Episode 10

Martech is exploding! 

Back in 2014 there were roughly 947 marketing technology tools available. In 2024, this number sits at 13,080 with an increase of 18.5% from last year alone. 

To deep dive into Martech’s growth, benefits, and application, Kate Nunan spoke to marketing technology expert with over 10 years experience, Khushbu Parmar.

Q: What makes you excited about Martech?  

Khushbu: It's been a pleasure to be able to understand how diverse these marketing technologies are, how the landscape is changing every other day. I am amazed at the fact that now that there's seamless integrations happening in between CDPs or the database. There are different marketing platforms or automation platforms and there's this big data analytics platforms such as Google Analytics, the Google giant, which is I feel like it's so immersive that you can kind of get caught in yourself understanding the diverse landscape of different analytics platforms. 

Q: How has the Martech industry grown? 

Khushbu: I would say that the big data analytics or the marketing automation or CDPs. These are the cornerstones of the martech industry today. From what I see that there is a huge, huge spike in the usage of the CDP platforms, since a lot of marketers are relying on the CDP platform.  

They could help business collect, unify, and actively utilize the customer data from various sources to the single view of the customer and deliver personalized marketing campaigns. Then there is also the huge spike in the analytics platforms, which is Google Analytics. So Google Analytics have advanced from Universal to GA4 today which is providing you not only just web, but it also immersive experience of web and app activities.  

And there's so much that is being able to understand there's marketing intelligence, which is being actively utilized in the analytics platforms, like the website traffic, or there's the targeted audiences, which can be utilized and can be leveraged against. 

And there is blockchain then there are so many complex other artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms.  

Companies are wanting to invest in more tech because you know you have the marketing platforms, you have the technology and you have everything else, but you want someone to be able to connect to each other. You want someone to be able to validate these platforms. 

Q: Do you think it was a shift in the companies and in your experience that they said, OK, we have this information over here and we have our technology over here and we need to combine those? Or do you think that people like you and your role in your experience that you needed to educate?  

Khushbu: The Martech technology was there. It's the information sitting right there, but it's also the fact that you need to be able to educate people how to utilize them. I had to do a lot of educational coaching sessions. 

 First, I had to learn it myself I had to dive deep into these technologies and understand how these platforms work, their workflows, their processes and how to streamline them and then be able to present documents and be able to present roadmaps to my business partners is also a super critical role for me.  

I think it also boils down to how you can leverage these platform features for better business use cases. So that's what also makes a better use of your tech knowledge.  

There's so many benefits to it, you can have your seamless integrations across your platforms. You can see how you can bring different universes of your users to merge with the different universe, right? You can also see that experiences or those audience insights in an analytics platforms is so so critical. You are not able to be just gain insights or even leverage these predictive insights if you don't have a full picture.  

So that's what I feel that it's just so it's a critical role for me to understand its nuances and also be able to navigate the differences between the individual platforms and how can we leverage them against each of the business cases. 

Q: How do you find the kind of marketing internal teams and the technology internal teams? Are they collaborating quite well now? Is it kind of you've gotten to this streamlined space that you just mentioned or is there still kind of work to do to make sure that you're staying competitively ahead of the curve?  

Khushbu: I think it's a time to cut down the silos between different teams. I do see that a lot even in my previous roles or I see in the industry overall. Each sector has their own way of doing things and getting ahead of the curve is important, but it's also important to be stay collaborative and understand what the needs of the business are. 

Is your objective just from the incrementality standpoint, just increasing your sales? Or are you also wanting to increase your brand awareness? Or are you just wanting to increase your target audiences? Or are you just wanting to make your creatives look more creative so that your ads are like? Your objectives can really define how you can cut down the silos, how you can come down together and can work in a in a collaborative fashion and then bring your objectives to one page is is not so easy and it's a complex process.  

How can we unify some of the objectives so that, and then understand what is that one goal? Like for Sephora, it's beauty awareness. Then I would understand that the brand awareness is so critical for the upcoming brands, right? Some of the brands were already established, people are gonna buy them and they're gonna be repeat customers.  

But for someone who is just newly launched, then they would need a lot of awareness, like a lot of establishments. So that becomes a major goal for the teams. So I think it's the opportunity to cut down the silos, but it's also the opportunity to see what the business goals are, and it can always kind of route in that direction. 

Q: What are the emerging trends that you're seeing in the Martech space that you think will have the most significant impact on marketing and technology practices over the next five years? 

 That's a very broad question. Martech is not just marketing technology. It could be marketing automation, or it could be just big data analytics. But I can see there's a pattern here that companies follows.  

I would definitely see there's a lot of advancement in how companies leverage these marketing platforms. There's also this huge gap in understanding the technological differences of these platforms.  

So from my perspective, I see that martech space is growing so much and people are now able to have that as a full advantage to their career that they're able to perform as a marketing technology manager in full capacity. That's amazing because that's growing and that's going to keep growing. It's going to be the same that it depends on what avenues the company wants to go.  

Now the AI is advancing so much that you're kind of wanting to utilize and leverage AI to any point that companies are wanting to have this AI leveraged for utilizing your assets or your creatives or even to the point that you're kind of launching your marketing campaigns. Just utilizing and printing RFPs and things like that for utilizing AI heavily, right? There are so many different companies are now invested and how can they provide comparisons of different platforms just by using AI. 

It's advancing so much that you need to be aware of your goals and objectives and be precise that you can't have everything in one plate. You need to be able to understand some of the technological differences and how these platforms work and how they integrate.  

I can see Snowflake or Optimo, there's so many other segments or high touches or other marketing automation platforms, Salesforce marketing, Marketo or HubSpot. They give you endless amount of capabilities on how to leverage your email marketing campaigns and how to manage your accounts. 

But you also need to understand that if there's a way to integrate these platforms seamlessly with your other existing set of Martech, right? I mean the marketing platforms that you have. So it boils down to that and then understanding what are the emerging platforms, what are the pricing strategies or what are the long -term goals for you?  

Is loyalty big for you or just brand sales? what is the main KPI that keeps your business up to date or that keeps your business going? Yeah, so that all boils down to that, but I definitely see a huge huge spike in the martech sector and there's a lot of technological advancements that are happening today.  

Martech is clearly growing and Khushbu’s insights have explained so much more about the industry as a whole, collaboration, and how to leverage the technology for brand goals. Given the growth rate, it is going to be fascinating to see where martech goes in the next 12 months. 

Listen to the episode on Spotify here. 

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