There has been a recent surge in the number of people employed as Marketing Technologists: or, people who can confidently and creatively navigate the ever-expanding marketing technology landscape. This demand for more technical-minded marketers has been rapidly rising, and having a background in just digital marketing or just advertising is no longer a suitable résumé.
What this comes down to is the emergence of a new kind of technical marketer.
What is a Technical Marketer?
Technical marketers are candidates with a strong combination of analytical (mathematical) mindsets, software or web development experience, and digital marketing DNA. At the intersection of these three skills is a technical marketer who can streamline processes, find new integrations, and enable new marketing tactics that can resonate with your audience in a way that scales.
What to Look For When Hiring
As I’ve found, the ideal skill set of a technical marketer can be broken down into three degrees of expertise:
- Digital Marketing – Having digital marketing experience means having a wide range of familiarity with SEO, SEM, online advertising, and email nurture (to name just a few pieces of the larger DM field).
- Development – This can be interpreted as either software development or web development (or, ideally, both). Ultimately, dev is what teaches you how to do clean code and how to create the robust and scalable setups necessary within a marketing automation system.
- Analytics – One of the most important qualities that a marketer can possess is the ability to look at a set of data, to find the things that are measurable, and to make decisions based on the data and that will have an immediate business impact.
The combination of these three areas creates the epitome of a technical marketer.
The Skill Trifecta: Digital Marketing, Development, & Analytics
Imagine you’re working with three or four different marketing technologies (as most agencies often are). If your marketing team only has experience with digital marketing, then your team will likely not go further than accepting the labels of each technology as they exist. Your team believes that each technology exists in a silo: that Salesforce is separate from Eloqua, which is separate from Marketo, and so on. “The systems might be integrated with small ways, according to the manuals, but there are no further connections to draw.”
This is why the modern marketing team needs a force of innovation in order to stay effective. With a background in Digitial Marketing and Development, you are now able to view your technologies as connectable tools. Automate multiple tasks so you don’t have to repeat things
Finally, add in Analytics. Make sure you are measuring your data, developing KPIs, and using the results to guide your marketing in a way that has immediate and measurable business impact.
The Technical Marketer: Increasing efficiency and effectiveness
This insurgence of technical marketers is due to the always-present importance of building effective, scalable teams at appropriate costs. This new technical marketer—with a trifecta of skills in digital marketing, development, and analytics—is capable of doing the high-level work that could once only be done by entire teams.
Finding the candidates for marketing technology teams can be difficult in today’s competitive environment. As technologies grow, remember to consult the lean startup methodology and look for the martechs who are finding new ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your marketing operations.
