What is MarTech?
MarTech, or marketing technology, is the all-inclusive term for the software and digital solutions that support marketing operations. Martech tools support all areas of marketing including social media management, content marketing, email marketing, and data management.
Scott Brinker, Editor of the chiefmartec.com blog, identified more than 8,000 MarTech solutions in his 2022 marketing technology landscape graphic.
Common Examples of Martech
Marketing tech solutions exist to support each area of marketing operations. They’re able to automate tasks that allow teams to operate more quickly and scale marketing operations to keep pace with business growth.
Common MarTech solutions include:
- Customer relationship management platform (CRM)—A single platform to help sales and marketing teams track and manage engagement with prospects and leads along their customer journey.
- Customer data platform (CDP)—A platform that connects to multiple other data sources across an organization, integrating structured and unstructured data to build a single customer profile.
- Data management platform (DMP)—A platform used in advertising and marketing to build profiles of anonymous individuals, store summary data about them, and share the data with advertising systems.
- Content management system (CMS)—A platform to build and manage content-driven websites.
- Digital asset management system (DAM)—A platform to store and manage content assets that can also act as a database for the content appearing on your website.
- Social media management (SMM) platform—An SMM tool that allows social managers to schedule posts, respond to messages and comments, conduct social listening (learning what others are saying around topics that matter to your business), and manage audience growth all in one place.
- Email marketing service (EMS)—A platform to plan, schedule, and automate emails and email sequences while growing a list of subscribers. It’s a powerful tool for sharing calls-to-action and moving audiences further down the marketing funnel.
MarTech Data Solutions
While all areas of marketing technology have their benefits, data solutions are key to understanding if and how well marketing efforts are working. They can also inform the direction to improve them. Data solutions can help businesses pinpoint the ideal customer, understand pain points, and determine which marketing channels are most effective for reaching customers.
According to a report from McKinsey & Company, data solutions are also important for enabling personalization at scale—which has the potential to create trillions of dollars in new value across several industries. McKinsey specifically points to CDP platforms as one of the key platforms needed to support real-time or near-real-time engagement between channels, breaking down business silos and allowing for personalized customer experiences.
