- Ad tech and marketing tech serve two different purposes. Ad tech helps you build your brand, while martech helps you connect with established prospects.
- Examples of ad tech are Undertone, AdPushup and Tapad.
- Marketing tech examples include SEO, Google Analytics, Salesforce and Buffer.
Articles, webinars and discussions on marketing can spur some confusion in reference to advertising technology and marketing technology (sometimes shortened to "martech"). Columns argue about which industry to invest in, which is superior to the other and where their futures lie.
The straightforward difference between the industries of ad tech and marketing tech is the difference between targeting the audience you don't have and targeting the audience you already have. Ad tech is made to build your brand and draw in the unknown customer to your business. It works on a larger scale, casting a net on large numbers of people to interest them in your brand. Marketing tech is more intimate, covering the group of people who are already customers to foster their continued business with you.
Both require analytics to be successful, and specialists debate which one should be a priority for businesses. They are two sides of the same coin, to be sure, and businesses need to at least implement some form of both.
What is ad tech?
Ad tech is commonly seen as platforms and tools that help you not only advertise online, but target ads to make them more effective, build your outward brand to attract potential customers to you, and track the effect of all this on your revenue. At the same time, ad tech is utilized by publishers who want to build revenue by selling advertising opportunities. It helps publishers optimize their advertising platforms and gives them analytics for tracking revenue and ROI.
Examples of ad tech
- Undertone is an ad tech company that helps you design cross-platform advertising campaigns. The company guarantees quality ads with high viewability. With high-impact ads that briefly encompass the screen as well as interactive, user-controlled ads, Undertone's goal is to make your business stand out. This company also has a strong focus on mobile advertising.
- AdPushup is an ad tech company for publishers who want to balance their own user experience and optimized placement of ads on their websites. This platform allows you to segment and personalize different ad layouts for different audiences. The ad script itself is optimized for fast-loading ads that don't slow down your site.
- Tapad is a tracking tool that assigns users a digital ID to track their web usage across devices. This makes it easier for companies to understand buyer behaviors.
What is marketing tech?
Marketing tech takes the more personable approach to reaching customers. Tools and software under the martech approach use direct methods of fostering good relationships with those who have been identified as your company's target audience – past customers or those who have expressed interest in becoming customers.
This specifies another clear difference between ad tech and martech audiences. Martech audiences have opted in to interactions with your company in some form, while ad tech audiences are mostly unsolicited, targeted by their demographics and available consumer data.
Examples of marketing tech
- Salesforce is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform that delivers vast amounts of data and analytics so you can build intricate profiles of your customer base and have better interactions with them. Its suite of products can improve your audience profile and your customer service. Like all CRMs, it's a data-gathering tool for all aspects of the customer interaction process.
- Buffer, on its surface, may seem like just a social media manager, but for businesses, it's a marketing tech tool to help you become closer and more accessible to your customers via social media. A growing subcategory of marketing tech is social media tools that allow you to better support customers and gain a positive reputation. Buffer's Reply platform is a customer service-oriented social media manager that lets your support representatives filter customer questions for multiple social media platforms and assign them.
- Web analytics is the collection of data related to website visitors. Analyzing your website visitors allows you to determine buyer trends. You can see what content is driving up traffic and the origin of the traffic. Google Analytics is the most popular and widely used web analytics tool.
- Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Snapchat are used to reach clients and build trust between the customer and business. Your posts can add value in your interactions with potential and existing clients.
- SEO, or search engine optimization, is a type of strategy to boost your landing pages in search engine results. Keywords within site content are used to move up where a website appears on Google's results pages.
Bottom line on ad tech and martech
Ad tech and martech are both essential tools for a successful business, and there's a lot of crossover and synergy between the two. Advertising is a way to field interest from large swaths of targeted individuals, and once they express interest in your company, that's when martech takes over to further engage them. For martech to be effective, you need a large base of current customers to market to and serve.
Ad tech cannot function optimally without data, and marketing tech can provide vast amounts of data. Building a profile of your most likely customers, you can target your ads using search keywords and frequently visited websites. Many ad tech and martech companies and products are already converging to form all-in-one platforms where data from ad tech could be used for martech and vice versa, so that is something to watch for.