Marketing technology is a term used to define the vast array of tools available to marketers to help them better research and promote their portfolio of products or services. They help businesses understand their target markets, the potential market opportunity, price points for products/services and how best to communicate messages to their audience in order to raise awareness and build a customer base. They are the technology programmes that help up capture and analyse data, broadcast marketing messages, exchange contact details, share knowledge and information, distribute news articles, track user interaction with our brand and much, much more.
Marketing technology ultimately helps us to build and improve our strategy to increase the reach of our brand, maximise our customer conversion rates and capitalise on revenue generating opportunities. All essential aspects of any business, technology opens up a world of opportunity for growth to everyone. There is so much technology for marketers to capitalise on out there; they even have a Marketing Technology exhibition focussed purely on this subject.
But let’s first step back for a minute and clarify what exactly we’re talking about when we say ‘marketing’.
Understanding marketing
Marketing is the process of:
- Understanding how your products or services fit a need or gap in the market.
- Identifying who will benefit from your product.
- Communicating these benefits to your target audience.
- Looking at how you can develop your products and services to fit new markets, solve. new problems of create more desire.
The marketing process should reach a conclusion when the right people gain an awareness of your business/product/service and demonstrate an interest in learning more. At the point, when they are ready to engage with you, the sales process typically begins. Of course there are exceptions, but as a general rule of thumb, marketing works to understand the target market in order to ensure that the product offering closely matches requirements, and then communicates this to their audience in a way that sounds enticing.
Take the example of a teacher that needs to draw diagrams in class to explain facts to their students in lessons. A company that makes white boards could offer a solution and sell them to schools. But in order to be successful in selling their white boards they should have an understanding of the following:
- Who is the buyer and who is the user of the white boards (this becomes their target market – the decision maker and influencer)? What is the demographics of their audience (is it just schools, are there geographical restrictions, are there other markets, are there any other ways to segment their market e.g. the type os school – state or private etc)?
- How will they differentiate their white boards from other white boards on the market to win market share?
- How can they understand what their target market are looking for next in a white board, allowing them to develop the product in line with future demands?
- How will they communicate all the features and benefits of their products with their target audience?
- How will the sales be monitored to visualise how people are buying and what are the most popular products/services?
Research, development and communication are all important factors in marketing. Fortunately there are technologies available to do pretty much everything you could possibly want nowadays. From strategical planning and team collaboration tools to more functional analysis of instagram engagement statistics, there are tools to help with all of it. When we refer to marketing technology, we are referring to the tools that help up to make decisions and generate actions and they can get very clever indeed.
Having worked in marketing for over 18 years I’ve seen many tools launch over the years with varying levels of adoption. I remember the days before Twitter, Instagram and Tik Tok where people are now making £millions promoting brands. I remember when a mailshot was one of the only ways to get your brand noticed. I’ve seen the rise of email marketing and the change in design trends as the generations move on and expect everything to be easier to use and more appealing to look at. I’ve used a lot of “marketing tech” and I am now hoping I can pass my knowledge on to help small businesses gain a fast and stress-free understanding of how you can achieve better results from your marketing budget, starting with the right tools.
From GetResponse to Dux-Soup and Hubspot, we’ll cover some of the brand leaders and also the lesser know challenger brands so you can explore and discover for yourself what’s out there to help you. I’ll share my experience and insights with you (without charge) in the hope that they help you achieve your goals.
I hope you find this useful, and if you have any questions or topics you’d like me to cover then please don’t hesitate to let me know. Please do share with me any successes you’ve had from using my site, I’d love to hear how my knowledge is helping people out there.
Good Luck, and enjoy the many free marketing resources available to you on this site.
Beth Baxter
Founder, The Blurb
About The Blurb
The Blurb covers the very latest in marketing technology to help grow your business. If you’re interested to hear the latest in marketing technology as it hits, sign up for our membership free of charge.
