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

Welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for business owners amongst us that have got value to unlock in their businesses but just want to know how to communicate that more efficiently and more effectively. And there really isn't a better person who could share that with us than Scott Brinker, who joins us today from just outside Boston. Scott, welcome to Speak PR.

Hi, Jim, great to be here with you.

Scott, tell us a little bit about you.

So, uh, yeah, what I do, I am the VP of Platform Ecosystem at a marketing technology company called HubSpot. And so I help HubSpot integrate with so many other different marketing and sales technologies out there. And then I also write a blog, chiefmartech.com, which I've been doing for about 12 years here now. Just, yeah, really diving into the dynamics of, you know, technology in the marketing world. And then as part of that, we also run a conference, not this year, but in normal years called the MarTech Conference, which I'm the program chair of.

So Scott, I mean, really, you're the professor in this, which is why when I was searching, I found you online. You create these amazing mind maps. Now, what do you think technology can do for the small business owner in your experience?

I mean, I'm biased on this, but I believe the marketing technology revolution has served small businesses actually far greater than it has large businesses. Because, you know, large businesses have always had large technology budgets. And while they sometimes have a, you know, the challenge on how quickly they can change and adapt, which is, you know, one of the perhaps the downsides of a larger organization. boy, they could certainly spend money on it. You know, so, you know, we think of, you know, like large, you know, digital marketing platforms and, you know, e-commerce platforms. And for years, they were, they were very expensive propositions. Well, what's happened over these past couple decades is the cost of developing software has dropped so dramatically, you know, thanks to all these, you know, cloud platforms like AWS, Amazon, or Microsoft Azure, all these open source projects is basically creative software developers now can for a fraction of cost, you know, create a great product, sell it at a very different price point and build a great business. And as a result, you've had all these entrepreneurs who are building these tools for marketers and salespeople at smaller companies that can now take advantage of this. And they can often, you know, they can now afford the technology, But because they're also small companies and they're entrepreneurial, they tend to be a bit more agile in how they actually adapt and experiment with that technology than some of their larger competitors.

Do you see widespread adoption, or do you see this sort of proliferation of platforms but slow adoption by SMEs?

So I think the adoption has certainly accelerated, you know, over these past few years, you know, and mostly because small businesses are adopting marketing technology sometimes without even really thinking about it, right? Like, you know, they're like, oh, well, I guess I need a website, you know, so they might do something with like Squarespace or Wix or, you know, something like this. And all of a sudden they're like, okay, and now I'm going to have this form and I'm going to collect data on, you know, customers that are interested. Okay, maybe I'll put that into a CRM. You know, one of HubSpot's strategies has been a free CRM that a lot of small businesses can adopt too. And so— Without really thinking about, okay, I need a technology strategy, yeah, you see SMEs that are like, oh yeah, well, of course we've got our website, we've got our CRM, you know, of course we have an email, you know, system that we use to stay in touch with people. It's just almost become a part of our daily life.

You said in one of your articles about the second golden age of martech, what do you see as some of the kind of hard trends that are coming into play for martech, and what does that mean for SMEs? Which ones should they adopt?

Yeah, so one of the things that was interesting, like in the past 10 years of marketing technology, it started with there was like, you know, maybe 100, 200 companies offering marketing technology, which at the time seemed like a lot, right? But over the past 10 years, because of those absence of barriers to entry in, you know, software, The landscape of marketing technology solutions has grown to thousands. Like we did a map earlier this year that mapped out 8,000, and that was by no means comprehensive. You know, I know because we hear from all the people we somehow missed. You know, so like you have just, you know, an incredible explosion of technology, but the challenge was most of those technologies grew up independently. So if you as a, you know, non-technical business owner, wanted to bring several of them together, it was often on your shoulders to figure out, okay, well, I've got this happening on my website. How do I connect this to my CRM? How do I connect this to my email marketing platform? And yeah, that really hindered adoption for a lot of folks. But one of the things that I talked about in that trend for the second golden age is I think you're starting to see the platforming of marketing technology. So sort of like if you have an iPhone or you have your Android phone, you know, you now have this universe of apps that you just can plug right into, you know, and they just work, you know, because iOS and Android are designed as a platform. And I think what you're now seeing in the marketing technology space is, you know, many of the large marketing companies, you know, HubSpot, Salesforce, Adobe, they really started to shift their product strategy to be more platforms and working with those other, you know, more specialized martech apps to make it easier to plug in. And ultimately, this is about getting those business owners to a place where like, oh, I can harness these different technologies without having to be a systems integrator myself.

