The pressure to deliver results as a B2B marketer can be overwhelming. You're juggling countless marketing tasks, from managing social media and email campaigns to tracking leads and measuring ROI. Luckily, the right marketing technology can take some weight off your shoulders and supercharge your marketing efforts.
Here's a closer look into everything you need to know about marketing technology, from the basics to building your perfect tech stack.
What Is Martech?
Marketing technology (martech for short) refers to the tools and platforms that help marketers work more efficiently and effectively. Think of it as your team's digital Swiss Army knife – a collection of marketing tools that automate repetitive tasks, gather and analyze data, and help you make smarter decisions about your marketing strategy.
Why Is Marketing Technology Important?
Martech is essential for any business looking to scale its marketing efforts and drive real results. Incorporating martech solutions into your digital marketing initiatives can help you:
Deliver Personalization at Scale
A whopping 73% of marketers say personalization is important, but only 35% feel their brand gives customers a personalized experience.1 Martech helps you segment your audience based on everything from basic demographics to sophisticated behavioral data so you can deliver tailored content to different groups.
This personalization goes beyond inserting a customer's name into an email. Advanced martech tools can create dynamic experiences that adapt to individual users in real time. For example, your website could show different content based on a visitor's previous interactions with your business or their stage in the buying journey, or your email campaigns can adjust their content based on a recipient's past engagement to ensure each customer receives messaging that actually resonates with their needs.
Boost Productivity
Marketing technology automates time-consuming tasks like scheduling social media posts, sending follow-up emails, or updating contact lists. When your marketing team isn't bogged down by repetitive work, they can channel their energy into crafting campaigns that move the needle for your business – which is likely why 91% of marketers say marketing automation tools help them achieve their objectives.2
Marketing technology also streamlines collaboration between team members. Many martech stacks offer a centralized platform for your project management, content creation, and campaign execution, enabling your team to work more efficiently together. This eliminates endless email chains or confusion about the latest version of a marketing asset so that everyone stays on the same page.
Unlock Powerful Analytics
HubSpot's 2024 The State of Marketing report found that 60% of marketers think their higher-ups scrutinize their budget spending and ROI generation more now than in the past.1 Marketing technology solutions collect and analyze customer data from multiple sources, giving you deep insights into your campaign performance. These insights can help you:
- Track which marketing channels deliver the best ROI
- Understand your audience's behavior and preferences
- Decide where to invest your marketing budget
Martech can help you track the entire customer journey, from their first interaction with your company to their final purchase decision. This comprehensive view helps you understand which content resonates with your audience, which email subject lines drive the highest open rates, and which landing pages convert the most visitors into leads.
Marketing tech also lets your teams conduct more sophisticated A/B testing. You can experiment with different approaches and continuously optimize your marketing campaigns based on real data (instead of gut feelings or assumptions).
Differences Between Adtech and Martech
It can be easy to blur the lines between advertising technology (adtech) and marketing technology, but these tools serve different purposes.
Adtech focuses specifically on managing digital advertising campaigns. It includes tools for:
- Targeting and displaying ads
- Buying and selling ad space
- Measuring ad performance
Martech covers a much broader spectrum of marketing activities, including:
- Managing customer relationships
- Automating marketing campaigns
- Creating and optimizing content
- Analyzing marketing performance across multiple channels
Adtech and martech often work together to create a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. Adtech tools can feed valuable data into your martech stack to refine your targeting and messaging across all marketing channels. Alternatively, the insights gained from your martech solutions can inform your ad strategies.
You might use adtech to run a targeted display ad campaign, then use martech to nurture the leads generated from that campaign through email marketing and personalized content. Understanding the strengths and differences of these technologies can help you create a more holistic, effective marketing ecosystem for your business.
6 Best Practices for Your Marketing Technology Strategy
A strong marketing technology strategy doesn't happen by accident. Here are six best practices to guide your martech implementation:
1. Build Top-Down
Start with your overall marketing goals and work backward to determine which technologies you need. Do you want to increase lead generation? Improve customer retention? Boost brand awareness?
Once you've nailed down your goals, you can choose technologies that directly support them. This approach prevents you from investing in tools that might seem impressive but won't actually contribute to your bottom line.
2. Collaborate With IT
Involve your IT team early in the selection process. They can help you evaluate tools for compatibility with your current tech stack, identify potential security risks, and ensure your marketing technology implementation aligns with your company's technical standards. Regular communication between IT and marketing teams can help you prevent costly mistakes and ensure a smooth deployment.
3. Focus on Integration
Prioritize marketing technologies that can seamlessly connect with your existing systems. Integration ensures marketing data flows smoothly between your different platforms, giving you a complete view of your campaign performance and customer interactions. The goal is to create a unified system where each tool increases the effectiveness of the others.
4. Start Small and Scale
Don't try to implement everything at once. Begin with core technologies that address your most pressing needs, then gradually add more tools as your team becomes comfortable with the existing ones.
