What is Martech? Full Guide and How to Build Your Stack

Martech, or marketing technology, is any software, platform, or service that helps you with marketing activities.

That might be in the form of

• Customer relationship management (CRM) systems
• Email newsletter platforms
• Analytics dashboards
• Content solutions
• Social media tools

Whenever technology enables your marketing and sales teams to do their jobs better—automation, analysis, communication tools, or other solitons—it qualifies as Martech.

Its goal is to streamline operations, gain meaningful insights, and deliver more results-driven campaigns.

Martech vs Adtech: What's the difference?

While Martech and Adtech do overlap, there are some differences.

Martech takes a broader approach to marketing operations and customer experiences, while Adtech focuses solely on advertising.

Adtech uses ad-specific tools and technologies—usually complex programmatic software—to power your advertising efforts. This helps you show the right ads to the right people at the right time.

Some Adtech examples are:

• Demand-side platforms (DSPs)
• Ad exchanges
• Ad networks
• Ad servers
• Data management platforms (DMPs)

A simple way to look at it is that Martech helps nurture and retain customers, while Adtech helps you find and acquire new ones.

Where Martech enables you to understand your customers better and engage with them more effectively, Adtech helps you place the best ads in front of your audience.

Martech solutions are crucial for maximizing your marketing performance. They give ambitious marketers an edge that helps them deliver faster, better results.

It empowers teams to:

• Work smarter, not harder: Martech automation enables you to streamline manual tasks so you can focus on more meaningful tasks that drive growth.

• Enhance personalization: With data and insights, you can craft tailored messages and offers customized to each customer.

• Drive higher conversions: You're bound to drive more sales by nurturing customers better across channels.

• Understand campaign performance: Robust marketing analytics give you attribution insights so you know what content and strategies work best—no more guessing games.

• Get higher ROI: Increased efficiency, optimization, and automation means you’ll get more bang for your marketing buck.

With great benefits also come great challenges. Martech requires a thoughtful approach and reasonable expectations.

Here are some top struggles marketing teams face when adopting Martech solutions:

• Data overload: With so many dashboards, metrics, and reports across your tools, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Marketing analysis paralysis is real—focusing on the most critical KPIs will help you see a way through.

• Integration difficulties: When you have multiple martech platforms, getting them to work together can be tricky. Nothing is more frustrating than data silos, so looking for integrated tech stacks is wise.

• Budget constraints: Many shiny marketing technology solutions are out there but often come with a hefty price tag. Securing a budget for these investments can be challenging.

• Measuring ROI: Marketing is responsible mainly for pipelines and sales revenue. However, actually attributing this revenue back to specific martech tools remains difficult. An unclear ROI makes it hard to justify spending.

• Adoption issues: You can implement a world-class platform, but it's pointless if your team doesn’t use it. Driving user adoption across your organization is imperative for success.

With so many Martech solutions available, you’re probably wondering how they all work together.

Enter the Martech stack.

It’s a careful combination of software, systems, and platforms that help you carry out your marketing strategy and campaigns.

Marketing and sales teams often use various technologies to enable their activities, bundling them into one Martech stack.

Most Martech stacks are made up of a handful of core capability areas, such as:

• Customer data and insights tools: CRM, analytics, and data visualization dashboard

• Marketing automation and campaign tools: Email, mobile, social, and ads management

• Digital experience tools: Personalization engines, content publishing, and Chatbots

• Operations tools: Budget allocation, asset management, and product catalogs

Each company’s stack is customized to their needs, with the goal of creating an integrating mix of Martech solutions that sync together seamlessly.

Constructing the right Martech stack for your business takes careful planning and thoughtful consideration.

So, what should you include?

Let’s look at some must-have elements when building your Martech stack.

• CRM: This is the foundation for managing customer data and relationships in one place. It provides a unified customer profile and ensures your sales and marketing efforts are aligned.

• Marketing automation: These tools enable you to create personalized, automated, multichannel campaigns that entice prospects and customers. Popular features include customized journeys, lead scoring, email templates, landing page builders, and integrations.

