Which 8,000 companies offer free martech tools and how to use them?

Jim James: 0:00

Today, I got to sp ak with Scott Brinker, the VP of Platform Ecosystem at a marketing technology compa y called HubSpot. He helps HubSp t integrate with other differe t marketing and sales technologi s out there, and he also wr tes a blog, chiefmartec.com, which he's been doing for 12 years. On his blog, he dives int the dynamics of technology i the marketing world. As a part of that, he also runs a mart ch conference (not this year, ut in normal years), of which he is the Program Cha I asked Scott for his opinion n what he thinks technology c I then asked Scott if he thinks we'd see widespread adoption n do for the small business owne . He says he's biased on this but he believes that the m rketing technology rev lution has served small business s far greater than it has la ge businesses. La ge businesses have alway because of this, or if we'd see the proliferation of platforms had large technology budgets, a d while they sometimes have t e challenge on how quic ly they can change and adapt, which is perhaps one of the do nsides of a larger organization they could certainly spend money on it. When it comes to he large marketing and e-comm rce platforms, for years, they were very expensive propos tions. But what's happened over ut slow adoption by SMEs. He elieves the adoption has hese past couple decades, he sa s, is the cost of developing so tware has dropped so dramatical y, thanks to all these cloud pl tforms like AWS or Microsoft Azure, and all these open so rce projects. Basically creative software developers now confer a fraction of cost, c eate a great product, sell that t a very different price poi t, and help you build a great bu iness. As a result, you have a l these entrepreneurs building t ese tools for marketers and sale people at smaller companies hat can now take advantage of his, and they can now afford the technology. But because they'r also small companies and they re entrepreneurial, t ey tend to be a bit more agile i how they actually adapt and experiment with that technolo y than some of their larger co petitors. ertainly accelerated over these ast few years, mostly because mall businesses are adopting arketing technology sometimes ithout even really thinking bout it. They're like, "Oh, ell, I guess I need a website," o they might do something with quarespace or Wix. All of a udden, they're like, "I'm going o have this forum, and I'm oing to collect data on ustomers that are interested. aybe I'll put that into a CRM." hat's why one of HubSpot's stra egies has been to offer a free CRM that a lot of small busi esses can use. And so without r ally thinking about needing a technology strategy, you see S Es creating their own websites, utilizing a CRM applicati n, and developing their own email system to stay in touch ith people. It's become a art of our daily life, Scott say . In one of his articles, Scott mentioned "the second golden age If you as a non-technical business owner wanted to bring several of them together, it was often on your shoulders to figure out how to, for instance, integrate your CRM or your e of martec." My next question was to ask what the hard trends are that are coming into play for martech, and what that means for ail marketing platform to your w bsite. Scott says that h SMEs. How will they determine which trend to adopt? Scott says ndered adoption for a lot of f lks. One of the things he t it began with around 100-200 companies offering marketing lked about in that trend for t e second golden age is that you re starting to see the platform ng of marketing technology. H technology, which at the time seemed like a lot. But over the likens it to your phone with t is universe of apps that you ca past 10 years, because of those absence of barriers to entry and plug right into, and they w rk, because iOS and Androi software, the landscape of marketing technology solutions has grown to thousands, and hey were able to map out 8,000 are designed as a platfo m. What we're now seeing in the ompanies. Scott says that was by no means comprehensive. He marketing technology space, Scott says, is many of the la nows because he's heard fr m all the people they've som ge marketing companies like H bSpot, Salesforce, Adobe startin how missed. Clearly, you can s e the incredible explosi to shift their product strateg to more platforms. They're wo n of technology. The ch llenge, however was that most king with more specialized mar ech apps and making it easier of those technologies grew up ndependently. to plug in. Ultimately, this s about getting business own rs to a place where they can har ess these different technologi s without having to be a sys ems integrator himself or hers lf. For every business owner that's starting out on their journey to digitalizing their marketing, Scott believes there are four or five core capabilities that pretty much every business needs. First, you need a website. You need a way that people can find you online, where you can share content, get discovered through search engines. The second is then you need some sort of CRM. It doesn't have to be super fancy. You need just a common database where you're able to keep track of all of your customers and all the people who are prospective customers and how those relationships evolve. The next thing you generally need is some sort of email marketing solution. These are also what they call marketing automation platforms, because it's not just about sending out emails to everyone at the same time. This is for when you start to get a little bit more clever and discover there are trigger moments for individual customers or prospects when you want to send them a specific email. Lastly, every business will want some way of managing their social media, and Scott's not just talking about being on Facebook or Twitter. That might be part of it, but Scott is referring to simply paying attention to reviews that customers are saying about your company in different communities and forums and sites. This is so that when people are talking about you, or they're looking to engage with you, you're able to hear them and represent yourself. If you've got those four, you've got almost everything, Scott says. The fifth one depends on the nature of your business, but there's usually some sort of