The Modern Marketer
Marketing gets a bad reputation from a lot of directions. For the most part, it’s deserved.
Sales guys are thinking of marketing as either collateral creators or as wasted budget (or both).
CEOs know that marketing, the concept, is important, but face that gnawing question of whether the marketing department actually helps or not.
Business owners don’t want to manage their own marketing, because they’ve been led to believe that they have to get into bed with some outside agency to help the manage and develop a brand.
Add to that common misconceptions about the difference between marketing and advertising, and then multiply it by how much people enjoy banner ads. Basically, marketers get no respect.
But all the hate for marketing comes from what marketing has been, not what it’s becoming.
As technology has left the realm of just IT, other departments finally have the authority to buy the things they want to. Marketing technology budgets have actually gone up significantly since then. And as marketing is spending more on technology, new marketers are actually getting really smart about how they track and analyze their efforts.
Enter the new era of marketing
As marketing departments have gained more control over their own budgets, they’ve been able to buy more of the marketing technology they actually want. From there they’ve had to hire or train people who feel comfortable using it. These hybrid roles have been tasked with making technology work for marketers, but also to get marketers thinking about technology.
The new role of Marketing Technologist has been born (with all due credit to Scott Brinker). Marketers now must think of campaigns in terms of what data they have on individuals, what information they can gather, how to leverage that to provide more personalized messages, and how to tailor those messages to generate the most revenue.
Rather than just rely on inferences or anecdotes, marketing technologists are seriously data-driven and understand everything in the context of experiments and numbers. As technology enables marketers to become better at their craft, it will also begin to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Which raises the question, “Will all marketers be required to take on more of a marketing technologist role?” Not necessarily. Similar to how not all designers need to understand code, or not all developers need to be full-stack, not every marketer is going to have to go deep on technology and marketing.
But it certainly helps.
Knowing exactly where the limits of your current marketing tech stack is opens up exciting possibilities for your campaigns if you’re able to transition between mindsets effortlessly. Technology is marketing. The future belongs to those who see it that way first.
