For starters there is the jargon, a miasma of buzzwords and phrases. You might, in the very same sentence, encounter both "holistic consumer experience" and "tag management system." Although smiling and nodding does help, trying to make sense of what they actually mean is far more effective.
In short, the idea behind martech goes like this: Today's consumers are empowered and demand more from the brands they engage with. Marketers want to meet these expectations -- they really do! -- but doing so requires a deep understanding, or one-to-one relationship, of who they are and how they engage with them.
And that requires a lot of data.
Marketing technology provides the plumbing to gather such data, but it's often expensive, complex and isn't fully realized. Here, we share some frequently used terms that are often used in marketing technology and attempt to explain them in the plainest English possible.
Account business management (ABM): Like B2B, but requires more effort
Adobe: The Tom Brady of martech, focused on advertising
Algorithm: Just as biased as the human who wrote it
Artificial Intelligence: Buzzword today, but has similar potential as VR
Audience segmentation: Get me left-handed gluten-free millennial widows with six toes
B2B: Martech's first love
B2C: Martech's new love
Campaign automation: We welcome our robot overlords
Campaign metrics: Did people buy your stuff?
Consumer journey: Show us on the map where the customer touched you
CRM: The customer is always right
Data management platform: Shadow broker who provides extensive info on said customer
Digital transformation: Playing catch-up
Dynamic ad creation: Personalized content
Holistic experience: Doing your job
Hootsuite: Marketing technology you can schedule
LUMAscape: Winter is coming
Marketing automation: We welcome our robot overlords
Martech: Any piece of technology a marketer uses to reach a customer, like Hootsuite
Natural language processing: We welcome our robot overlords
Omnichannel: Online and offline
Oracle: Watch your back, Adobe
SaaS: Software as a service. (Only slightly less sexy than Saabs)
Salesforce: No. 1 in CRM; just ask them!
Tag management system: One script to track them all
Watson: Good at chess. And Jeopardy. And branding for IBM and all of AI.
Contributor: Kate Kaye