e-commerce layer to this. If you're a consumer business, you might want the ability to just transact and deliver certain goods or digital products to customers. In B2B, that's still a little less common today, but now in 2020, things have been changing rapidly for all of us. You're starting to see even in more and more B2B-oriented businesses this ability to do transactions with customers online. If you have that universe, that's a pretty complete set of digital capabilities. You'll also need a strategy to manage the workflow and the content within universe. When it comes to managing this, which was a job companies didn't really have before, the most important piece, Scott says, is asking ourselves, "How do we want to engage with our audience?" Setting aside the technical details for a moment of how we actually operate and execute that, ask yourself, "Why would people come to our website? What value are we looking to provide to them? Why should people talk about our products in a great way on social media? Who is our tribe? Who is our target audience?" In the digital world, competition is, as they say, just a click away. So, on one hand, it's an advantage for companies in that you can compete in almost any market if you want. On the other hand, you have to be really clear on your strategy of why customers should pick you and not the other options in that field. A lot of small businesses are getting started in implementation, and this is seen when they work with small digital agencies that are serving SMEs. Their whole agency is centered around being able to help these small businesses get up to speed on what's possible and to do it for a modest price point. I then asked Scott for some case studies on how companies have gone from offline to online and how that's impacted them, what challenges they faced and how they overcame those start with or without an agency or maybe through guidance from HubSpot itself. Scott encourgaes us to check out the Hubspot website, as they have lots of case studies on there, and pick one that you feel is best aligned to your particular industry. If you are an existing business that is now looking to add this new digital layer to what you do, Scott says the first step is to understand how your existing customers want to interact with you and what they are looking for. One advantage of being a small business is you have a more intimate relationship with who your customers are. You can start by simply speaking wit them and asking, "How can e serve you better? What would y u like?" It goes back to that f rst step of understanding the strategy of why you are you doing things online. Once you've got that clarity, then the ability to hire someone or again, if you're a small company and you're just getting started, engage one of these agencies to help becomes easier. There's even some agencies now that will do some of this work on a contingency basis. They will put their money where their mouth is. There's pathways there, Scott says a lot of companies now use these predictive Scott says. One of the areas that's getting some traction nowadays is AI, algorithms without even really thinking about it as deploying AI. It almost just becomes a feature in the software we're and I've been looking at some of these services that autogenerate using. Scott finds it interesting that we're now content, what seems to be out of an analysis of headlines or body coming to a another inflection point where these more copy, and it gives you three or four different iterations. generative AI models tha have now reached a level of sop Scott's opinion on the impact of AI on martech is it's a really istication where they may n t be writing Shakespeare, bu they're able to generate a lot f viable creative output from fascinating topic to begin with. In the recent years, when people modeling on whatever you point hem to. And so, Scott's n t sure if we're quite at t e point where we're going to talk about AI and marketing, they've actually usually been ust turn the whole thing ove to those machines, but the idea of marketers using the e tools in partnership with the talking about a form of machine learning that essentially looks lgorithms to generate new ide s and then choose, craft, and at a whole collection of data. It determines what the signals terate will accelerate quic ly in the next couple of are that indicate a certain set of customers who have a higher propensity to purchase, and it helps us predict which customers years. we think will have the greatest lifetime value. Now that computing and data storage are so cheap, with the help of these machine-learning algorithms, we can look at a ton of all this digital data and make predictions that can be quite effective in identifying where we should prioritize our time. In terms of the budget required to get started and move up the martech chain, Scott says there are now a lot of solutions for small businesses, and these are often presented in a freemium model. If you're just getting started and you want try it out, but you don't have much data or content running through it, in many cases, you can actually get these things up and running for free. Once you start to get traction, a lot of them then offer packages at affordable starter prices. It's not unusual for these starter prices to be under $100 a month for some of these tools. And then as your business grows and as you start to do more and more through these digital platforms, then you can get to a place where you will pay more as well. The great thing about these freemium models in the way so many martech companies have structured them is you really only end up starting to pay a meaningful amount at the point in time that you've actually now started to see it work for your business and you've decided to scale it, and Scott thinks that's a nice relationship to have. Scott has definitely proven his value with what he's doing on his website, and if you are interested in learning more about martech, you should definitely visit his website or his Twitter. Scott would be more than happy to engage with you. Today, we've gained some pearls of wisdom from Scott Brinker, VP of Platform Ecosystem at Hubspot and the "ChiefMartec," on how we, as small business owners, can maximize marketing technology platforms to get us and our businesses noticed, especially in the online world.