The 3 Most Important Marketing Tech Stack Trends of 2018

The marketing tech stack continues to evolve year over year, and marketing leaders must take responsibility for making sure their departments have a tech stack with the tools to reach brand goals and keep up with the competition.

What technologies are marketers investing in this year? We asked Target Marketing readers where they’re putting their money in 2018, and the result is the “2018 Marketing Technology Stack Investment Trends” report.

Here is a look at the top tech marketers are buying.

Credit: "2018 Marketing Technology Stack Investment Trends"

So what are we seeing here?

1. Facebook Advertising Looms Over This List

Although the report asks what marketing technology people are investing in, the technologies at the top are the result of a digital marketing ecosystem where social media and search ads are absolutely essential to success. The piece of that driving change in the marketing tech stack is the rise of Facebook.

Facebook and Google are the most important digital marketing channels today, and social media and SEO can both be utterly exhausting. The key to each of them is creating high-quality content and promoting it at a scale that builds your audience and drives top-of-funnel engagement.

Without the social media and content marketing tools to make those tasks easier, it's very difficult to succeed. That's why social media tech is a the top of our list.

2. The Website Is Still the Center of Digital Marketing

Although Facebook and other social platforms are the most important new battleground for marketing, the home front — or home page — is still the end game they're fighting for. That's why the second hottest marketing tech stack category is website analytics, design and optimization.

For most brands, the website is their portal for Search traffic and an important channel for lead nurturing and/or e-commerce sales. You have to invest in the reporting and optimization technology to make it effective. That includes tools that provide visibility into the customer journey on your site, AI to optimize and personalize content for each visitor, and tech to enable active testing of your engagement and conversion elements.

3. Online Video Is the Next Frontier

Yes, video has been a hot topic for years now, but most marketers still don't feel like they're doing it effectively. And leading consumer social networks Facebook and Instagram both heavily favor video marketing content. Even in B2B, where articles and whitepapers are still king, video has emerged as an important way to summarize information and convince prospects that the text is worth their time.

Now, online video does not mean you're making infomercials. This kind of video is still a form of content marketing. You need to be able to produce regular content that engages your audience around the same interests that your product or service engages them. The technologies being bought here are to help develop, distribute and measure the success of that kind of digital content, and they're the next frontier beyond the video tech you used in 2017.