Full Stack Marketing is a Waste of Time

Learning just enough to get yourself fired

I follow the marketing community a fair bit, reading what different people have to say about the state of the industry. Most of my reading tends towards SEO/Startups/Demand Gen marketing. Recently, a fair number of people in the community have started talking about the idea of a “full stack marketer,” comparing it to the programmer equivalent of a “full stack engineer.”

The concept is a waste of time.

Everyone, when they’re young, believes they can know everything. We all believe we can read everything there is to read and we can be great at all of whatever it is that we put our minds to. The problem is that as we get older we start to realize that there is an immense amount of knowledge in the world.

We can’t know it all. Not possible.

When I first started in marketing, my goal was to be a full-stack marketer. At the time, about eight years ago, no one had coined the term. But I still wanted to know everything there was to know about marketing so I could always might the right choices for whatever situation I was in.

The idea is noble, the thought is worthy, but the concept exhibits the same lack of understanding that I see often in many contexts. When you don’t know much about a topic, it’s very easy to gloss over the edges. It’s easy to think you understand something when you’ve really only heard about it.

Let’s start from the top. Marketing is a huge topic.

In describing “full-stack marketers” most people tend to skew the “stack” towards whichever pieces of marketing they understand best. If you’re an inbound marketer, the stack starts with keyword research, up to content creation, outreach (including social) for distribution or links, and sometimes ads get thrown in there. If the writer is from a consumer startup, the stack begins with growth hacking concepts like understanding ads, copywriting, email, and possibly being creative with craigslist or doing joint ventures with other companies. One or both might have ‘marketing automation’ thrown in there somewhere.

The problem is that the entirety of the concept of a “full-stack marketer” is too small.

Let’s start over. What exactly is a full-stack engineer — since we’re basing our concept off of it? Frankly, they’re either the single best engineer on your team or they don’t last very long in a good organization. Anyone who can work on every bit of code from the novel javascript hack you use to make your site ultra-responsive to planning the architecture of the backend message queue is either your CTO or a unicorn. They don’t exist.

You might talk to engineers who claim to be able to do it all, but don’t trust them. They’re usually wrong.

A few can actually code from front to back well enough to get your site up by themselves. But they don’t often last a long time. As a company grows, full-stack engineers tend to disappear. The specialists start to show up and the full-stack guys are exposed for what they are: hacks. Their code is refactored, underlying technology choices replaced, and the team bitches about their early database decisions for years.

Full-stack marketers aren’t any different. Real, “full-stack marketers” tend to disappear as the company grows.

I fit most of the descriptions of a full stack marketer. The only reason I’m still at my company is because I’ve learned how to carve out new roles for myself as the company has changed. And because I know our industry almost as well as anyone at the company.

My biggest pet peeve with the concept of a “full stack marketer” is that everyone reduces it to a set of technical skills.

Think you know SEO? Probably not as well as the guys at Distilled.

Think you know ads? Probably not as well as the folks at AppNexus or anyone who’s been at an ad network for a couple years.

Think you know how to write copy? Not as well as anyone at an agency or a lead gen company.

Think you can write content? Not as well as a journalist.

Think you can program? That shit gets outsourced faster than you can blink.

With a few more hires or a couple of outside contractors, I could be replaced from a skill perspective. Luckily I’ve grown out of being a full-stack marketer.

I’m the technical and editorial lead on a startup, B2B inbound marketing team.

Real marketers understand the difference between strategy and tactics. They also understand the difference between breadth and depth of understanding. The difference between reading about it and doing it.

You don’t want to work through the full stack, especially if you’re the only marketer at a startup. You can understand it, but if you think being able to do it all will make you a better marketer, you’re wrong.

You’ll just make the wrong choices too often. You’ll decide to start running ads, but won’t know how to pick the right placements, get a good quality score or write solid copy. Or you will, but you won’t have enough time to optimize the ads because you’re too busy writing this week’s blog and setting up next week’s event. You’ll start doing CRO on the home page and the main conversion page, but you won’t think about how the two tests are conflating each other. Or you will, and will start pulling the data apart in Excel before you realize you forgot to get ready for tomorrow’s board meeting with the CEO. Or… you get the point.

There are simply too many details, especially at a startup. You cannot, ever, be a full stack marketer. It’s not possible.

I know because I tried. For quite some time I was the only marketer on our team.

When I first took over the marketing department, running it alone, I realized I didn’t have very much time. So I focused on what I could get done, had an opinion about what few things would change the way we were perceived in the industry, and executed on that small piece.

I tried to do a few other things for the company, as necessary, but I realized that my best chance for success was writing. It would give us the best return for my invested time.

And I got good results. Doubled lead volume and started changing a few industry perceptions about us.

But, as I got the writing into a rhythm, I started to expand. I looked at all the things we weren’t doing. All the things other marketers were writing about as the ‘next hot thing.’ I looked at all of the things I had asked about before taking the position.

Why weren’t we doing CRO? What about retargeting? Linkedin ads? State of the industry reports? Events? Our own conference? A news team? PR? Link building?

It spiraled out of control and I started failing. I tried to do the full stack and did none of it well. I focused on everything, throwing all kinds of strategies against the wall, and nothing worked.

Want to know why?

I didn’t do any of them well enough or long enough to make them succeed. I didn’t have enough focus on any one part of the stack long enough to do it right. And so, much of what I did failed.

Except for the writing.

It kept ticking because, honestly, that was the thing I actually understood. It was the only thing that really made sense for our industry and that fit with a longer term strategy.

In the last year we’ve hired four other marketers for the team. Each hire has made me significantly better at my job because they’ve pushed me further away from being a full-stack marketer.

They’ve allowed me to continue gravitating closer towards what I do best.

So what do you do if you can’t learn everything? If being full-stack marketer is the wrong way to think about your job?

Find your circle of competence. Figure out what you do best and optimize there. If you loved math growing up, move towards ads and conversion rates. Move towards email. Towards anything where you can focus on growing well-defined metrics. If you’re better at writing, go write. Learn about content marketing, SEO and branding. If you’re outgoing and talkative, move into events, PR and outreach. Find the things that make you tick. Figure out how to use your skills to your advantage.

Stop trying to do it all or you’ll get replaced. You’ll hit a ceiling.

The real trick is understanding that even if you can somehow learn about all of the things that are available in the marketing world, you can’t do them all. You can’t possibly get good at them all.

And — the biggest secret that no one tells you — what works in one industry doesn’t always work in others. Companies are different, markets are different, business models change and your marketing should reflect that.

Even if you become a full-stack marketer at one company, the stack could change at the next company.

Get good at marketing as you. What set of marketing strategies and tactics fit you? And what kind of businesses will gain the most from those skills?

Learn that and go there. You’ll be successful.

*Image thanks to Indi Samarajiva: http://www.flickr.com/photos/indi/