What Is MarTech?

Narrator 0:00
You’re listening to the all systems go podcast, the show that teaches you everything you need to know to put your business on autopilot. Learn how to deploy automated marketing and sales systems in your business the right way with your host, the professor of automation himself and founder of automation bridge, Chris Davis,

Chris 0:32
welcome to another episode of The all systems go podcast. I’m your host, Chris L Davis, and on this episode, I want to, I want to invite more of you to the table. And by that, I mean marketing. And this, this goes for any industry, but But marketing specifically, there’s a lot of terminology that’s thrown around. And I’ll be honest, even I don’t know all of it, there’s sometimes I’ll see an acronym, or I’ll see somebody put something together, and I’m like, what does that mean? And I’ve been in marketing for over a decade, right? And really technical, I mean, entrenched within marketing, but it is a very vast practice, and it, there’s a lot to it. There’s a lot to it. I just talked about in the previous episode, the subjectivity of marketing, right? How specific it can be to specific industries and companies and look different. And today I wanted to talk about a term, and this won’t be the last time I talk about what many may think is a basic like basic terminology, and that’s why I’m saying. I want to invite more people to it, and it’s martech. What is martech? Everyone? I don’t know if you’ve heard the term, if this is your first time, if you’re familiar with it, if you’re like, that’s, that’s me, that’s, that’s who I am, right? I don’t know the depth of which this term resonates. However, let’s talk about the definition now. It’s, it’s short for marketing technology, and one would say maybe that’s self explanatory, right? Marketing technology, but I went and did a little due diligence and said, You know, I’ve got a definition. I know what it means to me that I’m about to share with you all. But let me just see. What if somebody went to chat GPT or any AI tool and asked that tool, what marketing technology was? What would it say and chat GPT? Now my prompt was, I told chat GBT to put it in third grader language, because I didn’t want it to be over complicated or anything. And it says martech combines two words, marketing and technology. It’s the digital stuff. Yes, it says stuff, the stuff that helps companies tell people about their products and get them interested. And that’s okay. I think chatgpt got a little confused with third grade language, and it made it so basic that you can’t really glean a real good definition from it. However, let’s continue. Chatgpt says, Why is it important? Just like you need different tools to build a house, businesses need different tools to manage their marketing, martech makes it easier for businesses to reach out to people and understand what they like and keep them coming back. Okay? I mean, a little better, right? Still, if you’re not familiar with marketing, maybe you’re, you’ve got questions like, well, how, how do people keep coming back? How does it get them to engage. Tell me these things, right? But I feel like it covered it, I would add so this we have broken from AI and and I find I do this often. I’ll let ai do all the easy lifting, like the most basic stuff, but the deep understanding comes from a human’s brain. That’s just my personal thought. I will never be replaced my brain, my way of thinking, will never be replaced by artificial intelligence. And perhaps, maybe that’s not even the goal. Maybe that’s not even what people are trying to do who create these tools and everything. But I would say marketing technology is both an adjective and a noun, and in the adjective and the adjective for in the adjective form, there we go. It describes a type of technology used for digital marketing, right? Email marketing software is marketing technology. It is not, project management technology, right? And speaking of which, martech is just one of many techs that are starting to arise more prevalent. And you have FinTech, you have edtech, and it’s essentially saying. Saying, Hey, here’s now technology used for Financials, financial operations. Here’s software used software and technology used for educational processes and purposes. And this is the reason why you can combine these two words and get this short nickname, is because technology is expanding in business. The use of it, the adoption of it, is faster. It’s more vast, not the understanding I said, the adoption, the adoption of it, is taking place right before our very eyes. So now all of these industries that weren’t as techy are now beginning to become a little more techy, right? Hence the tech, FinTech, edtech. Maybe there’s going to be, like construction tech. Maybe it’s Contech, I don’t know, but we’re seeing this, this evolution we’ve never seen before of all of these industries really adopting technology. So that’s where martech comes from, and as an adjective, it helps you describe the type of technology being used for digital marketing. If I say QuickBooks, QuickBooks is not martech. QuickBooks is fintech. It’s technology used for financial operations, right? So, so we’ll see later on how it’s important to start to draw these lines of differentiation, because, naturally, the brain is lazy and wants to just lump everything together. Now that’s as an adjective, as a noun. It describes a category and or industry. Martech is a category. Now you can, you can say, hey, I’m in martech, and people, if more, if you’re in the startup space, people will know exactly. They’ll start to attribute that to like, oh, you’re a marketer. You’re, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re a digital marketer. Is where the mind would go if you say, Hey, I’m in martech. That lets them know that you’re probably doing some kind of advertisement, online sales, things like that. They attribute it with so it can be used as a noun as well. So for me, martech is a space that I’ve always been in but but never really you as you all as my witness. I’ve never really used the term. I never really use the term it. And it usually