• Email marketing: Deliver targeted and engaging emails at scale with a dedicated email marketing system. Key elements include creative email templates, automation based on customer behavior, advanced performance analytics, and split testing capabilities.

• Analytics platform: Gain clear visibility into your content and campaigns through marketing analytics platforms. Metrics provide important performance insights that empower strategic optimizations.

• Content tools: Streamline your content operations with user-friendly platforms. Centralize your content planning, creation, collaboration, distribution, and analytics.

• Social media management: Seamlessly manage multiple social media profiles through different solutions. Publish content across different networks, monitor your mentions, engage with followers, and analyze performance.

• Digital experience software: This enables you to manage customer journeys through dynamic personalization and omni-channel delivery, leading to more refined experiences.

Evaluating specific solutions across these Martech categories involves understanding their distinct capabilities, how easy they are to use, and any budget trade-offs.

For example, most marketing teams prefer Cloud-based platforms for convenience and broader app integrations.

However, the “perfect” Martech stack is one that:

• Aligns with your current business needs
• Offers flexibility to scale its functionality
• Fits with your budget and ways of working.

Remembering the end goal of fueling your digital experiences and engagement is also key.

Succeeding with marketing technology requires keeping up with the latest innovations and developments.

With 68% of CMOs expecting their spending on Martech to increase, knowing where to channel your budget is essential.

Here are some top Martech trends to be aware of.

• AI-enabled solutions: Machine learning is enhancing everything. From predictive lead scoring to hyper-personalized content recommendations and intelligent chatbots, expect to see it incorporated into almost every Martech platform you use. Over 80% of industry experts now use some form of AI in their online marketing activities, so you certainly won’t be alone.

• Data-driven strategies: Analytics, attribution modeling, and performance optimization are crucial for strategy decisions. With data powering most of our choices, the market was valued at over $49 billion in 2022, an amount that’s only set to increase.

• Audio marketing: With the growth of voice search (over 125 million people used it in 2023), optimizing your marketing efforts for audio channels like smart speakers (i.e., Alexa or Siri) is vital.

• Highly personalized experiences: Tracking multiple devices to develop unified customer profiles will be a huge focus area, enabling you to deliver highly personalized experiences that resonate everywhere.

• Omnichannel communications: Your customers should be able to reach you in whichever way they wish. You need to offer consistent, integrated interactions across different devices and touchpoints.

• Privacy-centric marketing: Around 63% of consumers think businesses aren’t being honest about how they use their personal information. You need to prove to your customers they can trust you with their data by being transparent and properly managing their consent.

• Virtual marketing: The VR (virtual reality) market is projected to reach $174 million by 2024. These emerging channels, including AR (augmented reality) and the metaverse, present exciting new opportunities to engage with your audience. Don’t shy away from what appears “futuristic” now—it may soon be the norm.

Staying on the leading edge enables you to keep competitiveness high and maximize your results.

Keeping a close eye on industry developments, testing innovative platforms, and dedicating resources to Martech education can help you do this.

Amplitude Analytics helps you move away from vague validation and towards metrics that fuel decisive and impactful strategies.

It’s the driving force behind true product-led growth, supporting marketing, product, and engineering teams with actionable user insights. Use it to back up your customer-centric decisions and accelerate expansion.

With Amplitude, you benefit from:

• Holistic insights: Amplitude connects user data across web and mobile devices to provide a complete view of product usage.

• Easy activation: Unlike some analytics tools, Amplitude offers faster time-to-value with intuitive UI and out-of-box tracking.

• Powerful behavioral analytics: Move beyond surface-level analytics to uncover the “why” behind user actions, thanks to detailed behavior analysis.

• Impact dashboarding: Spot trends, compare cohorts, and monitor campaigns with interactive data visualizations created with collaboration in mind.

• Flexible integrations: Integrate Amplitude with other platforms and software to make it easy to centralize data from all your technology solutions.

Discover why Amplitude is a must-have Martech solution. Contact our sales team today.