Trending for 2023: A Look into The MarTech Landscape
For anyone following digital marketing, ‘MarTech’ has been trending hot. Flaming hot. We’ve seen the term popping up all over the place this spring, due to MarTech day having been held in May. What is MarTech, though, and what can it do for your business?
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MarTech Companies And How Their Services Can Help Your Marketing
What Is MarTech?
Our favorite smashup of 2023 so far is ‘MarTech’, short for Marketing Technology. Yeah, you savvy readers probably already guessed that much, but what exactly does it mean? Let’s take a closer look, shall we?
MarTech is a collection of time-saving customer attraction and retention technology and marketing programs. These services can be automated to enhance a more effective and streamlined process. Even better, these tools provide massive quantities of data, which enable marketers to analyze and track their work.
So think in terms of software programs that allow you to simultaneously keep track of prospective, current and past customers, your digital marketing and communications, content control, design tools, sales management, and data collection and management — in other words, just about everything related to your business — and you’ll have a good idea of what comprises a MarTech stack.
From barely being a blip on the radar just over a decade ago, the number of MarTech Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions has grown at an exponential pace. As companies incorporate more tools in their MarTech Stack in sales, customer service, and marketing, they increase their ability to attract and retain customers and cultivate customer experience relationships.
According to this blog post, the number of MarTech solutions has experienced multiple years of consecutive growth, from starting at a paltry number of 150 solutions at the start of the 2010s to over 10,000 as of summer 2022. The May 2023 number puts the count of MarTech solutions at 11,038, which according to this research says represents an 11% increase over the previous year.
MarTech Companies And How Their Services Can Help Your Marketing
Categorizing the types of services that MarTech companies offer and listing these companies is something that the folks over at chiefmartech and MartechTribe have diligently labored at and presented in their equally impressive-yet-indecipherable-to-the-naked-eye graphic. If you really want to nerd around in exploring 11,000+ examples of MarTech companies, full access to this graphic is behind a paywall.
Here at Paperturn, we have simplified what a MarTech Stack would be composed of, using the six categories presented:
Advertising and Promotion
A woman from the back working on her laptop on visuals.
Google Ads has become an ubiquitous tool in the world of online advertising. It works on a bidding and pay-per-click basis, and serves up ads in search engine results pages, on websites with third-party advertising, and much more. One of the huge benefits of Google Ads are the statistics functions, which help you examine results to help optimize your advertising performance. Utilizing ad tracking software like Voluum enhances your Google Ads analytics by providing comprehensive tracking and analysis, allowing for a deeper understanding of campaign performance and better optimization strategies.
Content and Experience
The next level of a well-rounded MarTech stack contains programs relating to your online content and experience.
How Paperturn Can Provide A MarTech Content Solution
The interactive content platform, Paperturn, provides you with the service of offering visually impressive online flipbooks. Gone are the days of your website users having to wait to view your content by first downloading a PDF, followed by opening it with a different app, only to have the content appear staid and static. With Paperturn, your flipbooks open at the click of a link and will breathe some life into your static PDF. You can find a suitable example here.
Measuring your flipbook’s statistics is also a way to follow your offerings and interactions with your users and customers. You can choose either Paperturn’s Built-In Statistics or Paperturn’s Google Analytics 4 Integration.
With Paperturn’s Lead Capture form feature, you can require users to enter information (such as their contact information) before they can view your flipbook. This will give you a downloadable CSV file of user data, which can then be used as your sales leads, for example. Requiring an email address and consent for receiving marketing emails can also add to your list of potential customers in your email marketing CRM.
You can even add external content, such as a Google Form, with Paperturn’s iFrame feature. Here is a quick video showing just that!
In terms of other MarTech content solutions - you can check out what’s trending in real-time by using BuzzSumo. This platform allows you to search for content to see what is buzzing in your industry. It also can point you to potential outreach opportunities.
Especially for us bloggers, a keyword ranking tool that goes above and beyond is essential! That is where Ahrefs can help with their features such as Site Explorer, which analyzes your competitors.
Social and Relationships
Later.com and PLANOLY are examples of MarTech software that can help you manage and schedule your social media posts across platforms. If you are a visual planner, Later.com’s interface will help you keep an eye on your SoMe posts. They bill themselves as the best and only alternative to PLANOLY, which focuses on managing posts on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest and YouTube.
ZenDesk, a Software as a Service company with Danish startup roots, is a customer service solution that helps companies improve their CRM with live chat, VoIP, and AI-assisted chatbots that direct customers to their answers. A live chat pop-up on your website is a must-have for any company wanting to excel at providing excellent customer service.
Commerce and Sales
A small shopping cart with some money in it, besides a laptop
HubSpot is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that offers software, integrations, and resources for connecting marketing, sales, content management, and customer service.
The next one on the commerce and sales MarTech stack is Shopify, which unlocks E-commerce solutions across multiple channels, from online to in-person, whether it be on your website, social media, pop-up shops or in-store POS. You can even use certified Shopify Experts to build custom solutions.
Data
A laptop displaying data, as well as an iPad showing a calendar.
For anyone who has an inkling about digital marketing, Google Analytics 4 is the top dog of online statistics. Track your website visitors, learn about their demographics and behavior, and find the journeys that lead to the most conversions. Use the data to optimize your SEO. GA4 will combine traffic and engagement statistics from both your website and app.
A great alternative to Google Analytics is Matomo, which also provides in-depth data about your website visitors, insights about where you get the most traffic from, etc.
Optimizely adds to your MarTech data stack. It is used to conduct tests and enhance your DXP (Digital Experience Platform). Optimizely also offers a recommendations package, which will help you take your sales to the next level.
Management
For assigning your team members’ tasks and keeping an organized overview of who is working on what, Monday.com could be a fantastic addition to your MarTech stack.
With Monday.com, your team members will know exactly what tasks they need to be working on, as well as be aware of the priority level of each task. They can also input how much time they have spent so far on tasks and how much time they expect is needed to complete tasks.
Slack offers many possibilities for keeping your team members in the loop. It integrates with many apps, making it extremely flexible across organizations, both internally and externally. Create channels with your team members by project, department, location, or whatever else you fancy.
MarTech Stack Future Predictions
While there has been exponential growth in the number of MarTech solutions in the span of just over a decade, the Customer Data Platform Resource reported that 7%, or 689 companies, had disappeared from the 2023 Marketing Technology Landscape map compared to that from 2022. Still, startups in this area continue to launch at a rapid pace.
Another challenge in the MarTech landscape is the massive amount of data that these tools feed companies on a continual basis. The amount of data companies amass across all of their MarTech services is staggering. Sifting through the data mine will require more resources from companies across all departments, but will be worth it in delivering customer-specific solutions.
A robotic hand and human hand trying to reach each other
Perhaps this is where Artificial intelligence (AI) could be a useful tool in mining through all of the data in order to make it useful for companies. Generative AI is being touted as a way to accelerate the scalability of personalization delivered by marketers.
For some inspiration on using AI in your marketing, check out our blog post “10 Reasons Why AI Will Not Replace Your Job”.
The MarTech landscape is a fast-growing, exciting industry to follow. We have covered just the tip of the MarTech iceberg in this blog post. Now you have a much better general understanding of what this term encompasses. You also now have a basic idea of what categories of tools make up a well-functioning MarTech stack. Happy MarTeching, everyone!
