More and more small and medium-sized businesses are turning to TikTok to drive real business results, from discovery through to leads, bookings, and sales. Sitting under the Marketing Technology badge, the Channel Sales Partner Program recognizes partners that meet TikTok's technical, operational, and go-to-market standards while driving SMB adoption and investment through their platforms at scale.
A marketing technology firm that seeks to influence C-suite executives, policymakers, and other important people is getting a major infusion of cash from one of the world's biggest investors. Applecart received a $100 million investment from the private equity giant Blackstone last year, two people familiar with the situation first told Semafor, in a fundraising round that would value the New York-based data company at around $500 million.
I founded my startup, Forage, around 18 months ago. Besides myself, I have one full-time employee who has been with the company for eight months. My business is in the marketing technology space, and I needed someone with a deep connection to modern culture and social media. So, I hired a 24-year-old growth and brand specialist from my neighborhood. She's a college graduate with less than two years of experience, whom I started mentoring.
When Amazon launched its Amazon Quick Suite in early October, it was seeking to connect common workplace applications, data stores and more, in an interface marketers could use without disrupting their existing workflows and without deep technical knowledge. Marketers using Quick Suite don't have to worry about where data is and move among applications to find it, said Charlie Cartwright, director of Amazon Quick Suite at AWS.
The last decade has been defined by the convergence of these three worlds and by the dramatic evolution of the underlying technology. Ten years ago, brands started to shift away from buying hardware to store data and implementing software stacks in the hope they could extract value. Today, cloud infrastructure underpins almost everything we do, personally and professionally. The way we access, analyse, activate, and share information has been transformed.
You're competing against national brands with million-dollar marketing budgets. The advice you keep hearing? "Use the same tools they use." You sign up for tools built for enterprise operations - and suddenly you're drowning in features you don't need, integrations that don't work and subscription fees that add up faster than your leads. That's where many go wrong. More technology doesn't mean better results for small businesses.
The telecoms company has rolled out software that allows it to send tailored deals and offers to customers based on their history and interactions with the company.
Despite significant investments in marketing technology, companies frequently under-utilize these tools, leading to only modest impacts on their marketing efforts. Understanding the usage and strategic application is critical for optimizing outcomes.
"Meta claims its AI tools can cut ad creation costs by up to 50%. At the same time, early tests show results doubling in some cases due to better targeting."