Marketing Technology for Small Business

What is Marketing Technology?

Marketing Technology, or MarTech for short, is defined as the tools and technologies marketers use to make their jobs—and lives— simpler. MarTech can help any kind of business run better by improving the marketing team’s effectiveness, strategies and activities. MarTech does this through automation, e-commerce and connectivity, to name a few. Marketing tools have developed alongside the changes in today’s technology to help businesses of all sizes market their products and services better.

We already mentioned a few ways you can improve your marketing strategy; to start implementing these technologies, you will have to research the myriad of software programs out there and find which one best suits what your business does and what its goals are. Email automation is a helpful tool that can connect you with hundreds of people with the click of a button. And e-commerce tools help boost your sales. We will get into other tools and technologies later on, but for now, we want you to know that MarTech allows a business to gain valuable insights into their customer base to ensure they are marketing their business in the best way possible. Marketing Technology is a broad term but can be broken down into specific software tools and tactics you can utilize in your everyday business routine.

Why is MarTech important?

MarTech now allows for businesses of all sizes to compete in the age of digital. These software tools can be free or inexpensive and provide access to the capabilities and intelligence used by the large company sector. We believe that 2019 is a great time to run a business. For small businesses specifically, there are lots of changes going on that give scaling businesses an advantage. The key is to understand your strengths, define what makes your business stand out, and engage with prospects and customers where you provide the most value. Doing this effectively means leveraging simple technology to make it easy to help people while you serve your clients and grow your business.

With the increasing use of smartphones and personal tablets, people are always online and in the loop. Marketing technologies can help you reach those people, those who are searching for what your business does.

How do you reach all these potential clients? Let us give you some ideas.

How can you use MarTech in your business? How does it benefit you?

We’ve talked a lot in general about Marketing Technology, but if this is the first time you’re learning about it, you may not know where to start. As a HubSpot Partner, we use their software, which includes a plethora of marketing, sales and customer relationship management tools. Yext is another software that focuses on data management. This keeps your brand’s data consistent wherever there is information about you on the internet, and is a great tool for building trust with potential customers. These are just a couple of the hundreds of types of marketing software that can benefit you in whatever way you need.

We found an article written by the Harvard Business Review that gives a good introduction to the many types of marketing technology out there. They came out with a condensed list of marketing technologies every company should use in their day-to-day. The specific software that provide these services can be found in their article.

Here are the top 7 marketing technologies that HBR and InVerve think every company should consider:

Analytics: What good is the data you are gathering on potential customers if you don’t know how to organize or analyze it? You can be getting all the right information, but if you don’t strategically review the information you have gathered, you could be losing out on reaching potential customers.

Conversion Optimization: You can lead people to your website all you want, but the key is to get them to convert to a customer or a lead that you have the ability to market to. Conversion optimization is the process of creating the best path for customers to come to your website and do whatever it is you want them to do, i.e., make a purchase, schedule a conversation, etc. Have you ever entered your email while shopping online to get 15 percent off your first purchase? This is one of the most common tools for optimizing conversion or getting information from them for you to later market to in an effort to turn into a customer.

Email: After you get said contact information, you then want to provide them useful information via email. Staying in front of your potential customers through email is powerful, so long as you are doing it in a way that doesn’t turn them off of your company. Email marketing can also be automated so that you don’t have to send individual emails to the hundreds of leads coming through to your site.

Search Engine Marketing: You want to show up when someone is conducting a general search for your product or service. In order to do this, you have to be using the right keywords so Google knows your content is relevant to said search. Search engine optimization can be done on your own website without the use of an outside tool and can increase your ability to be found by potential clients.

Remarketing: Have you ever visited a website and then, after you leave, you start seeing ads for that website’s products? This marketing technology is called remarketing. Google Ads is the most commonly used tool to achieve this tactic. This is important because it gets your product or service back in front of the potential customer, giving them another chance to do business with you.

Mobile: The mode of technology people are on most nowadays is their phone. According to the Harvard Business Review, half of emails are opened on smartphones and, soon, half of all search will be done on smartphones as well. This means businesses need to adapt all aspects of their online marketing tactics to be mobile-friendly.

Marketing Automation: Automation, as we mentioned before in relation to emails, brings all of the above technologies together. The Harvard Business Review considers HubSpot to be one of the leading marketing automation programs for small businesses, and we agree. HubSpot utilizes automation to track how people come to your website and what they do when they are there, can help you manage an endless number of email campaigns, and facilitates the alignment of sales and marketing through qualifying leads as they come in.

Marketing Technology is one of the most important resources you can use in your small or large business today. What we have outlined above is just the beginning of the tools available to you; there are still a variety of different areas to consider utilizing marketing technology with: social media, content strategy and video are just a few to get you thinking about it. Do your research on what marketing technologies you think would be most useful in your business and take a stab at implementing one within your marketing team. If it works for you, take the processes in-house. If not, you can always hire an outside marketing agency to help manage all the little pieces. Remember, marketing technology is here to help make marketers jobs and lives simpler, and to help you better run your business to achieve long-term growth and success.