Change is a constant force that drives people to innovate to survive and be on top. Marketing is a perfect example of a continuous flux where various companies develop, compete, and outdo one another to be on the highest spot. Companies have been utilizing various MarTech (marketing technology) strategies and tools to boost their marketing campaigns and acquire customer engagement.
For ten years, from 2011 to 2021, the marketing technology landscape experienced a steady increase in MarTech solutions. As a result of competition, expectations, and technology, along with 2020’s economic setbacks from the pandemic, how do business owners approach their markets for 2021 regarding MarTech, its trends, and tools?
What is Marketing Technology or MarTech software?
Let us first define the big umbrella, MarTech.
MarTech is a shortcut for Marketing Technology. It integrates and leverages innovations, tools, and software to develop, accomplish, and reach marketing campaigns and goals such as increased profit and customer engagement.
Consequently, MarTech benefits companies by efficient automation of processes and conservation of marketers’ time to manage various marketing channels easily. Additionally, it helps to analyze and collect data efficiently.
Moreover, MarTech provides real-time insights that marketers can modify to develop and jumpstart marketing campaigns vital for their business. MarTech consists of different tools to address the varied marketing needs of companies utilizing such software.
Stack and Tools of MarTech
Tools of MarTech are present for streamlining marketing techniques, data collection, customer data analysis, and means for customer engagement.
A group of marketing tools that specific companies take advantage of for marketing campaigns is the marketing technology stacks or MarTech stacks.
A full MarTech Stack should cover all the marketing cycle stages – attracting, involving, transforming, managing, and understanding your aimed customer.
The most basic tools and innovations in the MarTech stack consists of:
Digital Asset Management (DAM)
DAM is considered as the core of the MarTech Stack. It is the conglomeration and proper management of digital content needed to market a business or company. Contents as digital assets propel marketing campaigns.
Therefore, proper handling of content marketing and management volumes is necessary to boost marketing effectiveness and widen customer engagement.
Social Media Management
These tools effectively manage and sustain customer engagement in the different social media platforms associated with the company using the MarTech stack.
Content Management System
These tools enable marketers to oversee the company’s web content and presence in websites, landing pages, blogs, and hyperlinked pages.
Analytics Tools
The upward elevation of the MarTech landscape over the past years to the present triggers companies to devise techniques and tools to step up their marketing spot. This stiff competition requires analytics tools to measure marketing campaigns, channels, and processes to achieve MarTech’s goals.
For instance, if you’re doing SEO, you’d need keyword rank tracker tools to help you understand if your efforts are paying off.
Moreover, having a reliable measurement of marketing success and lapses through analytics tools like Google analytics motivates companies to boost marketing and profit further.
Lead Management
These management tools enable marketers to involve, develop, and qualify promising leads to identify their sales and profit generation’s readiness.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
CRM tools offer a vital sales source and a customer-oriented team to monitor, nurture, and engage with customers and lead. Flawless integration of email marketing solutions and CRM is crucial to sustaining CRM.
The best illustration of the MarTech factors’ interrelationship is the marketing technology landscape or MarTech landscape created by Scott Brinker. It consists of MarTech vendors and MarTech automation and solutions applied in different digital marketing channels and combines to form the vast MarTech population.
Expected Major Marketing Technology Trends for 2021
Tracing back the MarTech landscape, the world has witnessed a steady expansion of the MarTech landscape since 2011. According to MarTech Today, the landscape started at 150 companies, which boomed into 1,876 companies in 2015, 5,381 solutions in 2018, 7,040 solutions in 2019, and 8,000 MarTech solutions in 2020.
The landscape infographic shown above tells us that MarTech is in a steady upward expansion amidst all the external factors and its growth, including the pandemic.
The major anticipated MarTech trends that will shape the MarTech landscape for 2021 are as follows:
Increased Spending for MarTech
The increased number of remote work during the pandemic required marketing teams to depend on technological tools and processes to organize work and marketing campaigns. A survey showed that 60% of marketing administrators anticipate raising MarTech spending for the entire year.
As a result, Marketing teams are now primarily driven to develop tools that enhance visibility, content creation, and campaign management in response to an increased need for collaboration tools.
Investment in Channels for Content Marketing
The survey showed that 20% of marketing administrators would crucially invest in content marketing channels or platforms for their marketing structure.
