What is MadTech? How does it help you to realize the full potential of your marketing efforts?

MadTech is a linguistic blend of terms, being the result of combining marketing, advertising, and technology into one word. The term first appeared in 2015 and is meant to more accurately represent the current state of marketing and advertising technology in that both are increasingly more intertwined by data. 

Sitting at the crossroads between Marketing, Advertising, and Technology, MadTech plays a crucial role for businesses in the 21st century. It's through MadTech that companies can successfully deploy the right tools and strategies to get ahead of the competition and even generate disruption in the marketplace. 

Thanks to today's technology, big brands and corporations are literally sitting on a treasure trove of customer data. This includes everything from purchasing behavior, order history, demographics, geographical location, purchase intent, and even product research. 

MadTech allows this information to be combined like never before, helping marketers and advertisers to form a much better and more comprehensive picture of their audience. It allows businesses to see and understand their customers both before and after they've made a purchase. This gives them the necessary insights to know what offers will be more relevant to their customers in the future, when are they most likely to make a purchase, and what is the optimal combination of tools, strategies, and tactics needed for success. 

Traditionally, advertising has been covered by AdTech while marketing by MarTech. For the most part, they've coexisted at the opposite ends of the sales funnel. But over time, it's become increasingly more difficult to draw a clear line between the two. 

Simply put, AdTech defines by the ad campaign, ads, and all other relevant data and metrics that go with them such as acquisitions, views, impressions, etc. Advertising tech is created to help advertisers to build, run, manage, and measure all advertising activity across many websites, social channels, and apps. It also allows publishers to sell their available ad space (inventory) to numerous advertisers. It can be achieved through display ads or search-engine marketing (SEM). 

MarTech, on the other hand, allows marketers to develop, deploy, and manage their marketing activity such as social media management, email marketing, A/B testing, user-feedback, personalization, web analytics, etc. 

Both online marketing and advertising ecosystems are made up of several unique platforms, specific to their field. There are some, however, that can be found in both industries, such as data-management platforms (DMPs), but for the most part, they are independent. 

Below is a short rundown of what's unique to both AdTech and MarTech.

List of AdTech stack

When it comes to advertising technology, several major platforms and technologies come to mind. These include:

• Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) - These are specific platforms that allow media buyers to run various ad campaigns and buy inventory through a single user interface. These platforms represent a crucial component of the real-time bidding process, allowing advertisers to purchase media on an impression-by-impression basis. DSPs often use DMPs to enhance media buys and improve targeting. 
• Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) - Supply-side platforms provide security, automation, and efficiency to publishers selling their available inventory to advertisers. While this platform is not mandatory for this process, they offer the most yield and also provide better insights into the audience.  
• Search-Engine Marketing (SEM) Platforms - SEM platforms ensure the promotion of websites, which provide better visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). They are strictly connected to paid advertising and buying ads. 
• Ad Exchange - This dynamic tech platform works similarly to how the stock market buys and sells stock. It works pretty much the same way but between advertisers and web publishers. 
• Ad Network - The ad network will buy any unsold inventory from publishers, repackage it and sells it to advertisers. 
• Ad Server - It is a web-based tech platform that decides which ads will appear on what websites. They also serve and collect data, reporting metrics such as clicks, impressions, etc. 

List of MadTech stack

Some of the essential MarTech tools include:

• Social Media Management (SMM) Platforms - These platforms include examples such as Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Buffer, etc. Concerning social media listening tools, we can include examples such as Hootsuite Insights or Reputology, while in terms of influencer management, we have TapFusion or Webfluential. These are only some examples of social media-related platforms used in marketing. 
• Web Analytics - It includes the process of collecting and analyzing data, which marketers use to optimize their pages, campaigns, and strategies better. Web analytics is used for both business and market research, providing various insights for better development. 
• Customer-Relationship Management (CRM) - CRM, in the context of MarTech, is a platform used for managing a company's interaction with both current and potential customers.
• Content Optimization Tools - SEO and other similar content optimization tools are used by marketers to better tailor their content for better search engine rankings and other benefits. 
• Marketing Automation - Marketing automation can include a wide variety of platforms, some of which being mentioned above. These are used to automate some of the marketing processes, streamlining operations and increasing efficiency. 
• Personalization Tools - These tools are used to customize messages of a marketing campaign based on the needs and interests of individual users. This personalization is based on what available data there is about that customer. 

How MadTech Improves Your Marketing Efforts

Each of the examples presented above includes numerous platforms and tools. Regardless, they all involve the aggregation and processing large amounts of data. MadTech is a natural response to this as a means of combining both advertising and marketing technology into one seamless and optimized category.  

The results of this merger provide better, richer, and more comprehensive data which will prove to be invaluable to marketers. The synergy generated by combining these different types of technologies will better target the right audiences, which, in turn, will help marketers in understanding what exactly their customers want and need. 

Personalization Across All Channels

With MadTech, an organization can create audiences based on detailed information collected from its e-commerce store and use it on a DSP. From here, they can target users who fit the exact criteria of the company. With MarTech, personalized messaging happens with first-party data collected from owned media such as emails, CRM, and websites. ADTech, on the other hand, uses third-party data and paid media. MadTech, however, combines both of these features and delivers personalized messages across all media.

Utilizing Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence

When it comes to machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) in the fields of AdTech and MarTech, the technology isn't quite there yet. But when it comes to MadTech, there are suddenly numerous possibilities. Amazon's predictive-shipping initiative is one such example. As its name would suggest, this is a system where the process will automatically deliver products to a customer even before he or she places an order. 

Improved Customer Journeys

Single customer views (SCVs) help marketers create personalized customer experiences. They can better analyze and understand how a customer interacts with the brand and helps them focus their efforts on the most efficient touch-points of the customer journey and eliminate inefficient or obsolete ones. 

Differently stated, a unified MadTech data platform will automatically eliminate people from the sales funnel the moment they are no longer part of a given audience segment. What this means for the end-user is that they will no longer receive advertisements for products they've already purchased. It implies that the organization will no longer spend resources on such irrelevant messaging.  

Together with Ameex Technologies, you can utilize MadTech to your advantage and maximize your marketing efforts like never before. Contact us today for more information.