Yesterday I published a post about Filling In The Marketing Gaps and I hinted at returning to a topic I have grown increasingly excited about. I want to share just a few more thoughts and details along with some graphics which I hope will make things easier to understand. I promise, after this post, if you’re simply begging me to stop I won’t post anything further on the topic for a little while. The challenging thing is I’m seeing what I believe to be an invigorating and innovative spark for moving the future of MarTech. And Mautic is positioned on the forefront of it. As a result of all this pent-up excitement I end up thinking about the topic and by extension writing about it frequently. The topic as I’m sure you’re well aware is one we are calling MarTech Microservices. Mautic is creating the future of marketing automation with this new advancement.
The Next Generation of MarTech
There’s a lot of words in there and I realize I've completely obliterated the key 6x6 principle (6 words and 6 lines max on a single slide). Let me pull out a few salient points from this particular slide.
Mautic is positioned to become the leader in the MarTech space, based on an open architecture, a flexible framework, and a sustainable path for future expansion and growth.
As I shared yesterday, the very foundational core of Mautic positions us uniquely to step into this role as a leader, pushing the boundaries of what we know to be marketing automation today. Mautic 3 will give our community the opportunity to demonstrate what this future looks like by creating a headless, serverless marketing automation tool. This means a variety of things and I’ve shared it before (ad nauseam?). The purpose of this post is to take those concepts and make them easier to understand exactly what it will look like.
A Complete Marketing Automation Package
This is the first and greatest point that needs to be made with Mautic 3. Mautic will continue to provide the absolute best, most cutting-edge, full-solution marketing automation solution in the world. Even as we explore the many and exciting ways that Mautic 3 will technically change the MarTech landscape and revolutionize many of the services which marketers are already using; we will continue to offer an incredible all-inclusive Mautic product.
Mautic will grow and become better with each release and Mautic 3 will build on the learning as well as the technology of each previous Mautic release. Rather than losing value with this major release we will be able to build upon our history.
Continued expansions through plugins, a renewed vision for the various “builders” (emails, marketing messages, and landing pages) and countless additional valuable improvements through across the platform - some seemingly inconsequential and some more noticeable. (Does this interest you? I’ll share more specifics if this is a topic you find intriguing - leave a comment if you do!)
A Complete Marketing Automation Platform
Okay, this is where things get exciting. This is where Mautic 3 is completely and totally revolutionary. This is where everything changes. This is where the future begins to become the present and ideas become realities. Can you tell I’m getting excited? Because this is the inflection point. This is the Mautic 3 platform.
The title for this section belies the true differences between the previous section and this one. Package to Platform. An incredibly subtle difference in words, but an incredible impact for marketing and technologists. A package is a bundle of things, a group of objects. In this particular case, the marketing “package” is a bundle of two objects: a frontend user interface and an API driven application layer. The Mautic 3 platform refers to these two individual objects. Keep reading to learn more about what this means.
Two Marketing Automation Tools In One
Here is a more direct look at these two completely unique and standalone parts of the Mautic 3 platform. Each one of these tools is capable of functioning completely independently from the other.
This idea of two tools in one sounds far more complicated than it really is. Remember if you get worried or confused — return to the first point above: Mautic is a complete marketing automation package. There’s no need to feel differently about Mautic 3, and certainly no need to worry.
The power of combining two discrete tools affords the marketer the opportunity to be as demanding as necessary for their unique business environments. Mautic is flexible.
If you’re not sure what this bifurcated approach enables then I’d recommend posting a comment or letting me know! But first, keep reading and see if the next few sections explains things better.
Mautic 3 User Interface
The first of these two tools to explore is the Mautic 3 user interface, or commonly thought of as “the frontend”. The user interface (UI) is the part of the Mautic platform the marketers directly interacts with. This involves all the beautiful drag-and-drop functionality of the campaign builder. The powerful and intuitive navigations. And everything related to what is visually displayed in the browser or app.
Feature Highlight: Did you see what I did there? (I said “app”) We have big plans coming for Mautic 3 in this regards both mobile, desktop, and far far beyond.
As the slide above indicates, this marketing automation tool can be used with any “backend” system (you may understand this part more with the next section). Simply put, if you have your data in a different location, or different database, by adding a simple API layer you can take advantage of the Mautic 3 user interface with your own system.
