The emergence of data science and the proliferation of new media channels has radically changed some traditional marketing jobs, while creating new ones. As a whole, all these changes are part of the evolution away from marketing simply as art into a hybrid of art and science.
All marketers today need baseline skills in data and analytics. Today’s marketer needs to go well beyond reporting and metrics, and be more proficient in a full range of analytical skills. These include knowledge of data management principles and analytical strategies, and an understanding of the role of data quality, the importance of data governance, and the value of data in marketing disciplines. Marketers today also need a nuanced understanding of current and emerging digital channels.
As our functional needs have changed, we’ve had to adjust the kinds of jobs and job descriptions of people throughout our marketing organisation. There are four roles today’s marketing teams need to cover.
1. Digital Marketing
The world of digital marketing includes the functions of web, search, social media, email, digital advertising and media buying. This category has been going through tremendous growth and change over the past decade as the number of channels has exploded. What we’ve learned is that the real opportunity is in convergence — in creating strategies that leverage multiple channels rather than silos. We’re looking for people who are passionate about their channel and understand how it intersects with others. These marketers are capable of collaborating and use data to guide them.
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For example, before he recently transitioned into a new role as a segmentation analyst, Scott Sellers was one of our go-to people for tapping into the world of online advertising and paid search. Sellers was responsible for helping the team understand where the best opportunities were for, say, purchasing keywords that our potential customers were most interested in.
When Sellers and I discussed some of his experiences, he recalled that when he was involved in supporting paid search advertising, a campaign he was analysing was using some very expensive search terms. Although the keyword campaign had been in place for some time, Sellers examined two years’ worth of data to analyse the actions people took after they engaged with the ads we attached to those search terms.
As part of his analysis, he compared the results to the actions people took when they engaged with similar terms via an organic search. He also tracked the behaviour of contacts who clicked on the ads to see what other activities they undertook. What he found was sobering: despite the high cost of the paid search campaign, it generated only fourteen sales leads. None of those leads were related to the initiative being promoted — and none of them turned into successful sales.
Armed with that kind of insight, the decision to kill the campaign was easy, but only because we had done our analytical homework.
2. Content Marketing
Content has become an especially critical component of the modern approach to marketing. Everything we do as marketers now involves some kind of content that has to be designed as ‘channel appropriate,’ meaning that the format, length, and relevancy must work in that channel.
You cannot run a two-minute video in a display ad. That’s why we have created an entire new family of jobs whose role is to fill in the gaps and help ensure we are offering the kind of relevant content our customers are looking for. The people we trust for our content marketing roles have a very good understanding of all our different channels, how they function, and how they can complement each other.
Using the power of analytics, they can assess a piece of content and understand how it fits into a marketing campaign. They also assess what kind of content works at what stage of a customer’s decision journey: when do they want slides, videos, or even
a book?
Collaboration and coordination are, again, key skills. Without them, we were generating lots of duplicate content or content that was under-utilised because no one knew it was there. Now, our content marketers can oversee that inventory and, by applying analytics, understand what pieces of content work best and when. For example, when we are putting together a campaign, a member of the content marketing team works with the campaign orchestrator to perform a ‘content audit,’ in which we select content that scores best with the target customers of a particular campaign.
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3. Marketing Science
The role of the marketing data scientist or data visualisation analyst is also new to marketing; this role is distinct from that of a pure data scientist. In some ways, we are still defining the different roles that fall under the umbrella of a marketing data scientist. One descriptive title I have seen for this role is ‘data artist’ or ‘data storyteller.’ For example, Shawn Skillman is a senior marketing data visualisation analyst who is skilled at modeling and storing data. His job is to look at the data objectively to see what stories it’s telling, without being tainted or biased by what someone running a campaign might want to see.
Marketing data scientists like Skillman are also able to see what happens when we make changes and tweaks; they can tell us how the story begins to change.
Another job title that currently falls under the same umbrella is what we call a ‘segmentation analyst.’ Someone running a campaign will come to a segmentation analyst like Julie Chalk, for example, and ask for her help in building a contact list that the campaign should target. To do this, Chalk relies on ‘scoring models,’ in which she parses out the key factors in a contact database that might make that person a good target for the campaign. Chalk is then able to track the results of the campaign and suggest where it might be working well or not.
Chalk recalled her analysis for a campaign around one of our customer experience software solutions. By tracking the activities of customers on our website, Chalk realised that 26% of visitors were dropping off before they registered for a free white paper we were offering on our product. That was great insight, because it made us question why: Were we asking too much information from the visitor? What other barriers were we putting in the way? And perhaps most importantly, what could we change to help reduce that dropout rate and create more conversions instead?
The ability of data artists and storytellers to tackle questions like these has become a central tenet of the marketing modernisation efforts we are making. They help to provide that analytical muscle that lets us make better investments in campaigns, while also letting us know when we might need to
try again.
4. Customer Experience
Many people might think of marketing as purely an ‘outbound’ function in which we are reaching out to potential customers. ‘Inbound’ marketing is another evolving area in the world of marketing that ties directly to the customer decision journey, where we need to engage with customers wherever they are in their journey. We created a new position called a ‘customer engagement specialist’ (what we used to call a ‘prospect development specialist’), whose role is to create deeper and more intelligent conversations with potential customers who have questions they want us to answer.
Because potential customers have so much information available to them – everything from what they obtain in a Google search to insights they get from a social media contact – it’s rare that any interactions are now considered ‘cold.’ Customers have some expectations about us already, and we need to be prepared to engage them at that level. Someone might not know who we are, but he might know exactly what kind of solution he is looking for; it’s up to us to understand if we can meet that need. This shift results in higher quality interactions that have a far greater chance of conversion into actual sales than we might have experienced in the past.
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While we spend much time and effort trying to land new customers, we also rely on the power of data and analytics to service our existing customers as well – something we call ‘relationship marketing.’ Once someone becomes a customer, his needs change, and it’s our job to nurture that relationship and help retain his business. We have to keep up with our customers’ needs and make sure they know what we can deliver to meet those needs.
Our goal is to hire marketers who have a passion for, and understand, the value of data and analytics in decision-making. This is not as hard as it was ten years ago. The modern marketer has evolved from being purely creative and logistics-driven to appreciating data and the role of analytics. Anyone accustomed to measuring digital and social media efforts or experimenting with A/B web pages or one-to-one marketing is primed to use more advanced analytics to measure the overall value of a programme. You’re not killing creativity or innovation, just seeking naturally curious employees with updated skills.
