MARKETING + TECHNOLOGY #1
MarTech: The simplification of the intrinsically complex
Overview
Marketing and Technology; a fairly recent marriage that’s still a big query for many working in either industry. Understanding where marketing and technology intersect is fundamental to succeed in this realm of the transformative process towards a better digital enterprise.
Introduction
After more than 15 years working in Enterprise IT projects, and spending the past 5 years working specifically on Marketing and Technology projects in complex environments, I have realised that despite the level of maturity and highly evolved landscape, many stakeholders, regardless of their experience, domain knowledge, role and industry, don’t fully understand what Martech really is, let alone why Martech even became a thing.
The so called Martech space, still nowadays represents a black box for many. Martech is a relatively immature practice area in the enterprise world that have been growing organically in the past decade.
Marketing is composed of many complex layers and Martech can be so vast, that attempting to define it in a few words could prove to be quickly dated.
Instead, I rather approach Martech as the composition of the many systems that help organisations to better communicate with their audience.
Marketing, what is it?
I am not a marketer by trade. My background is in Software Development, Information Systems and Enterprise Architecture. But working for almost 5 years helping organisations solve marketing challenges has awakened in me a profound interest in understanding what the core of marketing is.
To me, marketing in any environment is a communication process, the process of encoding a message by the sender to be sent through a media or channel which ultimately will be decoded by a receiver who will finally share feedback with the original sender to complete the loop.
Organisations aim to craft the best message possible that can cut through the noise and reach their audience.
The purpose of these messages is to inform, induce or prompt the receiver to perform additional activities, such as, to click, to read, to sign-up, to download, to buy, and so on and so forth.
Types of Marketing
We can probably find hundreds of different types of marketing, which essentially are classified at the highest level by the parts of the communication process, i.e. the sender, encoding, the media or channel, decoding, the receiver and the feedback.
As an example, one of the many types of marketing is Email Marketing. In Email Marketing, the strategy is generally governed by the channel or media, in this case the email.
The way email works is fairly simple. Anyone can send message, generally text based, to any known receiver with a valid electronic mailbox. But that’s only one part of the entire process.
Every marketer wants to measure the impact of the messages sent. They want to know how much change they are provoking, and how effective their efforts are.
Now, imagine we increase the number of messages to be sent up to a few tens, and the number of recipients to a few millions. This is where marketing becomes complex. No matter what type of marketing we are discussing, at scale, marketing is a complex process.
Marketing Processes
Marketing, as expected, it’s not a single monolithic process, marketing is the combination of many processes that work together in synchronisation to take some input and resources, transform them and produce a result.
All marketing processes must act coordinately and consistently, but should also be flexible enough to adapt and pivot to the future needs.
Putting all this in an enterprise environment, where regulations, budgets and deadlines are constantly stress testing the system, clearly speaks of the complexity originated in trying to drive a successful marketing practise in any organisation.
Challenges, where marketing lies
Marketing faces many challenges which generally come from the inner workings of the process itself, but also challenges come from the ever-changing nature of this business process that always competes for the scarcest resource in marketing land, the consumers’ attention.
The scale at which most organisations perform their marketing activity also helps to increase the complexity, sending millions of messages, running multi-touch, omni-channel and always-on campaigns, managing conversations, doing social listening, data and sentiment analysis, reporting near real time and real time analytics, managing offers, content, teams.
Everything adds up, and it is not going to stop or revert.
The Test and Learn principle
Marketing is constantly challenged, marketing has evolved and survived in the enterprise because of its most intrinsic working principle. Marketing is, trial and error, test and learn. Marketing is an infinite loop of continuous learning and improvement, or at least this is my approach to it.
Technology, a definition
A formal definition of technology would describe it as the combination of skills, tools and knowledge that helps transform a set of resources in something with more value.
Now, a more complete description is the one that allows me to explain that technology is also the transformation of a set of inputs and resources, applying a set of technologies to produce a measurable result with added value. This is also what we can understand as Technology System.
Technology Systems for Marketing
The purpose of technology in modern marketing is generally to solve large scale problems.
Managing communications at scale requires technology systems that support the entire communication cycle.
There are currently beyond 7,000 known systems classified in around a hundred different categories.
Many of these systems don’t solve just one problem, they solve many problems but they don’t solve all problems.
Organisations generally require a set of these systems to support their marketing operations and to solve their marketing challenges.
Technology also comes with challenges
Technology can help to simplify the complexities of marketing, but managing all these technology systems can’t be overlooked.
Technology can’t be treated as a one-off exercise. Implementation of marketing technology should follow a plan, a strategy, a Martech stack strategy.
Technology, in buckets
Many solutions have emerged to solve problems a wide range of problems. We have solutions that are very specific and can work in standalone mode, and we have very broad solutions that basically conform entire ecosystems.
I have mentioned that there are perhaps more than 7,000 existing solutions as of today that vendors have created, but this is without counting the unknown number of in-house solutions built by many organisations which are also part of the picture.
Each of these systems or solutions may fall under the following classification depending on their role within the stack: Experience, Social, Advertising, Commerce, Data and Management. Obviously there are sub-categories under this high level classification which are broken down into more specific functions or roles of the technologies within the stack.
To explore in detail these categories we can always refer to the best effort published so far into creating a comprehensive list of Martech systems, created and maintained yearly by Scott Brinker and a group of contributors.
In his latest version, Scott Brinker has created the below breakdown that we can use to better explain the different systems and roles within Martech:
As we can see, this list is detailed, and well thought through, but in only scratches the surface.
Many of these solutions have different features that make them more or less suitable for a particular use case, but ultimately what is common to all of them is that they must play together with the rest of the stack. This is where a technology strategy is important.
Technology evolves rapidly
The marketing technology evolution has been an interesting one. Many of the systems we have today didn’t exist 10 years ago or they were in their really early stages.
With the explosion of data generated in the past decade, the adoption of cloud computing and the increasing need of organisations to deliver better customer experiences at scale, another breed of solutions has emerged; the cloud suites.
But in between, more specific solutions have also bloomed, creating an ecosystem that it’s highly dynamic, fast changing and continuously adapting to the market needs.
To some, we’re currently at the “end” of the first golden age of marketing technology, and we will traverse a few years where things will settle before we get to the next “golden age” in a couple years time.
But in my point of view, the transition from one stage to the other will be seamless, continuous, and almost imperceptible.
The evolution of different technologies will create new challenges and opportunities in some cases. In other cases will help optimise and consolidate and will always help us evolve.
Certainly there will be periods of “value realisation” but the Test and Learn mode will be always on, at least for those that seek continuous improvement.
So, if you are immersed in Martech, you have to understand, this is not going to stop, it will only become faster, better, more efficient.
Marketing and Technology challenges
One of the most exciting things I see while working in Marketing and Technology is that it is a continuously changing environment.
However, navigating this type of change is definitely a daunting task and there has got to be an approach for it. There has got to be a strategy to help organisations and even individuals to tackle these challenges and convert them into opportunities.
This strategy is actually not complex as such, but it is not easy to master either. The answer is available across multiple disciplines or areas of knowledge such as Enterprise Architecture, Project Management, Software Engineering, Knowledge Management, Business Strategy, Customer Experience, Marketing, amongst others.
Starting with outside-in architectures or CX-Led Architectures, Lean Startup, Agile Delivery, Agile Project Management, Test & Learn, Human Centred Design and making all these “dots” come together in the organisation context is where we can say, this is why Martech exists.
The purpose of Martech lies behind the combination of all these elements to make communication effective, seamless, but ultimately to make change happen, to create opportunities to change to a better future state.
