Customization, Gen Z, and all the marketing technology apps you could hope to want.

Marketing technology, or MarTech, has exploded in recent years, growing from 150 solutions in 2011 to over 7,000 in 2019 according to ChiefMarTec.com (and, by their own admission, they know they’re missing many in that count).

An image of Chief MarTec’s “Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic 2019”, showing the over 7,000 provider solutions in categories like Advertising, Content, Commerce, and Data.

It goes without saying that new technology can boost your company’s efforts in marketing – such a robust MarTech industry wouldn’t exist if it didn’t – but how do you find what’s right for you without getting overwhelmed? And how do you keep your marketing tools as tools, while still providing room for human choice and intuition?

One feature about the current technology landscape is that you don’t have to try to fit a square peg into your marketing’s round hole. Technology is more customizable than ever before, and that customization is increasingly democratic, in that you don’t need an advanced programming degree to set up a solution unique to the marketing needs of your business. Apps like Airtable create anything from team workflows to enriched databases to accounts payable to 3D modelling, all powered through a spreadsheet – and what marketer doesn’t know their way around a spreadsheet?

The flipside to the proliferation of new marketing technologies is that the data they generate can overwhelm even well-staffed teams. Marketing Directors and CMOs have to be able to efficiently traverse that data and lead responses to it while the getting is still good. So, while creating marketing technology is becoming more available to the lay marketer, there’s still some specialized expertise required for data collection and analysis.

All that said, new technologies are essential for the longevity of your marketing. The Generation Z demographic expects brands to be simultaneously culturally aware, omnipresent, and tech-savvy, and MarTech can help. From AI personality-fused chatbots (check out Cleo, an occasionally sassy money management app with advertisements all over social media) to data-driven customer journey maps that fuel new, customized content, there are a lot of ways technology can help you establish your brand with Gen Z. Get ready to garner new business for years to come with MarTech.

Looking for help to sift through all of the 7,000 options available to marketers, or need external experts to make sense of your collected data? Contact our consultants for an introductory meeting.

 

Photo by Marvin Meyer on Unsplash.