Guide
What is MarTech? A guide to marketing technology
Martech, or marketing technology, refers to tools that use technology to optimize marketing efforts. A grouping of marketing technologies is referred to as a “martech stack.”
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In an increasingly technological world, efficiency and automation are pivotal to a successful marketing strategy. With martech—or marketing technology—those streamlining opportunities are seemingly endless. Depending on your brand’s unique objectives and needs, marketing technology tools can help you achieve more with less.
What is martech?
Martech describes the software marketers use to optimize their marketing efforts and achieve their objectives. It leverages technology to plan, execute, and measure campaigns and other marketing tactics. Essentially, it can help make marketers’ jobs easier. A grouping of marketing technologies is called a martech stack—we’ll touch on this more later. These tools are often used to streamline marketing processes in a multi-touchpoint, omnichannel environment.
What is the difference between martech and ad tech?
Just as marketing and advertising differ, the terms martech and ad tech, short for advertising technology, are not interchangeable. The key difference is that ad tech is only used to impact buyer behavior through promoted offerings, while martech is used to actually create, run, and manage campaigns and other marketing efforts.
More specifically, ad tech is an umbrella term for advertising tactics and management tools like supply side platforms (SSPs), ad exchanges, and demand-side platforms (DSPs), which help create meaningful connections between brands and customers. It’s more focused on technology that directly brings campaigns into the world. Martech, on the other hand, describes the use of customer relationship management (CRM) software, social media management tools, email marketing solutions, and more. It encompasses a wider variety of technology solutions that marketers use throughout the digital marketing process.
While both martech and ad tech are important for your brand strategy, we’ll be focusing on martech today.
Why is martech important?
Technology is playing an increasingly big role in marketing. The marketing landscape continues to shift because martech is becoming more sophisticated, enabling brands to better keep up with the ever-evolving—and fragmented—customer journeys. In short, marketing technology is essential to the future of modern marketing.
In addition, marketing technology is important because it considers execution needs from start to finish. It enables marketers to scale their marketing efforts holistically. Finally, martech is also important because it improves the way we communicate and collaborate with both counterparts and customers. Improving these B2B and B2C relationships has a positive snowball effect on the relationships you build with your customers, too.
Types of martech
Martech can be categorized in a variety of ways, but we like to think about it in terms of marketing technology needs: management, social optimization, campaign reach, and insight generation.
Management
Management is a broad category of martech tools that includes content management, vendor organization, product management, budgeting, and talent management. Optimizing these aspects of your business needs is the catalyst for the rest of your marketing strategy. The use of effective management systems ensures that organizations can pull marketing material quickly and easily, make thoughtful recommendations, and maintain accuracy in reporting.
Social optimization
Organizing and measuring social media tactics may include influencer management, user-generated content (UGC), customer relationship management (CRM), and more. Systems that help automate social tactics enable you to connect with online communities in more efficient ways.
Campaign reach
This third type of martech enables brand campaign executions to reach audiences through remarketing. These solutions are all about helping cultivate business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) relationships and build new ones.
Insight generation
Analytics from sources like Amazon Attribution enable marketers to effectively and efficiently understand their campaign, content marketing, and social media performance. This data-driven category helps make sense of complex datasets.
The type of martech tools you choose will greatly depend on the type of business you’re operating, the kind of product you’re selling, your specific needs, and/or your desired outcome or goal. If your marketing team is struggling to pick just one—don’t fret. Luckily, martech “stacks” enable you to integrate multiple solutions at once. Let’s dive into what that really means for your marketing automation.
What is a martech stack?
A martech stack is a collection of martech systems that work together to improve marketing efforts—it’s an interconnected web of marketing technology tools. Your stack will likely be based on the unique objectives of your business or brand. This helps ensure you’re able to tailor processes based on your customers’ unique behaviors and have a chance to experience a more significant return on investment.
A full martech stack will enable you to attract, engage, and understand your customers, as well as drive conversion. It covers all bases to ensure you’re connecting with the right audience at the right stage of the purchase funnel.
Most stacks also include a digital asset management (DAM) solution. Considered the heart of any martech stack, a DAM provides a centralized resource for managing content and assets. It’s pivotal to consistency across touchpoints. As you start building out your own stack, this will be a key consideration.
Once you build your stack, it’s critical that you continue to manage this set of tools. Keeping your martech tools in harmony will become an important piece of your marketing strategy—and it’s an ongoing process. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s take a step back to walk through how to actually build your stack.
Building a martech stack
Building a martech stack starts with determining an answer to one key question: What are your objectives and key results (OKRs)? Your answer to this question will kickstart the process, but let’s walk through the full list of key steps.
Start off by determining that desired outcome we mentioned before. This may depend on your business model, type of brand, sales cycle length, and more. Setting goals or key performance indicators (KPIs) enables you to establish a clear path to success.
Unique value proposition
As you build out that goal, consider your brand’s unique value. How do you stand out? What makes your company different from others in your sector? Understanding these differentiators will help you pinpoint appropriate martech tools and resources.
Capabilities
Before you jump into new opportunities—though exciting—it’s crucial to gauge your wheelhouse of existing tools. Are there systems you aren’t utilizing as much as you should be? Are there ones you could use differently? Keeping this in mind ensures you aren’t double-dipping into opportunities that already exist for your business.
Build your marketing stack based on what your customers’ unique journey down the marketing funnel looks like. Unsurprisingly, you must understand these touchpoints before you’re able to impact them.
So, you’ve answered all these key questions and analyzed these pieces of your business. What’s next? It’s now time to actually start putting the pieces together into your martech stack.
Getting started with martech through Amazon Ads
Not unlike other aspects of marketing, the martech landscape is always evolving—so your strategies should evolve too. That’s where Amazon Ads comes in.
Our technology suite is a tool to optimize your marketing and automate the tasks that help you build relevancy in an effective and cost-efficient way. These flexible services are tailored to your unique goals, such as advertising effectiveness, supply efficiency, or measurement. You can solve unique problems with first-party insights, cost-efficient machine learning, and interconnected services.
Amazon DSP can help reach relevant customers across the largest supply of premium, ad supported content wherever they are spending their time across Amazon-exclusive properties like Prime Video, or across third-party supply through direct integrations with publishers and leading SSPs. Maximize ROI with our AI-powered solution by leveraging first- and third-party insights to automate tasks and target relevant audiences on Amazon and across third-party apps, sites, and devices.
Marketing your brand strategically and effectively can be time-consuming, but martech solutions streamline the process and drive efficiency across marketing efforts. From planning to creative execution and every step in between, marketing technology helps you achieve marketing objectives in a more optimized, accurate, and user-friendly way. Martech stacks make this process even more robust, providing a way to link your marketing tools in an interconnected and collaborative way. And Amazon Ads solutions—like our technology suite—can help you start automating your marketing to grow your business.