The marketing technology available now is tremendously strong and will only get stronger. Does it need to drive your marketing?
Has marketing technology merged with marketing? The short answer is no, or at least not yet. Marketing technology is only one aspect of marketing.
MarTech is becoming a common term in our language. Google claims that just in the United States, searches are performed over 10,000 times every month. However, MarTech and Marketing Technology can mean various things in this context.
What is Marketing Technology (MarTech)?
“Marketing technology,” or “MarTech,” refers to various software and devices that help marketers accomplish their goals and objectives. The marketing technology stack is the collection of marketing technologies a marketing team uses. MarTech has established itself as a mainstay in digital marketing campaigns, but it can also be utilized to improve marketing initiatives in any marketing channel.
Where Does Marketing Technology Fit into Marketing?
Marketing technology refers to marketers’ methods and tools to organize, carry out, evaluate, and improve their marketing efforts. There is nothing that marketing does that marketing technology does not assist; it is the great enabler for all the marketing operations mentioned above.
The marketing technology available now is tremendously strong and will only get stronger:
- Deliver deep insights into the behaviour of prospects and customers.
- Recommend and map customer journeys.
- Enable personalization at scale.
- Optimize campaigns to improve performance.
- Engage in “conversations” with customers.
And that’s only the very beginning! With all these features, it’s becoming simpler to fall into the misconception that marketing technology is the core of marketing. We can see some line-blurring in discussions, publications, and industry charts.
The risk with this way of thinking is that marketing becomes a collection of technologically based strategies that need to be connected to a larger plan. We end up losing, if not destroying, our relationship with our customers. It’s far too simple to become preoccupied with conversion numbers and their optimization at the expense of considering the human factor. It doesn’t follow that we should send 10,000 highly personalized and perfectly targeted emails daily just because we can. The belief that marketing technology is the core of marketing results in technology priorities being more influenced by optimization and tactical functionality than by marketing strategy and objectives, resulting in a disconnect that ultimately impacts marketing performance.
Martech Can’t Replace Customer Relationships
Currently, marketing technology cannot create a marketing and brand strategy or take the place of a company’s efforts to build relationships with its clients. And yes, I am fully aware that AI-driven technology may eventually play a role in these matters, as demonstrated by the new content creation tools. Still, for the foreseeable future, it will provide an assist, not a replacement for the original ideas generated by the marketing team or for human connections with prospects and clients.
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