Marketing has seen an exponential growth of available technological tools – 3500 now versus 150 in 2011 (Chiefmartec.com). As a consequence, people working in the digital sector have learned to change rapidly and, sometimes, to feel lost in this ever-changing ecosystem.
As for me, it’s at 35 years old that I finally found a job title that fits me perfectly: Marketing Technologist. In this article, I’ll explain how and why this is the perfect job for me.
In today’s modern world, people are either asleep or connected.
As this wonderful quote by Janice H. Reinold (The Boston Consulting Group) suggests, the consumer journey changes rapidly. Therefore, being present in every key point of it is increasingly complex.
For this reason, a marketer’s goal is no longer just to place the ideal message at the right time, but also to know how to segment their users and, in a B2B context, to qualify leads to allow the sales department to act in a more focused way.
The human factor
Among inbound, profiling, segmentation, nurturing and who knows what other keywords destined to become the next marketing trend, extreme customisation seems to be the real trend of the moment.
Managing such an imposing amount of information, however, goes through an inevitable process of trials, errors and improvements.
In the illuminating biography of Jeff Bezos, we can read, for example, that the founder of Amazon decided to block email marketing on sensitive categories after realizing that automatic emails were sent to users browsing the “Sexual well-being” department without buying.
There are risks, of course. But also opportunities that can generate amazing results and that can be halted only by your imagination. Watch the video that tells about “The Social Home Tour 2.0”, a brilliant idea created by a Brazilian real estate agency.
A life as the midfielder
You may have guessed that the line between marketing and IT is getting thinner, and this is where the marketing technologist comes into play. Marketing Technologists are strategic figures who are able to evaluate the technologies available on the market and facilitate their adoption in the company.
They’re so strategic that, while in 2012 Harvard Business Review claimed that the Data Scientist was the sexiest job of the century, in 2014 they spoke of the Marketing Technologist as a rapidly rising professional figure.
Digital products are one of the main drivers of organisational change for companies in Italy. Marketing Technologists are the ones who can guide this type of change from within the company. They’re not creatives who invent new games but rather those figures who are behind the scenes and favour the team’s game: a life as a midfielder, like Oriali sung by Ligabue.
A marketing automation process at (almost) zero cost
Do you have a very busy website that you can’t manage to monetize and on which you have the desire to enable a marketing automation process?
If you work with WordPress (percentages on the use of CMS’ in the world say it’s likely you do), I recommend you install Gravity Forms, which costs just $ 39. Activate an account on Zapier, a tool that allows you to automate processes among all the most used cloud tools, – today it has more than 750 integrations.
- A newsletter subscription form integrated with MailChimp?
- A Google Sheets file updated in real time with all the leads who have filled out an involvement form?
- An automatism that publishes blog articles or news from your company on your social channels?
These are just a few ideas, – here Zapier describes 50 of them by interviewing some marketers around the world – that you can activate immediately. They will undoubtedly make your mouth water, already making you feel like a little Marketing Technologist!
In conclusion, a piece of advice. If research conducted by Econsultancy a few years ago said that “72% of marketers understand the importance of customisation but do not know how to do it”, there is only one password: just be scared a little, experiment a lot.
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This post was published in preparation for the Marketing Automation course held on May 31, 2018, for Digital Update.