MarTech

MarTech is short for “Marketing Technology,” meaning marketing technology. It refers to all software that companies use to organize advertising and customer contact. This includes a program that sends newsletters to millions of addresses. It also includes a system that stores which products you looked at in an online shop. In the past, marketing was mainly a matter of ideas and posters. Today it is, to a large extent, a matter of databases and programs running in the background.

Why advertising today is a software business

Advertising was long a guessing game. A company placed an ad in the newspaper and never really knew who had read it. A famous saying from the industry goes: Half my advertising budget is wasted, I just don’t know which half. MarTech promises to answer that question.

That’s because digital advertising can be measured. You can see how many people opened an email. You can see how many of them then bought something. From these numbers, you can calculate whether a campaign paid off. Marketing thereby becomes verifiable, like a production line.

That’s why it has turned into a huge market. Estimates count more than 10,000 individual MarTech products worldwide. Many companies now spend a considerable share of their marketing budget not on advertising itself, but on the software that controls it. For investors, this is interesting because such companies collect fixed monthly fees. This business model is considered especially predictable.

From data record to matching ad

It starts with collecting. When you sign up in a shop, a record about you is created. It grows with every click, every purchase, every opened email. This is managed in a customer database, often called a CRM, meaning a customer relationship management system. Some companies additionally combine data from shop, app, and physical store in what’s called a customer data platform.

Then comes sorting. The software divides customers into groups, for example by age, place of residence, or purchasing behavior. Afterward, someone sets rules. One example: anyone who leaves a full shopping cart gets a reminder after 24 hours. Such processes are called automation, because no human triggers them individually.

This is where AI comes in. Instead of rigid rules, models today predict which customer is likely to cancel or which subject line is most likely to be opened. Language models also write advertising copy in dozens of variants. A common misconception is that MarTech is thus fully automatic. In reality, humans must set the goals and check the results, otherwise the system optimizes for the wrong metric.

Recognizing MarTech in everyday life

You encounter MarTech constantly without hearing the name. The cookie banner on every website is part of it, since it governs permission to collect data. The product recommendation “Others also bought” also comes from such software. And when a shoe you once looked at follows you everywhere for days, retargeting is behind it, meaning targeted re-approach.

In the news, the term mostly comes up in connection with acquisitions. Providers like Salesforce, Adobe, or HubSpot buy smaller specialists to expand their offering. A second recurring topic is data protection. The European General Data Protection Regulation requires that data may only be used with consent. The end of so-called third-party cookies, which companies used to track users across other websites, is also forcing the industry to restructure.

MarTech should be distinguished from AdTech. AdTech more narrowly refers to the technology of buying ads, such as auctions for ad space in fractions of a second. MarTech encompasses the entire customer relationship, including emails, shop, and customer service. In practice, however, the two areas overlap significantly.