How MarTech Will Change The Way You Do Marketing For Your Startup

The story matters.

The funny part is that we don’t seem to have time to build more stories even though we are going through a digital transformation with a bunch of opportunities to automate our tedious tasks.

I see us as marketers, as storytellers, but still, we are stuck in all this tech. Instead of making tech marketing apps work for us we are spending way too much time working with tech apps.

And I am not the only one saying this.

Only 9% of marketers have all the marketing technologies they need and fully utilize it according to a study by Ascend2.

According to the study, 87% of the respondents said marketing technology is improving marketing performance at their companies. 32% said that is improving it significantly.

Now, that is a considerable discrepancy, why aren’t we adopting these technologies and making technology work for us?

All this brings an entirely new set of possibilities for marketing as a profession and will change drastically with the digital transformation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) on the rise.

Digital Transformation Distribution For Marketers

In 2017, the marketing technology boom has birthed over 5,000 software brands, while in 2011 we had 150 software brands.

Why this large distribution?

Simply because the digital transformation is much bigger than marketing alone — it includes sales, service, products, internal operations, and so on.

Now, companies like Airbnb, Netflix, Amazon, and Uber are the leaders for digital natives because of the digital experience of their products.

As Scott Brinker explains:

The core message for marketers since 2015 has been that in a world of search, social media and public reviews, brands must focus on customer experience. As a result, marketers have increasingly turned to things like content marketing, paid social, and programmatic advertising to deliver a personalized customer experience.

While digital natives recognize this need, for them it is the product team, not the marketing department, that is in control of the customer experience.

Digital natives rely instead on “growth hacking,” where their “marketing” is driven by the experience of the digital product or service itself. LinkedIn, for example, uses changes to the experience inside the platform to drive growth and adoption of their services.

At the same time, we have software which leads this digital transformation through open source and API’s.

The question we all have is what marketing stack we shall use?

What Marketing Stack Should You Use?

The challenge we face today is that the majority of organizations use different tools in silo’s, and they work independently instead of cooperatively.

A marketing technology stack is a grouping of technologies that marketers leverage to conduct and improve their marketing activities.

Often, the focus of marketing technologies is to make complicated processes more manageable and to measure the impact of marketing activities and drive more efficient budgeting decisions.

So, before you choose a MarTech tool, first look into its API’s and how your software can talk to other tools. On the plus side, there is a considerable growth from 186 public API’s in 2005 to 15,799 in 2016 and growing according to Ruben Vergogh from ProgrammableWeb.com.

You want to make sure that whatever data you have in your different tools communicate, and you’re aiming to create a 360° view of your customers.

When it comes to identifying marketing technology products to use or vendors to work with, “the best source is word of mouth and what people [within the organization] have worked with before,” said Acquia’s CMO Lynne Capozzi.

Why Do You Need Microservices For Effective, Digital Marketing?

Now, instead of thinking how to develop and have a one-fits-all monolithic marketing app, we should start to think of marketing as a collection of small services that can evolve independently and collect different pieces of data.

Why are microservices so important?

A microservices app makes companies more adaptable, unhampered by the evolutionary speed of a single application.

Just think of corporations: How hard is it for them to change or add a new feature to their tools? If you use SAP or Oracle, you are doomed, as you will never be able to keep up to speed and integrate new microservices.

Even if you are not a developer, you can still do simple marketing automation to save time and be more relevant for your users.

How Can You Utilize The Microservices In MarTech?

For example, by connecting few tools, like Clearbit, Segment, Customer.io, Optimizely and Mixpanel now I can do the following:

I can identify a lead only by its email address and start getting already all the social data from (e.g.) LinkedIn (role, company size, and seniority); based on this information we can segment them and begin personalizing content.

Now, with Optimizely or Omniconvert I can start and personalize the landing pages for each audience segment, also prioritize based on the seniority (for the B2B market) of the potential customer.

Additionally, I have all the demographic data about the lead and what technologies they use in their organization – so I can pitch the right solutions.

All this, without asking a question, just by getting the email.

This strategy gives me the opportunity to create a meaningful conversation and asks them about their goals, desires, and fears so I can build the right fit for the market.

If you are in the B2B space and want to know how I approach digital marketing and build effective marketing funnels based on data, not hunches, I wrote a comprehensive playbook on the topic. No download or signup is required. Check out the MAN Digital blog for more.

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