About to start building your martech stack? Here's everything you need to know! Marketing technology, also known as martech, is essentially the technology that marketers use to attract and retain customers for the business. These tools are generally used to automate and streamline processes, thus saving a lot of time and effort for your marketing team. The tools can even help your marketers crunch numbers and analyze the success of their marketing campaigns and efforts.

Regardless of size, most companies are using some form of martech, from email automation tools like MailChimp to social media management tools like Sprout Social. For enterprise-level organizations, the explosion of tools combined with new capabilities like AI and machine learning make it possible to scale marketing efforts more quickly and efficiently than ever before. Even so, there is a dark side to all this tech--namely, confusion. In 2011, Scott Brinker's martech landscape contained just 150 tools. A survey by the World Advertising Research Center and global finance company BDO, revealed that 76% of marketers wanted to add more tools to their existing martech stack.

"TechStyle brands utilize machine learning to cluster similar products based on different attributes, such as color, fabric, heel height, review information, etc., which then match customer clusters with product clusters to show users the most relevant information." This Los-Angeles based, avant-garde fashion group, which includes brands like, ShoeDazzle, Fabletics and JustFab, seamlessly ties personalization and vertical integration to create a winning combination of brick-and-mortar stores with online retail. We spoke to Danielle Boeglin, vice president of data analytics at TechStyle Fashion Group, to understand how the company marries data and fashion so successfully. From her approach toward customer experience to the role of AI and ML in personalization, Boeglin shares the most useful lessons for marketers in the digital retail space. In this exclusive with Martech Advisor, she throws light on TechStyle's experience with integrating the various components of their martech stack, and more.

AI isn't taking your job, it's saving it -- when done right. We take a look at the overpopulated MarTech ecosystem and why it may pay for B2B marketers to think more B2C. Is the growing MarTech stack a help or a hindrance? It's a powerful question -- and one that marketers have been increasingly grappling with in recent times. For companies, the allure and promise of new technologies such as AI are driving a swift uptake in MarTech.

AI is everywhere from Google Search to Waze, from Chatbots to intelligent automatic email responses. As a B2B marketer, this is just another technology that we need to consider as part of the martech stack. So how do we evaluate how AI can help or optimize our marketing? Many marketers feel intimidated by AI because they don't know what it is and how to take advantage of it in the context of marketing. In my previous blog post, I explained AI, Machine Learning and Deep Learning in relationship to Marketing.

It is truly an exciting time to be in marketing. Forward-looking martech is creating smarter, data-driven marketers. By merging human intelligence and artificial intelligence, marketers will continue to gain influence and authority in their organizations, writes, Jaime Romero, Vice President of Customer Success at MRP. Pick Or Upgrade To The Right Marketing Automation Solution To Power Your Growth Story. With forward-thinking technology and helpful information at our fingertips, it is truly an exciting time to be in marketing. The future of martech is transforming us, bringing smarter, data-driven marketers, and we can see a new breed developing and creating new ideas with more impactful results within the space.

The marketing technology (martech) landscape, as monitored by Scott Brinker, is made up of 6,829 solutions from 6,242 vendors. What's more, the martech sector attracted venture capital investments of more than $8.8 billion last year. For volume reasons alone, it should surprise no one that choosing and implementing the right mix of technology solutions remains a big challenge for marketers. From content and media management to workflow and collaboration tools to data analytics and reporting solutions, building (and managing) the perfect marketing technology stack can seem like a daunting task. And yet even though according to Gartner martech spending is on the rise and outpacing advertising expenditures, it's not uncommon for marketers to patch together a mix of free and low-cost systems that may work in the short term but won't scale to meet enterprise-level needs.

The growth of artificial intelligence and machine learning is picking up pace, and those who thought adoption was a few more years away are finding the reality much different. AI is already embedded in our everyday lives, and forward-thinking marketers are embracing machine learning technology efficiency to automate and scale their marketing programs. However, little has been mentioned of deep learning, the gem in the AI armory that provides even more powerful insights to marketers. In my last article, I focused on AI applications and explained why not showing up in 2018 without an AI system or application in your martech stack could leave CMOs lagging. Taking that premise a step further, not utilizing deep learning technology means that marketers are losing out on essential insights that I predict will fuel marketing technology development in 2018, 2019 and beyond.