The Rise of the Marketing Technologist

We are currently witnessing two major challenges in the market. In this article, I will explain what’s happening and how companies are able to turn these challenges into opportunities to give them a competitive advantage.

Challenge #1: the expectation level of customers is higher than ever. They know what they want and they want it now. Leading companies across the globe have shown the way to true customer centricity at scale, improving customer loyalty and advocacy. The secret to their success can not be attributed to only one thing. Once we start to reverse engineer their approach, we can bring it back to the following crucial factor: customer obsession.
This goes much further than a solid marketing strategy. Think about customer service, sales, marketing and IT. Each department focused around one (or a limited amount of) metric(s) that matters, also commonly referred to as the “OMTM”. Every OMTM is carefully calibrated towards the company’s North Star.

Challenge #2: the influx of marketing technology platforms. This should not come as a surprise if you’re in any way involved with marketing technology. The possibilities are pretty much endless. Sounds great, right? The downside is that it is becoming increasingly difficult to see the forest for the trees. Thousands of software vendors are speaking the same language. How do I choose the best possible platform(s) that will support my business objectives?

In 2020, approximately 8.000 different platforms were identified within the Marketing Technology landscape. Even if you have identified a shortlist of interesting platforms, there are still dozens of potentials platforms to choose from.

When looking at the evolution of the influx of marketing technology, we can clearly see that the majority of the 5.233% growth really started around 2014-2015.

It doesn’t stop there. After making a well-considered decision, you are still going to have to implement it and adopt it within the wider organisation. Traditionally this is executed via a long (and tough) implementation project. By the time it’s ready, technology has evolved even further and your business objectives might have changed as well.

Implementing marketing technology platforms can not be taken lightly and should not be considered as a “side project”. Many companies are having difficulties in finding the right (internal) resources. Mainly because of two reasons: 1) most IT resources are already working on several projects and do not have the time to focus solely on an intensive implementation project and 2) most (internal) resources do not have extensive experience in implementing this type of platforms.

This brings us to the punchline of this article: the rise of the Marketing Technologist.

The two challenges outlined above created a new type of role. We call them Marketing Technologists. People with a strong technical background but also a good understanding of the business side of things. Their main purpose is to help companies gather key business requirements, navigate the complex world of marketing technology and lead a team of technical rockstars that will implement a future-proof MarTech ecosystem.

Marketing Technologists have a unique set of skills that are specifically geared around marketing technology. They love to sit right in between your marketing and IT teams and feel comfortable with having both business and technical conversations.

At Dignify, we have been witnessing an increasing demand for this type of role over the last few years. Our mission is to train the best Marketing Technologists in the market and create business impact for ambitious companies by implementing future-proof marketing technology ecosystems.

Could your company benefit from the expertise of a Marketing Technologist to help you overcome the two challenges outlined above? Get in touch with us!