Welcome to the Martek report, a place to discover the latest trends and insights into Marketing Technology.
If you’ve been involved with Marketing or Technology in the past few years, you’ve probably seen the words Martech floating around, but not really the term Martek. Let’s explain why we made a difference, and what it actually means.
So what is Martech?
At its simplest, Martech is short for ‘Marketing Technology’. What it stands for however is so much more than the sum of its parts. Marketing Technology tools have been growing significantly over the past 5 years, ranging initially from a few hundred options in 2011, to now over 3500 products and solutions in 2016. Martech however is more than just the products alone. It also covers the technologically centric marketing initiatives being pioneered by professionals that are not afraid to evolve away from analog tactics in a rampantly digital world. Regardless if you consider these professionals as Marketing Technologists or Tech-Savvy Marketers, it is clear that they see the value of integrating both sides of the industry.
So what is Martek?
Martek is flipping the word Market inside out. Which is exactly what marketing technology paradigms can do for for almost any problem – flip it inside out. It is combining the skills of Marketers and Technologists into a single inside-view perspective, instead of having two competing outside departments looking in, and having both sides almost inevitably think they are better than the other.
Traditionally, custom product solutions fall into one of the following two linear ways of thinking:
1) Marketing First solutions:
- The marketing team comes up with a brilliant marketing idea, and has no way of knowing how to do it.
- They thrust it into the hands of the tech team to implement or find a solution that gets barely taped together to handle due to unclear direction
- The scope changes dramatically and consistently and the technology crumbles and fails under the weight of the unplanned changes
2) Technology First Solutions
- The technology team comes up with a brilliant product idea, with no clue how to market it.
- They thrust it into the hands of the marketing team to promote, target and sell.
- The product is black boxed and the marketing team fails by overspending or incorrectly marketing what the audience needs
The all too often outcome from either of these scenarios is a lot of wasted time, money and frustration that could have been avoided.
The Martek way:
- The Martek team determines what the problem is, and what audience does it apply to
- The Martek team comes up with a brilliant marketing technology driven solution that appeals to that audience
- The solution is Whiteboxed and agile, so that marketing tactics originate from the inside and out, and technology tools integrate from the inside and out.
So how can this apply to any problem or Market you might ask? Good question.
Its all about re-defining what you consider to be your market.
For example, if you are building a tool that internally optimizes your process flow, your market is your employees, and what you are selling is not only their buy in to this new process, but the efficiency you gain from them using it. If you are a startup creating a new product from scratch, your market would be those individuals that have the problem that you are trying to solving.
Where most solutions fail is when you build a product without understanding who your market is in the first place.
And that’s why we chose Martek to be different.
So the next time you consider needing a custom software solution or consulting, consider Marteknology as your Martech partner to bridge the marketing technology gap for you.