Content Marketing Platfor TV m (CMP) is a tool that allows management and streamlining of the entire marketing process, from the creation to the approval of marketing strategies and tools.
Marketers see digital platforms such as webinars, ebooks, blogs, and whitepapers to maximize customer reach for their marketing campaigns.
Emphasis on Quantifying Campaign Attribution
The survey also revealed that 81% of these top markets see the necessity of quantifying business impact; however, only 36% expressed confidence in adequately measuring the effects.
Marketers are expected to know the use of campaign attribution in measuring the campaign’s actual impact and results vs. the prospect’s intended outcome. The success of the marketing campaign will reveal the need for additional resources or budget to boost marketing. Proper tools and innovation such as the content marketing platform are necessary to measure the content success in marketing efficiently; otherwise, measurement of attribution is hard.
Faster campaign execution or turnaround times
About 81% of the top marketers verbalized that accelerating campaign execution is considered a high priority.
Due to the ongoing marketing competition, many companies are motivated to create marketing campaigns to enhance marketing productivity. Consequently, their marketing team is expected to be very active and fast in developing and creating efficient and timely marketing campaigns. Automation of marketing processes is highly encouraged to avoid the long hours of spending time on work.
Enhanced Collaboration
There is an increased demand for marketing collaboration tools to assist the entire marketing processes from its start to measurement. Companies must perform marketing analysis and determine MarTech tools applicable to boost and jumpstart their markets this year.
2021’s Top MarTech Tools to Look Out For
Here are the top five marketing tools to complete your MarTech Stack this 2021:
Google Adwords
Google Adwords is the most commonly used advertising tool worldwide that extensively reaches various demographic coverage and clear intent and funnel process dedicated to selling and advertising. It is the most recommended advertising tool for rookie digital marketers. It responds to 40,000 searches every second, which corresponds to 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion per year.
You can also market your business through Youtube, a platform tied up to Adwords, with 1.5 billion subscribed active users who watch daily for more than an hour. It has a super extensive customer reach, coupled with advertising and focused account managers’ real intent on optimizing marketing campaigns. In short, combine the influence of these MarTech tool giants, and you will have a significant share of the MarTech stack.
Rocketium Campaign is a creative automation platform that provides solutions for brands to generate on-brand creatives on a large scale. It is an essential component to any MarTech stack, as it enables you to feed creatives into multiple channels. Features like importing content via spreadsheets and uploading animations designed in Adobe After Effects make it indispensable for design teams. Whats more, you also have the ability to import pre-built PSD designs to create templates.
Organizing and sustaining customer relations is highly vital in the growth of your business. Although, it is more costly to keep customers than sell to another customer. Salesforce is a top CRM tool that addresses these customer relations concerns.
Furthermore, it is a highly customizable CRM tool with its AppExchange that integrates various applications for every use. It also contains dashboards that allow entry of extensive data to build customer leads.
Hootsuite
Social media management tool for maintaining and handling your social media visibility. That is, it organizes your social platforms in a single app through a participative dashboard to track your social media channels’ flow, arrange the schedule, and engage with your customers. Additionally, it contains analytics that helps you retrieve reports for marketing and sales.
Marketo
Nowadays, 91% of industries find marketing automation as an essential marketing technique. Several automation tools, such as Marketo, are created for marketers, especially B2B, to facilitate interaction and management of various marketing channels for customer retrieval. Built with the use of the same platform as Salesforce.
Besides, it has a user-friendly and customizable modular system that allows automation, real-time customization, consumer involvement marketing, and management. It also allows cloning of programs and advanced reporting for thorough customer analytics, perfect for integrating all your MarTech tools in one place.
Conclusion
MarTech is an ever-expanding domain that improves marketing campaigns, lead generation, customer relations, and business productivity. Consequently Marketing, MarTech, and the marketing technology stack are inseparable from each other as vital forces for customer engagement and business visibility.
It is therefore, necessary to identify and use the best marketing technology stacks that are appropriate for your business marketing campaigns.
Review the expected marketing technology trends this 2021 and utilize the concepts of MarTech to your advantage. Jumpstart your market, boost your business visibility and profits, and sustain long-term customer engagement this 2021. Good luck!
Ayush Parti 