Mautic 3 API
The second tool available in the Mautic 3 platform is the incredibly powerful API. Again, as with the previous “frontend” tool this API platform builds on the previous success of Mautic 2. Rather than a complete rewrite (I trust this will encourage some of you) Mautic 3’s API will expand upon and continue to extend what was done before.
Feature Highlight: Mautic 3’s API is powerful and robust due to the open source nature of the code. Every aspect of the entire platform is required to be available via this API.
When you have an API that is completely and totally capable serving every aspect of the marketing automation system you are capable of using this tool in a wide range of applications. As highlighted in the image above, Mautic’s API can be used to power a variety of other outputs. Regardless of the interface, Mautic can power the backend data processing.
Just as with the previous section, this API can then be implemented by the discerning marketer into a wide variety of different use cases. (For those with a question - this is meaning of a “headless” system)
Diving Deeper into the Mautic 3 API
It is usually at this point we tend to get into the deep and technically challenging part of the Mautic 3 topic and debate and cause some consternation for people. Let’s rehash how we got to this point very quickly.
First, we have a full marketing automation package in Mautic 3, this package can be used as one tool. Second, this package is actually a marketing automation platform consisting of two distinct tools: a frontend user interface, and a backend API. Each of these tools can be used on it’s own. Now, we have gotten to this concept of microservices. If we look at the API tool we can imagine breaking things down with even greater specificity and consider the concept of discrete functionals components.
In the graphic above I’ve highlighted three possible examples of these microservices. The takeaway is simple and incredibly powerful at the same time.
MarTech Microservices are discrete functional improvements which enhance the marketer’s role across their entire digital marketing stack.
These microservices are the glue which bind together the entire vast and confusing MarTech landscape. They can be used independently of the full marketing automation package (point 1 above).
The Mautic MarTech Glue
This is why I get so excited about Mautic 3. We’ve taken a flexible and open source framework and the concept of being adaptable to every marketer’s unique business workflow and magnified it times a thousand. We have the opportunity to take MarTech into the next phase and to enable marketer’s not only through the use of a new and powerful marketing automation package but to seamlessly bring together their entire marketing suite of tools into a single cohesive system with Mautic MarTech Microservices. And this can be expanded even more as we look into the future a bit further.
Mautic fills the gaps between the various and disparate systems in use by a marketer. Mautic does this with the ultimate in flexibility. By no longer existing as only a monolithic platform Mautic is able to fill in the space, adding value, and connecting marketing tools and more across the organization. — Filling In The Marketing Gaps
If you’d like more information not this particular section I recommend returning to my post from yesterday where I shared more detail.
Flexible, Open Source, Connected
Here’s where we bring it all together. Final thoughts on the topic. I’m going to try to summarize the content above and distill it down to the core fundamental points in as clear a terminology as possible. So here goes.
- Mautic is a marketing automation package which offers a full and complete marketing automation experience for businesses to use as an entire system to handle their omni-channel marketing automation needs.
- The Mautic platform consists of two tools: a beautiful and intuitive marketing automation user interface and a powerful and robust marketing automation API framework. Each of which can be used independently as needed in various marketing environments.
- The Mautic API framework contains discrete marketing automation microservices which can be implemented independently of the rest of the platform to enhance existing marketing tools and services.
These three core principles enable the marketer to experience a truly unified digital marketing experience. But it’s important to recognize how these 3 core principles are made possible. This unique ability to be both monolith and microservice at the same time is only as a result of the underlying foundational architecture and beliefs of the Mautic community and Mautic product. Those foundational truths are:
- Mautic is flexible to be used in a variety of means as required by the unique requirements of each marketer.
- Mautic’s open source code means every aspect is available for review, use, and improvement. There are no black boxes. And full transparency exists across the entire system.
- Mautic is capable of providing marketers with a single, unified, connected system for their digital marketing. Being open source and flexible gives Mautic the unique ability to add meaningful value “in the cracks“ left by other systems.
I hope this has helped to make things a bit more clear and also to showcase what Mautic 3 will involve. More than anything, I hope you are beginning to see the vision for what the future of MarTech looks like. Not only the vision of the future, but a better understanding for why this is so important, relevant, and meaningful. The digital marketing landscape is changing, growing, and expanding. What we believe, what drives us to create Mautic 3, is our uncommon, sui generis ability to be the glue to bring it all together and improve the lives of marketers around the world.