takes people to use the term on me multiple times or to refer to me multiple times for me to even consider the term. And it’s been for years. For years it’s been used, and I thought it was in the beginning. I’m like, Oh, it’s just a fancy word for automation. In marketing, marketing automation, you want to say martech. And, you know, startup people want to sound bigger than what they are. But no, no, no, it’s a real thing. It’s a real thing. Marketing technology, as a industry and as an adjective, is real. It’s real, and those of us in the martech space, we’re challenged. We accept it, but we’re challenged with learning the tools, understanding the landscape, staying up to date and savvy with strategies that leverage these tools that you need to be up to date with and know of, right? So it’s becoming a very well sought after skill practice person. Can I submit to you today that you can be a martech marketer. Can I create that term? I think I want to, all right, made the executive decision here on today’s podcast that I do. I want to, I want to coin the phrase martech marketer, and martech marketing, because it really is it. It tells you the area that the digital marketer is skilled in

Chris 9:07
martech. Now, some of you may have thought, well, Digital Marketer, duh, digital you got to know technology, not necessarily. All right, it may seem like it goes hand in hand, but you can be successful in digital marketing without being good at technology. There are tons of people. I’ve got tons of friends and counterparts and associates that technology overwhelms them, but they are some of the most masterful digital marketers you’ll ever meet. And digital marketing is essentially your the means of translating marketing into a digital form. Well, look, you don’t have to be the translator. You can just be the strategist, and you can have martech marketers that do the translating for you. That’s why I’m saying the term martech marketer is one level deeper than a. Digital Marketer, because that specifies that, hey, look, I’m the one that’s using the technology. I’m the one that’s responsible for understanding what’s out there, how to leverage it best, and which tools to best marry with your with your software. Now I know, I know my longtime listeners are maybe I introduce a little bit of confusion. They’re like, well, then what is an automation service provider? Chris, you’re confusing me. Listen everyone. It’s confusing because it’s confusing, not because of me. I’m actually adding some parameters. So a digital marketer is the broad that encompasses everything that you can do with respect to marketing, and not just marketing. Digi, especially like digitalmarketer.com the one that Ryan dice created. It, it’s vast. It sales. It does marketing. Sales teach you advertising Right? Like it’s become a very broad term, and it’s because of that, then I’m just adding a little bit of definition around these terms so that you can use them properly, present yourself appropriately, and potentially get paid for doing the thing, instead of all the things that feel Like you’re undervalued. So yes, you have digital marketer marketing as the big umbrella with any type of marketing, sales, advertising that takes place online, you can lump that under the digital marketing umbrella. Be careful, because broad language really produces really broad and undesired results. But anyways, that’s how it’s been okay, not arguing that, not trying to change that within digital marketing, now you have, are you a strategist? Are you at, you know, you good at Facebook, ads, SEO? Are you an email person? You know? Right? So you have all of these service based industries, but then there’s a category of strategic or technical? I don’t know what you would call the strategic person, right, but the technical person is the martech marketer. Now that just means I’m familiar and am learning and desire to know marketing technology and implement it for companies or myself or whatnot. Inherently, that process should produce automation. It should doesn’t always if I introduce Canva to a marketing team as an alternative to Photoshop, because of its ease of use and access to features that you know maybe are are not available elsewhere. That’s not really automation. Do you understand what I’m saying? So I can have marketing technology acumen without automation, but when I use marketing technology to automate processes, now I become an automation service provider, because I am providing the service of automation through martech in this digital space, digital marketing industry category, right? So that’s how that’s how it all connects everyone. And I hope this is giving you a better understanding, because another thing is, when you’re applying for jobs, marketing managers, operations specialists, nobody has Clean Language, and until you read the description of the job. You really don’t know what they’re really saying, because people just like to throw marketing technology, operations, automations and manager just pick any two words, and then that’s a position, right? Because we’re still really learning what marketing technology and automation positions even entail and look like, because people are now starting to adopt it as a natural means of going but I wanted to, I think I got a little deep there without even going technical. But I hope that makes sense. I want to dial it back and just say that from a very basic level, martech is a space. It is a practice of using marketing technology. I would desire to use marketing technology to automate your most important and profitable processes, but you don’t have to. Some of you just love AppSumo and seeing what new marketing technology is available, that’s fine. Who’s judging that that’s perfectly fine, but just understand you’re looking for marketing technology and understand the difference between sales technology. You take a tool like HubSpot, it’s both, it’s both. It does marketing and it does sale. This is how you get these bundles. And Active Campaign used to have bundles, and now they have add ons. This is why every. One. And as you see, Active Campaign just updated their pricing