Which applications do you think, Scott, are the core ones that Let's say a business owner is starting on this journey of sort of the digitalization of their marketing.

Yeah, you know, there's about 4 or 5 capabilities that pretty much every business needs at this point. So you need a website, you need some sort of way that people can find you online, you know, a way that you can share content, get discovered, you know, through search engines. So that's the first place. The second is then you, you need some sort of CRM. You need some sort of place that— it doesn't have to be super fancy, but 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. And if you get a little bit more advanced, these are what they call marketing automation platforms because it's not just about, you know, batching out emails, you know, to everyone all at the same time. You start to get a little bit more clever of like, oh, there are trigger moments for individual customers or prospects when I want to send them a specific email. So you get that. And then I think, you know, last thing that pretty much every business wants to start to engage in is some sort of way of just managing their social media. And I'm not just talking about like, you know, being on Facebook or Twitter. I mean, that might be part of it, But it's even like, you know, just paying attention to reviews that, you know, customers are saying about your company in different, you know, communities and forums and, you know, sites across the web. Just so, you know, when people are talking about you or they're looking to engage with you, that you're able to hear them and, you know, represent yourself. It just— so if you got those 4, you've got almost everything. The 5th one Depends on the nature of your business, you know, but there's usually then some sort of e-commerce layer to this. I mean, if you're a consumer business, you might want the ability to just, you know, transact and deliver, you know, certain goods or digital, you know, products to customers. In B2B, that's still a little less common today, but particularly here in 2020, as things have been changing rapidly for all of us, I think you're starting to see even in more and more B2B-oriented businesses, this ability to just be able to do transactions with customers online. So if you get that universe, that's a pretty complete set of digital capabilities.

You also have to have quite a strategy to kind of manage the workflow and the content within it. How do you think companies can manage that? Because that becomes a job that kind of nobody had before.

Yeah, it definitely— there are new skills associated with this. But it's interesting the way you worded the question, you know, was almost starting with like the strategy of it. And I think that is still probably for most businesses, the most important piece is like, how do we want to engage with our audience? Like, forget the technical details for a moment of how we actually, you know, operate and execute that, you know, but just like, why would people come to our website? Like, what, you know, value are we looking to provide to them? You know, why should people, you know, talk about our products, you know, in a great way on social media? Who is our tribe? Who is our target audience? You know, in the digital world, you know, competition is, as they say, just a click away. You know, so I think companies, you know, on one hand, it's an advantage. Like, you can compete in almost any market if you want, but you have to be really clear on your strategy of why you, you know, who do you serve better than the other options in that field do. But yeah, I mean, once you've got the strategy side of that, then, you know, one way we see a lot of small businesses, you know, get started in implementation is they will work with a small agency. You know, there's a ton of these, like, you know, small digital agencies that are serving SMEs, and this is their whole business is like, okay, at a modest price point, You know, be able to help these businesses get up to speed on what's possible.

Do you have, perhaps with your HubSpot hat on, some examples, a case study of how companies gone from maybe sort of offline to online and how that's impacted them and any challenges that they faced and how they overcame those, Scott, with or without an agency or maybe through guidance from HubSpot itself?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's kind of a ton of case studies, you know, even just going to the website. I'd almost encourage folks to, you know, go through some of those to like pick the one that they felt was best aligned with their particular industry. But I think, you know, if you are an existing business that is now looking to add this new digital layer, you know, to what you do, you know, the first place to start is just understanding for your existing customers, how do they want to interact with you? You know, what are they looking for? And, you know, one advantage of being a small business is usually you have a more intimate relationship with who your customers are, you know. And I think, you know, the first place to start of even just like talking with them, you know, you know, how could we serve you better? You know, what would you like? You know, it goes back to that first step of just really understanding the strategy of like, why are you doing things online? You know, and then I think once you've got that clarity, then yeah, the ability to either hire someone, you know, who's maybe on your team who does this, or again, if you're a small company and you're just getting started with this, you know, engage one of these agencies to You know, help. There's even some agencies now that, you know, I mean, will do some of this work on a contingency basis. You know, they will put their money where their mouth is. So there's pathways there.

