This is an education piece you will want to listen to. Marketing Technology or MarTech is one of those areas where every marketer operates whether they’re aware of it or not. It’s just the technology you use everyday to deliver on your goals.
Where you specialise in it though, is utilising martech to be more efficient and connected, which serves richer data and information to your team. In this article, we’re going over the stark difference between marketing categories and marketing technology.
Let’s dive in!
Yes, marketing categories and technology have a stark difference. One encapsulates all technologies into segments, the other is the technology that belongs to it.
Often marketers get confused by the two because, well it’s easy to. A clear example for you would be:
Category: Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)
Technology: Hubspot
The category can only exist as one, whereas technology can exist as many.
The reason why this is important to understand is so you can build a strong MarTech Stack that works well for your business.
Great question! With the abundance of technology out there, it’s important to outline the categories so you know where your tech should fall. However, remember that a tool isn’t necessarily category exclusive - it can span across multiple categories, which is the ideal goal.
Some categories you may refer to:
- Customer Relationship Manager (CRM)
- Acquisition Tools
- Paid Acquisition
- Organic Acquisition
- Data, Analytics, Reporting and Testing
- Social Media Managers (SMMs)
- Customer Data Platforms (CDPs)
- Content Management System (CMS)
- Email Automation
These will likely be the categories you refer to the most when navigating your day-to-day marketing activities.
From here, it’s valuable to map out your technology across the required categories for your business to operate. If you can have a single tool utilised across multiple categories, it means any additionals are rendered redundant and you can save costs there.
However, don’t try and have a single tool deliver in every area. We’ve seen this attempted with a lot of tech platforms and fail in key delivery areas. Map out what is important for your business and what drives the most growth, then invest in a platform/tool that will deliver in the way you intend to.
If you’re looking for more detail or information on Marketing Technology, or how to build your tech stack, head to the MarTech Mechanics course to learn more.