again, got rid of the bundles. Now they’re calling it add ons. Everybody’s trying to figure out this whole technology space and how to differentiate and decipher I think the drawback is it’s usually companies instead of an agnostic voice like myself. So this is the importance of having conversations podcasts like this that really takes some of these more basic principles that it may seem basic, and just give some color around it. And I want to do this in an ongoing fashion, just to level the playing fields everyone. Let me say this, for those of us in marketing, we’re still in The Talented 10th. Okay, we’re still in the upper echelon. Most people still struggle understanding marketing at a very basic level, and it has nothing to do with the amount of money you make, the maturity of your business, it requires, it is all dependent on the amount that you’ve had to know to be successful. And for most people, the amount that they’ve needed to know to be successful is not as large as you may think, and it did not require differentiating right terminology and words because technology wasn’t what it is but But mark my words as this new a the new generation of marketers come along with a whole new generation of technology. Listen everybody, it is going to get extremely confused, each more more confusing, even more quickly, and I get it, I’m kind of playing like the the the speaker that’s that’s been hired by a school to come and talk to a room three kindergarten classes all in one room around lunchtime, and they know in an hour, they get to go to recess. And I’m trying to get them to focus and sit down like I get it. Everybody’s scrambling, running around trying to do business, get business stuff done. And here I am, the voice of reason, just saying, Hey, slow down. Everybody real quick, just for 20 minutes, just for 30 minutes. Let me tell you this thing. Everybody look at the board. I get it. That’s the challenge, and I won’t have all of your attention. I won’t. It’s just impossible. But for those who will lend the ear, I’m grateful for, and I’m hoping, I’m hoping that these types of conversations bring a little more clarity to hiring managers, to talent that’s out there positioning themselves. And it helps. I hope it helps to ensure that you’re operating accurately and optimally and optimally, and more importantly, I hope you all appreciate me taking the time to really define these words and the carefulness to make sure that,

Chris 17:59
in some capacity, we can all get on the same page so that we can operate and reach our goals quicker. So make sure you share this with somebody that needs to that really, that you you were listening to it, and you’re like, that, hit home. Hey, listen to this. Maybe this is the language that you’ve been missing for the posting for your job. Why you’ve not been getting highly qualified candidates. I don’t know. Maybe this was the shift that you needed to make in your agency or business to say, Yes, this is what we specialize in. If so, I’m grateful. Would love to hear from you. There’s ways I heard if you’re using Apple, you can like, respond to the podcast. You can click a button and send a voice note. Feel free, please, somebody do it so I know that this feature is working. But beyond that, I’m just grateful for your time, for me to to spend with me, to talk about this topic in itself. Mark martech is a space that is growing so rapidly. I’m I’m glad to be in it everybody. I mean, this is my space. I love technology. I really do. And by the way, before I go, when I say technology, it’s really a synonymous play between software and technology. There software is technology, but technology can exist without software. So again, get a little nuance, right? There’s, there’s some different differentiation there. But by nature, software is technology. Technology can be anything. Technology usually leverages software in some capacity now, definitely now to run like operating systems and firmware and all of that. But when I say technology, it’s the broad language to be able to encompass software, um, physical devices, you get what I’m saying. So it’s a, it’s a, it’s I’m using it appropriately. But I once, I just wanted to make that statement. So you know that I’m not going. To explicitly always call out software, but usually when you hear me use the word technology, it encompasses software as well. So again, everyone, hopefully that was very clear for you. Helped you understand exactly what martech is, how it with the industry in itself, where to start to draw the line when you’re looking at technology and saying, Okay, I get it. This is good for marketing, this is good for sales, it’s good for project management. This is good for HR. This is good for finance, it’s good for education, this is good for support, right? All of the areas of business have their own appropriate technologies. And you’re, of course, listening to this podcast for marketing, technologies and strategies and in the means of automating both executing the marketing strategy with technology to automate profitable, profitable processes. All right. So with that being said, thank you all for listening, and until next time I see you online, automate responsibly, my friends. Thank you for tuning in to this episode of The all systems go podcast. If you enjoyed it, make sure that you’re subscribed at the time of recording the all systems go podcast is free to subscribe to, and it can be found in Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. New episodes are released every Thursday, so make sure you’re subscribed, so that you don’t miss out. And while you’re at it, please leave us a five star rating and review to show some love, but also to help future listeners more easily find the podcast so they can experience the value and goodness as well. We’ve compiled all resources mentioned on the podcast, as well as other resources that are extremely valuable and effective at helping you grow your marketing automation skills quickly, and you can access them all at all systems go podcast.com. Thanks again for listening, and until next time I see you online, automate, responsibly, my friends.