Most marketing professionals are familiar with Scott Brinker’s marketing technology landscape slide.
Commonly known as the Martech 5000, this slide initially depicted the 5,000 organisations competing in the global marketing technology sector in 2017.
Brinker reported that he had since added another 2,000 marketing software companies to this competitive arena.
These broad statistics indicate how important it is to drive a comprehensive marketing strategy that focuses on customer experience.
This aspect involves all interactions and experiences that your customers have from beginning to end with a product or brand.
Your marketing technology (or martech) stack can improve customer experiences from start to finish.
The industry regards martech as all of the technologies that a marketer employs to optimise processes throughout the entire customer engagement cycle with a product, brand or company.
These technologies enable marketing agencies to plot this customer lifecycle and retain feedback on experiences, loyalty ratings and word-of-mouth promotions.
Marketing experts maintain that the creation and use of an effective marketing technology stack enable collaboration, measure the success of marketing campaigns, and establish personalised communication platforms with customers.
Indicators are that before the coronavirus pandemic, many companies failed to capitalise on the inherent functionalities and benefits of marketing technology stacks.
Gartner, a global research and advisory enterprise, conducted research indicating that despite the underutilisation of marketing technologies, companies dedicate an average of 26% to their marketing budgets.
Initially, marketing professionals did not believe that COVID-19 would affect their budgets.
This stance changed towards the end of 2020 when approximately 66% of the marketing industry expected significant budget cuts.
The above-stated organisation conducted another survey in 2020.
Findings indicated that since the onset of the pandemic, businesses tap into less than 60% of the potential of marketing technologies.
Despite this non-optimal implementation, the statistics before 2020 showed hardly any use of marketing technology stacks.
COVID-19 forced many businesses to rapidly reroute their operations and adopt digital strategies to survive.
It is estimated that the pandemic accelerated this already naturally occurring process by approximately seven years.
Businesses are presently confronted with analysing and keeping up with changing customer behaviours, establishing and maintaining virtual interactions with a personal touch, and finding ways of managing the inundation of queries and other communications.
A marketing agency can help your business with this, identifying the gaps in your marketing technology stacks and design content that speaks to the core of your potential and existing customers.
In a short period, this race to digitalise for the sake of economic survival highlighted the need for marketing technology stacks.
Interviews with prominent software companies specialising in marketing technologies cast a light on how COVID-19 impacted this aspect of marketing success.
Experts believe that businesses will maintain both digital and retail platforms after the pandemic subsides.
Business-to-business (B2B) services, such as providers of marketing technology software, emphasise the need to investigate ways to personalise marketing technology stacks to attract and keep customers.
Companies do not need new technologies.
They should rather investigate their existing marketing technology stacks and optimise these to reach their customers.
