We’re almost closing this year and at the same time planning the next one, right? So, I choose the martech topic for this article and how this kind of technology brings tools that can help in your organization, both for optimization and greater performance.
Are you ready? Let’s get to it!
Here’s our table of contents for this article:
1. What is a martech?
We call martech to the companies that are combining marketing with technology in its scope of work and services: marketing + technology = martech, get it? 😊
The demand for martech solutions was born from the marketing needs of data, both from audiences and campaigns. This was something that technology made possible, simply, fastly and accurately.
In short, software or tools that help with efficient decisions, help on process optimization, from planning to monitoring and data analysis and gathering, are called martechs.
You definitely know some martech solutions. Are you not sure?
From the most used ones, we can simply say Google Analytics for data analysis. This platform gathers a huge amount of information about your audience behaviour and also your marketing strategies performance. Also, Salesforce, our partner and the #1 CRM in the world that provides you with information about sales forecasting, manages your contacts and your sales team, opportunities, customer care, automation, resources and time optimization, marketing campaigns, and a lot more. Hootsuite, for social media management, is another example, helping with planning, monitoring, and contacting your audience. And last, Mailchimp, which is focused on e-mail marketing campaigns, its layout design, audience segmentation, and KPIs.
For you to understand the importance of martechs, I can tell you that a recent study found that 26% of the marketing teams budget is used with a martech solution.
1.1. How martech solutions can help you?
1.1.1. Enhanced decision-making and data management
Today, having data is having all you need!
Martechs help in the process of gathering, storing, and most important, understanding what your data means so they can be turned into valuable information that drives action. As they provide details from your audience until your campaign’s performance, all the information is displayed easily for you to understand and use to generate insights.
We should also speak about the real-time monitoring features, what helps you in making adjustments to your marketing actions during the process.
As a result, you increase the effectiveness of your decisions and consequently improve your performance, time management, process management, and budget allocation.
1.1.2. More efficient campaigns and happier users
More knowledge about your persona and using tools such as A/B testing will help you in important decisions as your brand’s tone of voice, posting schedule and what are the contents that really resonate with your audience. All that actions presented in the form of data will be more efficient and optimized.
Another crucial KPI is your user’s satisfaction. Salesforce found that consumers became even more demanding during the pandemics spread and the digital transformation process follows this tendency. This index will help us get more conversions and reinforce the brand’s authority.
Don’t fool yourself when we’re speaking about satisfaction. We’re not only talking about your products or services quality, but instead, we’re speaking about all the experience – the communication touchpoints (social media, emails), the e-commerce UX, the customer care, problem-solving… A martech solution can help in monitoring and gathering all data within one place, so you can set up strategical actions only after deep analysis. This effort gives us a chance of impacting more as also as the guarantee of a good experience.
1.1.3. Better cost-benefit
So, how can you improve cost-benefit?
Martech solutions can help you in managing resources, processes, data, insights, monitoring, automation, efficiency, and client satisfaction. In the long term, relevant KPIs like ROI will present better numbers. The trust in your marketing team will increase! And also, your team will need less time for even better performance.
2. Top 3 Trends in martech
Now that you already know what a martech solution is and what its benefits are for your day-to-day marketing activities, I’m telling you what I believe to be the top 3 trends that you should have in mind about these tools.
2.1. The rise of no-code tech
The rising demand for technology made it impossible to establish a workforce that assures that growth and so no-code (or low-code) martech solutions are becoming more important.
It allows the users who understand a bit of coding to create and implement their proper tools, with no need to get an IT professional – and with no code involved!
These solutions can be easily used by marketers with minimal technical capabilities and sold to top management with simple data visualisation.
Imagine yourself building website pages, using monitoring tags, e-mail marketing templates, landing pages that integrate forms or event gather data to build intuitive dashboards with just a few clicks? Yes, all of this is possible!
2.2. Martech driving business growth
With more companies migrating into digital processes, they need to re-evaluate business strategies and the processes used to support them until now. With the pandemics spread, reduced budgets, higher goals and the marketers getting into the online world of adventures, attribution data will certainly be the success for marketing activities.
Nowadays, 80% of marketing professionals are not satisfied with the tools they’re using to measure ROI, according to Harvard Business Review.
2.3. Double down on engaging and personalised content
Between 55% to 75% of consumers are expecting to be impacted with personalised content, according to Salesforce. This shows us that there are no unique formulas for your marketing communication efforts. So the need for technological solutions is growing in tools such as creative automation to help marketers to manage and understand the digital content flow needed to generate personalised content, communicate in the right places, monitoring, and track.
