What is MarTech? A guide to marketing technology

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.

Just as marketing and advertising differ, the terms “MarTech” and “AdTech,” short for advertising technology, are not interchangeable. The key difference is that AdTech 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, AdTech is an umbrella term for advertising tactics and management tools like demand side platforms (DSPs), supply side platforms (SSPs), and ad exchanges. 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 AdTech are important for your brand strategy, we’ll be focusing on MarTech today.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.