Taking a phased approach allows your marketing team to fully master each tool before adding new ones to the mix. It also gives you time to evaluate the impact of each technology and make adjustments as needed. As your team's expertise grows, you can expand your martech stack in a strategic, manageable way.
5. Prioritize User-Friendly Tools
Businesses are only using 33% of their martech stack's available capabilities,3 so keep in mind that the best marketing technologies are the ones your team will actually use. Look for tools with intuitive interfaces that your team can quickly understand and navigate. The learning curve shouldn't be so steep that it hinders adoption or productivity.
Good documentation, tutorials, and customer support are also important – your team should be able to easily find help when they need it. Remember, the goal of marketing technology is to make your team more efficient and effective, not to create additional obstacles or frustrations.
6. Measure and Optimize Continuously
Establish clear metrics for evaluating how each tool in your stack performs. Are they delivering the expected results? Are your team members using them effectively? Regular audits can help you identify underused features, redundant tools, or gaps in your stack that need to be addressed.
What Should Your Martech Stack Include?
Ready to build your marketing technology stack? The perfect martech stack will vary for each business, but these core components form the foundation of a solid digital marketing strategy:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms track every interaction with your prospects and customers. It helps you understand the customer journey, identify sales opportunities, and – perhaps most importantly – maintain consistent communication across your organization. In fact, 78% of sales leaders say their CRM effectively improves alignment between their sales and marketing teams.4
Essential features of a CRM include:
- Contact and lead management
- Sales pipeline visualization
- Task management and reminders
- Reporting and analytics
- Mobile access
- Integration capabilities with other marketing technologies
Some popular CRM platforms are Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, and Zoho CRM. You'll need to consider factors like the size of your business, the complexity of your sales process, and your budget when choosing a CRM.
Content Management System (CMS)
A content management system (CMS) manages your website content, enables easy content creation and updates, and helps optimize your content for search engines. When choosing a CMS platform, look for:
- A user-friendly interface for creating and editing content
- SEO tools to improve your search engine rankings
- Mobile responsiveness to cater to all devices
- Integration capabilities with other martech tools
- Scalability to handle content and traffic growth
Popular CMS options include HubSpot CMS, WordPress, and Drupal. Each has its strengths, so evaluate them based on your specific needs and your team's technical expertise.
Customer Data Platform (CDP)
A customer data platform (CDP) consolidates customer data from your CRM, marketing automation platforms, web analytics, social media, customer support tickets, and more to create a single, comprehensive view of each customer. Essential features of a CDP include:
- Data consolidation and cleansing capabilities
- Identity resolution to accurately link data points to specific customers
- Real-time data updates and activation
- Integration with existing martech tools
- Advanced segmentation capabilities
- Cross-channel campaign orchestration
- Predictive analytics and customer journey mapping
Popular CDP options include Segment, Tealium, and Adobe Real-Time CDP. When choosing a CDP, consider factors like the complexity of your customer data, your existing martech stack, and your team's data management capabilities.
Social Media Management Tools
Social media has become an essential channel for B2B marketing, and managing multiple platforms efficiently requires specialized tools. A social media management platform helps you schedule posts, monitor mentions, and analyze performance across all your social channels.
Advanced features might include sentiment analysis, competitive monitoring, and the ability to manage paid social campaigns. Popular options include Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Buffer, but you'll need to consider the social platforms you use most, the size of your team, and the level of analytics you need to find the right fit for your needs.
Email Marketing Platform
Email is still an essential marketing tool, considering it has an average ROI of $36 for every dollar spent.1 An email marketing platform helps you create, send, and analyze email campaigns at scale. Look for features like customizable templates, A/B testing capabilities, and advanced segmentation options.
Popular email marketing platforms include Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and SendGrid. Some marketing automation platforms, such as HubSpot, also include email marketing capabilities. Finding the best platform for your business will depend on factors like your sending volume and whether you need features like dynamic content or predictive send-time optimization.
Advertising Technology
Adtech is a critical component of many marketing stacks. These tools help you manage your digital advertising campaigns across multiple platforms for precise targeting, budget management, and performance tracking.
Essential adtech features include:
- Cross-channel campaign management (search, display, social, video)
- Audience targeting and retargeting capabilities
- Real-time bidding and optimization
- Creative asset management
- Conversion tracking
- Attribution modeling
Common adtech solutions include Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager, and demand-side platforms (DSPs) like The Trade Desk or MediaMath for programmatic advertising.
Maximize Your Marketing Technology With Mojenta
Ready to take your marketing technology strategy to the next level? As a HubSpot Platinum Partner, Mojenta specializes in helping B2B tech companies harness the full power of HubSpot.
We offer a complete suite of HubSpot onboarding and management services to help you:
- Align your sales and marketing teams
- Remove friction and roadblocks for your buyers
- Create predictability with data-driven sales and marketing
- Automate key processes to achieve more
HubSpot can do wonders for your marketing efforts as an all-in-one martech solution – but only if it's fully optimized. Book a consult with the Mojenta team today to unlock HubSpot's full potential and transform it into a powerful engine for your B2B marketing strategies.
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