Marketing technology in 2014

If you work on a marketing department for sure your daily life is full of things to do; and most of the days you don’t have enough time to do everything you should.

Based on this reality, a new concept is rising among marketers: marketing technology.

Marketing technology is a range of tools and platforms that marketing and sales department need to accomplish effectively their tasks.

Depending on the size of the business and how many departments it has; or in some cases if it is a technological company the responsible for these marketing technology tools will be one or another department.

What kind of technology influences marketing?

Every kind; but we can group them in six groups. Once we finish classifying for sure you notice that you are currently using one of them:

• Marketing Experiences: we can include here all the tools that marketers use in its interaction with customers across their lifecycle. We are talking about SEO, advertising, email, social media, usability tools and so on.
• Marketing Operations: if marketing experience was about what users see, operations is about what they don’t see; but it is necessary to work in this part to provide services to our customers. We can include here Marketing Resource Management that support marketing activities and improve its effectiveness. Also here you can include analytics and Digital Asses Marketing (aka DAM).
• Marketing Middleware: like operations, it is something your users don’t see but Middleware is such an important piece of any strategy since it is a marketing software that helps your other marketing software work together better. As MM tools we can include cloud connector, user management and tag management, that most experts consider the most important tool inside middleware.
• Marketing Backbone Platforms: These kind of platforms support most of the experience and operations systems, enabling those systems to focus on particular tasks without creating complete customer management environments of their own. Sometimes to connect Backbone Platforms with Experience and Operations Middleware is used, but some others they are connected directly. We can include here e-commerce engines, email marketing or content manager.
• Infrastructure Services: Databases, cloud computing and software tools could be included in this group.
• Internet Services: This last group includes those tools from the Net that have achieved a top position based on their influence. We can group here all those platforms used daily and have a capital importance when we think about sharing contents such as Google, Facebook or Twitter.

By :Tlta