3. Pick the right tool for you
There are many options for martech solutions and it’s possible that you already are using some of them. However, before you pick a solution (or even if you’re evaluating if the ones you’re using are useful) is important to perform business analysis. Picking a solution only thinking about marketing and technology merged doesn’t grant that it will be useful for your company.
Having this issue in mind, we can help you understand if your company is ready for marketing automation in 10 steps.
Here, we set some crucial points you should have in mind to evaluate a martech:
1 – Identify your needs
Establish which activities are needed to complete a task, project, or action and identify who is involved in the process (clients, suppliers, IT, executives, etc.) to better understand what is needed in this process that will be used to generate requirements and to evaluate tasks progress.
During this evaluation, understand where each department spends more time and energy, where are the pain points or operational tasks, or even if you’re present where your clients are. This process will help you understand which kind of tools you need.
2 – Establish your goals
When it’s time to define your company’s goals, focus on what is essential. You can think about many goals you wish to reach, such as:
– growth (ex. 20% increasing production in the next 2 years)
– profitability (ex. increasing profit to X in 1 year)
– market share (ex. increasing market share to 30% in the next 5 years)
– productivity (ex. double the number of sales per employee within 6 months)
– quality (ex. reach a client’s satisfaction level of 9 points in the next 3 years)
After establishing those goals, you can understand where the martech solution could make a difference.
3 – Decision
Find below some crucial points that will help you understand if the tools you’re thinking will help:
– it will ease the day-to-day activities of myself and my employees, accelerating operational processes and allowing everyone to focus on tasks that matter?
– is the martech solution profitable when compared to its investment?
– is the time invested within this solution justified?
So, to decide effectively you should analyse:
– What’s the impact on your current system?
– Which resources will be needed (time, p.e.) for implementation?
– Does it support integration with other tools the company uses?
– How will the tool be adopted by the company?
– Is the investment possible and profitable?
4 – Salesforce is the best martech ever!
Okay, I might sound suspicious when saying this, but do you want to see how Salesforce is better than its competitors?
Salesforce allows companies to understand the real needs of customers, solving problems by analysing and understanding information.
All interactions have a defined goal that is previously studied. It makes it possible for you to personalize your communication according to the needs identified within each contact.
This platform is a one-stop-shop! It helps companies in business development, understanding prospects, managing all interactions while gathering and analysing data. It also helps in qualifying leads, nurturing them, and contacting customers no matter the platform or field of support.
There are a lot of essential tools from Salesforce that will help you maximize your client’s and prospects overview, so below I will tell you about the marketing ones.
4. Marketing Cloud
Does your business need to reach potential customers individually on a large scale? If you answer yes, the marketing automation product you’re looking for is Marketing Cloud. Using this solution you get to know better your clients, generating relevant personalised touchpoints and interacting with them during all customer journeys in different channels. This is the platform if you need to engage clients in all your communication channels, from email, ads, SMS, push notifications, social media, and others, thanks to features such as Audience Studio, Data Studio, Datorama, Journey Builder, E-mail Studio, Mobile Studio, Interaction Studio, Advertising Studio, and Social Studio.
5. Pardot
Pardot is the right choice for B2B companies with longer sales cycles. Marketing and sales departments need alignment to succeed.
Personalised engagement with leads and clients
Create landing pages and in-house forms that you can use to generate leads in all your communication channels. Also, monitor results with integrations such as Goole Ads, LinkedIn, Facebook, or GoToWebinar. Using Pardot for lead generation can assure that each new lead is immediately followed up by using an e-mail notificating a sales rep. However, you can simply integrate this lead in a personalised email flow based on navigation history and interaction.
Accelerate your sales funnel
To assure that your sales reps invest more time with better leads, Pardot offers tools to qualify them. For instance, the scoring and grading lead model give points according to the lead profile and its interactions with your business. This way you can give warm leads for your sales team automatically. While cold leads stay engaged within your communication flows until they are ready to buy! When the sales team accesses the lead, all the interaction history is recorded so the approach can be as personalised as ever.
Measure the performance of your marketing department
Using reports, you can relate each deal to its original source with closed-cycle reports and multi-touch influence reports, that attribute value to the campaign that generated this specific lead. You can also check reports about lifecycle, the speed of your sales lifecycle, and where your leads are spending more time. You can also measure your marketing campaigns individually, both when they are associated with events, Google Ads, content promotion, blog subscriptions, or any other.
I hope I helped you in your journey into martech. If you have any concerns, I’d be glad to help you!
If you came all the way until here, understood everything about martech, and got to know that this is the right way for your business using Salesforce, speak to us about it.
Also, get to read more amazing content at Knowledge Center.
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