What does your MarTech Canvas look like?
MarTech, otherwise known as Marketing Technology, is the term for the software and tech tools marketers leverage to plan, execute, and measure marketing campaigns. The suite of tools a company leverages for marketing processes is known as the MarTech Stack. If you’re a marketer, it can be a great idea to create your own MarTech […]
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MarTech, otherwise known as Marketing Technology, is the term for the software and tech tools marketers leverage to plan, execute, and measure marketing campaigns. The suite of tools a company leverages for marketing processes is known as the MarTech Stack.
If you’re a marketer, it can be a great idea to create your own MarTech Canvas – just like entrepreneurs and innovators often use Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas.
The Martech Canvas
You can start with a blank canvas looking like this:
source: MartechTribe
The canvas consists of five main building blocks:
Management
These are the tools that you use in order to manage your marketing content. Examples of such tools could be Slack, Trello, Dropbox, Google+, Asana, Skype, Intercom etc.
Advertising & Promotion
These are your tools to do advertising and promotional campaigns. Examples of such channels are LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google AdWords, YouTube, Instagram, Adroll, Pinterest etc.
Content & Experience
You also need MarTech tools to handle your content & deliver great experiences for your customers. Tools for this purpose include Google Analytics, Salesforce, WordPress, Marketo, Optimizely, Moz, Hubspot, Wistia, Mailchimp etc.
Sales & Commerce
Across the three MarTech blocks mentioned above goes your Sales & Commerce efforts, where some of the most popular tools include Salesforce Pardot, Datanyze, Yesware, Pipedrive & Magento.
Data
Data tools are vital to prove that your marketing efforts are working. Market leaders in the Data-area include Tableau, Crazyegg, Xoominfo, Google Tag Manager, Segment.iot and Discover.org.
Investment and Return is everything
With an overview of the main building blocks let me explain to you what the logic behind the canvas is.
This is best explained by looking at the first and last building block – Management and Data.
For digital marketers being able to show a good ROI on your efforts is everything in the future.
If you’re only able to show that you’re producing content (e.g. sending out newsletters and writing blog posts), you won’t be able to compete with marketers that can also prove that their MarTech stack works.
That is why your main focus should always be to have management and data tools that combined are able to show the Return on your Investment spent on the three other stacks: ads & promotions, content & experience and Social & Relationships.
Awareness, interest, desire and action
You might be familiar with the AIDA-model? If not AIDA is an acronym that stands for Attention or Awareness, Interest, Desire and Action.
The AIDA model is widely used in marketing and advertising to describe the steps or stages that occur from the time when a consumer first becomes aware of a product or brand through to when the consumer trials a product or makes a purchase decision.
Given that many consumers become aware of brands via advertising or marketing communications, the AIDA model helps to explain how an advertisement or marketing communications message engages and involves consumers in brand choice.
In essence, the AIDA model proposes that advertising messages need to accomplish a number of tasks in order to move the consumer through a series of sequential steps from brand awareness through to action (purchase and consumption).
Paid, owned, shared earned
Having the AIDA-model in place, what does your Marketing Mix then look like?
To explain what I mean, when I use the expression Marketing Mix, let us again use the MarTech Canvas and put 3 other words to the main building blocks of the canvas:
There is a mix of media types that online marketers employ to facilitate the connection between brand information and consumers/buyers across the customer lifecycle relationship.
Those media types are often characterized as Paid, Earned, Owned and Shared media.
Paid Media
Often thought of as “traditional” online advertising through display ads, pay per click search ads and sponsorships. The pro for paid media is its ability to be implemented pretty much on-demand, the ability to have some degree of control and also that it scales.
The growing popularity of social advertising on sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (YouTube as well) adds another option for marketers to gain presence in channels where consumers and buyers are spending their time.
The appearance of brand messages and content within paid media can work together with social sharing and organic search.
Earned Media
The result of public & media relations efforts to gain coverage in publications – on and offline.
Or essentially, brand presence within media without having to advertise.
This definition also extends to brands that behave online in such a way that “customers empowered to publish” create content on the brand’s behalf inspiring buzz and word of mouth.
Owned Media
Media, content and assets that the brand controls, like websites, blogs, newsletters and brand social media accounts.
Brands are increasingly behaving like publishers with editorial staff managing content creation steams.
“Content Marketing” is the hot topic when it comes to Owned Media and can facilitate brand information discovery through search and social channels.
Content engages customers and fosters relationships throughout the customer lifecycle.
Brand content to serve both broad and niche audiences are not immediately scalable but can provide long term growth benefits without corresponding growth in costs.
Shared Media
Brand social web participation and interaction with consumers on content on sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that results in content is “shared media” since it’s a result of a shared interaction.
Because of the nature of social sharing and engagement on social media sites, Shared Media can propagate across an individual’s network to others, and so on and so on.
Paid and Owned Media can inspire Shared Media. Shared Media can inspire Earned Media.
Your marketing stack
Putting these building blocks together gives you the MarTech Canvas.
The canvas consists of the building blocks that I mentioned above, and each building block often contains a number of different ‘stacks’ – meaning a subset of software tools that support a specific marketing function.
It’s illustrated in the model below that I’ve borrowed from MartechTribe:
An example of a marketing stack
Each MarTech canvas and stack is as different as the company using it. Of course, there are popular tools like the ones described in the beginning of this blog post, but it really depends on your company size; focus; goals etc.
Here is just one example of what the different marketing stacks could look like – combined in the MarTech Canvas:
Often our tool, JumpStory, is included in a number of these different stacks since we both have our normal platform that you’re on right now, but also our API integrations where our product is integrated into other MarTech product like APSIS, Scratcher, WordPress etc.
I hope that reading this article gave you a useful overview of the life of a modern, digital marketer.