One of the areas as well, Scott, that's getting some traction seems to be AI. And I've been looking at some of these services that are helping to auto-generate content, what seems to be out of, you know, an analysis of headlines or body copy and giving you 3 or 4 different iterations. What's your view on the impact of AI on martech?

Yeah, that's a really fascinating topic. So there's sort of what's been possible in the past few years, you know, like when most people have talked about AI in marketing, they've actually usually been talking about a form of machine learning that essentially looks at a whole collection of data that we have of like, okay, you know, what are the signals that indicate a certain set of customers have a higher propensity to purchase, you know, or how do we predict, you know, which customers we think will have the greatest lifetime value, or how do we identify when we think a customer is at risk, you know, from churning, you know, that these machine learning algorithms, you know, now that computing is so cheap and data storage is so cheap, right, they can just look at a ton of all this digital data and, yeah, make predictions that, you know, can be frankly quite effective, you know, in identifying, you know, where we prioritize our time. And so a lot of companies now use these predictive algorithms without even really thinking about it as like, oh, okay, we're deploying AI. It just, it almost becomes a feature, you know, in the software they're using. But I think it's interesting that we're now coming to another inflection point where, you know, the example you talked about, you know, these more generative AI models that are starting to create things that I think in people's popular, you know, ideas of like, okay, well, I mean, a computer can't do that. You know, I mean, sure, the computer can analyze this data better than I can. But, you know, when it comes to, you know, writing a song or, you know, like, you know, crafting copy, I mean, it's not like the computer is going to do that. But actually, yeah, you know, some of these generative AI models, they've now gotten to a level of sophistication where, you know, they're still not writing Shakespeare, but whoo, they're starting to generate, you know, a lot of viable, you know, creative output. From, you know, sort of modeling on, you know, whatever you point them at is, you know, like the example of what you're looking for. And so I don't know if we're quite at the point here for some time where we're going to just turn the whole thing over to those machines, but I think this idea of seeing marketers using some of these tools in partnership with the algorithms to generate new ideas and to then choose and craft and, you know, iterate. Yeah, I think a lot of that's going to start to accelerate quite quickly in the next couple of years.

Scott, what about costs? You know, our listeners, our audience are business owners, so they're thinking, that's all great, Scott, you know, HubSpot integrates with 400 apps, for example. What sort of money are business owners looking at, do you think, to get started and to move up the martech chain?

There are now a lot of solutions for small businesses that frankly are presented in a freemium model. So if you want to just get started and try it out, and quite frankly, you don't have either that much data that you're running through it or that much content, in many cases, you can actually get these things up and running for free. And then if you start to get traction, a lot of them have a very modest step function to say, oh, OK, now that you're ready to make this a little more professional, here's a starter price. It's not unusual for these starter prices to be under $100 a month. You know, on some of these tools. And then, you know, I mean, as your business grows, and as you start to want to do more and more through these digital platforms, you know, then you can get to a place where like, okay, you know, they become, you know, hundreds, you know, a month. But the great thing about those sort of freemium models and the way so many martech companies have structured them is, you know, you, you really only end up starting to, you know, pay, you know, a meaningful amount at the point in time that you've actually now started to see this really work for your business and you've decided to scale it. That's a nice relationship to have, like prove your value, you know, and then be able to, you know, charge after that.

Scott, well, you prove your value massively with what you're doing on your website. Perhaps you could share with people where they can find out more of your thoughts and your amazing Thank you.

Yeah, so my blog is Chief Martek, without the H at the end, long story on that, chiefmartek.com. And actually, then my handle on Twitter is also that same @ChiefMartek, without the H at the end. So yeah, happy to engage.

Scott Brinker joining us from Boston. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Jim.

So you've been listening to Scott Brinker, who's the Vice President of Ecosystems at HubSpot. He's also the editor of ChiefMartech.com, you've heard that, martech without the H, and the program chair of the MarTech Conference. So thanks so much to Scott, and these pearls of wisdom, of course, in the show notes as well. Thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR, and you're welcome to find this and other notes at eastwestpr.com. And until we meet again, I'd like to wish you the best of health, A profitable business, and that you keep on learning and using MarTech.