I’m on the hunt: are you the fabled unicorn that is skilled in BOTH technology and marketing?
Probably not.
Why do I say that?
There is a reason they are called unicorns; they are extremely hard to find. Since you may not be skilled in database wizardry, programming logic AND copywriting, design, marketing strategy, you’ve got a new mountain to climb.
Maybe you’re already aware, but technology that helps marketers be more effective is spreading like wildfire in today’s business community. In fact, you’re probably tasked right now with researching one or more categories of MarTech (marketing technology) like Content Marketing, Mobile Marketing or Marketing Automation. And if you’ve been fortunate enough to have already tackled and implemented these solutions, you’re likely progressing to investigate other categories like Interactive Content and Testing & Optimization.
Frankly, the amount of MarTech available now is insane and that’s coming from someone (yours truly) who has hands-on experience with at least one platform in 27 of the 43 identified categories below:
(@ChiefMarTec’s 2015 Marketing Technology Landscape)
Looking at this massive list of technologies, if I were a marketer without technical skills, my head would be spinning. In fact, mine is anyway, and I’ve been in the MarTech game for years! Instead of feeling sick about it, I’m going to provide some medicine for our heads by offering up some helpful guidance.
I sincerely care about our collective success as marketers, so I feel compelled to share something personal that may ease your mind a bit. Marketing technology IS making your job harder. Trying to understand how all of the marketing technologies work AND how they all connect and extend into each other can blow your mind.
Though our jobs have become more challenging, we have to admit we’ve asked for it. How many times have we talked to “IT Pros” at our respective companies over the years saying “I wish it could do X” or “Can we make it do Y?”. (We all nod our heads in agreement).
Guess what? These “IT Pros” got smart and started building and building and building…creating this massive sea of marketing technology because we “asked for it”. We are now dealing with the repercussions. How do we do handle this new career challenge?
Before I tell you, I wanted to share one example (of hundreds) where your job is now harder when it comes to learning how to use marketing technology software to accomplish your goals.
Perhaps you are just getting your feet wet with Marketing Automation. You will soon learn that connecting to a CRM is an essential piece in getting the full benefit out of marketing automation. It’s likely you already use Salesforce, SugarCRM or Microsoft Dynamics which makes finding a marketing automation platform that integrates with one of these mandatory. Alternatively if you have a CRM that doesn’t natively integrate with your CRM, you need to find a marketing automation platform that has a solid API and supports a custom integration with your CRM.
This example scenario is actually a real and common challenge many marketers and businesses are actively facing. There are many more situations like this for marketers to wrap their head around now, too, because of this influx of MarTech.
These new marketing technologies have created quite a challenge for us marketers (in a good way).
So what is the intel I wanted to impart to make all of this easier to bear?
2 things:
First, not all marketing technology is critical to your success.
Used correctly, most of the technologies in the landscape provide positive value, but for most businesses, much of it is overkill, overlap or irrelevant. If you don’t do local marketing or e-commerce, there are 2 whole categories you can ignore.
Take another look at those categories: do you think advanced dashboards/visualization, tag management, gamification or vendor data/analysis are the difference between meeting your goals or not? Not likely.
I’m not dismissing these technologies (I use dashboards, tag management and vendor data/analysis), but I just don’t believe they are absolutely necessary to everyone’s success. The same can be true for many of the others.
That simplifies things – you don’t need one of everything.
Second, you don’t have to learn it all.
I’m a geek for this stuff. If I could, I would take a year or two off just to accelerate learning about all of the technologies that I haven’t gotten my hands on yet. But you know what would happen, the landscape would continue to change and I’d be back where I started, clamoring to understand it all. It’s not feasible or healthy to try.
Instead, just pick a couple technologies that are truly effective when used correctly and start there. If you are curious as to my personal recommendations of where to begin, while I believe it’s dependent on your company’s current needs/objectives, I hinted at the 5 categories earlier in the article (marketing automation, mobile marketing, content marketing, interactive content, testing & optimization).
There you have it: you don’t need all of these technologies, you don’t need to learn about them all and you certainly don’t need to be a marketing unicorn to succeed. That should remove a huge weight from your shoulders (that I may have accidentally created if you didn’t already know about this MarTech landscape) .
Chances are you already knew though, so now you can relax and get focused.
