdTech and MarTech
There is confusion among business owners and even marketers between AdTech (advertising technology) and MarTech (marketing technology). Although closely related, these technologies perform different functions. Let’s understand the difference between them.
What is AdTech?
AdTech is a group of technologies that simplify ad buying and selling programmatically. These solutions cover all the demand-side platforms, the supply-side platforms, and ad exchanges.
AdTech makes it possible for companies to target specific audiences and optimize their advertising spending.
Ad technology is encouraging companies to leverage more digital advertising. As a result, ad spending has increased steadily, despite the pandemic impact, and is expected to reach $220.93 billion in 2022.
The full guide about what is AdTech
Difference in Platforms
First, the platforms used for online marketing and digital advertising are different. Most platforms are unique to each field. For example, advertisers use demand-side-platforms while a marketing agency will usually use an email automating tool.
Difference in Function
Ad tech is based on a working campaign. The advertisements and the measured metrics are designed to possibly create, execute and manage digital advertising campaigns. Ad tech makes it easy for publishers like app and website owners to sell their ad inventory available.
MarTech encompasses AdTech, and it includes also creating a sales funnel, nurturing leads, and testing campaigns.
AdTech Platforms and Tools
These platforms are used by the ad tech industry:
- Demand-side platform
A demand-side platform is a software solution that allows media buyers buy inventory in ad exchanges and supply-side platforms. DSPs implement real-time bidding so advertisers buy media per the impression.
- Supply-side platform
An SSP is the supplier-side version of a demand-side platform. It automates the offering of the inventory on an ad exchange. The technologies used in an SSP enable publishers to maximize their yield by getting the highest possible price for their inventory.
- Ad network
An ad network usually buys inventory from suppliers and ad exchanges and sells them to advertisers. Learn more about ad networks and which are the best for publishers in our article 11 Best Ad Networks for Publishers in 2024.
- Ad exchange
An ad exchange is a tech-powered marketplace that simplifies buying and selling ad space and impressions between suppliers and advertisers. The exchange manages the buying and selling process automatically via programmatic real-time bidding.
- Ad server
An ad server is a software that determines which ads will be displayed on a digital property. This software serves the ad to the user according to the specifications set by the advertiser on the ad network or ad exchange. It also collects data about the ad’s performance, like clicks and impressions.
- Search engine marketing platforms (SEM)
These platforms use programmatic paid advertising to promote a website on search engines. To achieve that, they connect to ad networks and exchanges.
The MarTech Stack
There are essential technologies both for B2B and B2C marketers:
- Content management system: the software that helps you power your website, blog, or any other content where the marketers try to engage your potential audience.
- AdTech platform: your AdTech stack should be part of your marketing stack. Consider signing up for an advertising network or monetization platform. Combine different types of display ads, retargeting, and ad tracking software.
- Email marketing software: email is one of the most effective marketing channels and you need to have it in your toolkit if you want to engage and nurture your customers. Email marketing is sometimes part of inbound marketing solutions.
- Analytics software: not only website analytics but business analytics capabilities should be included in your stack. In large companies, it could be necessary to leverage data warehouses or content intelligence solutions to understand your data in large companies.
- Experiential marketing and optimization: event marketing is gaining momentum with the growth of virtual events. To make the most of experiential marketing, there are event management tools to add to your stack.
- Social media management: who isn’t on social media these days? Ensuring your posts and content gets published on time, monitoring social activity, and increasing social engagement will depend in part on having the right tools.
- Search engine optimization: great SEO can increase your brand exposure in search engines and drive organic traffic to your website. There are many solutions available to help with keyword research and other SEO-related initiatives activities.
- Customer relationship management: Lastly, but not less important, the right sales and CRM solution can help you track the results of your marketing efforts.
How MarTech Simplifies Media Trading
Without MarTech, modern digital marketing and advertising wouldn’t be possible. The different solutions that comprise the MarTech stack help businesses streamline their marketing processes, among them, media trading.
What is media trading? It is the buying of ad space in real-time through an automated process (real-time bidding). Advertisers use programmatic tools to buy from publishers that make their inventory available on ad exchanges. Media traders are the people in charge of optimizing this process.
MarTech and AdTech tools help publishers maximize their yield and match advertisers’ demands. There is no need to be contacting advertisers directly to sell inventory because the tool takes care of everything in a matter of seconds.
Conclusion
It is without a doubt that the MarTech industry has revolutionized the way marketers and advertising agencies work. Leveraging MarTech tools like CodeFuel can simplify the process even more. By offering a complete monetization platform, you have an all-in-one solution to monetize your digital properties.
