Once upon a time, life was simple. There was marketing, and there was IT. The former did creative work to drive the product creation and sales process, and the latter kept the computers, software and networks running. In large organizations, the former had a Chief Marketing Officer and the latter had a Chief Information Officer. And if the two departments talked, it was usually about things like software licenses or password resets.
Fast forward to 2017. Marketing is now a heavily data-driven field, where success involves things like marketing automation platforms, CRMs, big data analytics, social media analysis, content personalization, and data governance. Technology and automation software now play key strategic roles in the marketing process. Which leads to a new buzz phrase that is now here to stay in the industry: marketing technology.
Content management firm Docurated defines marketing technology as “tools and platforms used by sales and marketing organizations to effectively complete their duties.” These marketing/sales tools and platforms are becoming increasingly complicated to deploy and administer while new ones are being introduced at an exponential rate. To manage these technologies, many organizations now have a formal leadership role, embedded within the marketing organization, to oversee its use of technology: the marketing technologist. According to marketing blogger Scott Brinker, over 60% of firms have now restructured their marketing and/or IT departments to better leverage marketing technology, or plan to do so over the next 12 months.
According to McKinsey, marketing technologists are much more than IT people who have been moved to a new office: “They’re passionate about re-imagining what marketing can do in a digital world. They help nontechnical marketers craft better campaigns, programs, and customer experiences that effectively leverage software and data … They’re hybrids, who speak both marketing and IT, and naturally see the connections between them.” Whatever their formal title, they are part of a closer integration between IT and marketing, often reaching all the way up to the C-level suite.
It is important to know that the marketing technologist has emerged because of larger trends in the software industry. People didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to create this role – it evolved in response to the growth of inexpensive, scalable, cloud-based tools such as Salesforce and Marketo, as well as other trends leveraging big data and social media. In less than a decade, the automated marketing environment has gone from the province of expensive enterprise solutions to becoming a competitive necessity used by almost everyone.
One of the key roles of a marketing technologist is managing the data quality of an organization’s information assets – and where possible, creating automated processes to ensure this data quality. This dovetails with a broader portfolio of responsibilities integrating component technologies that form the basis for an organization’s marketing automation strategy.
At Service Objects, we help marketing technologists automate their data quality and leverage the maximum value from their data assets. We do this with tools ranging from our flagship address validation capabilities, which clean and validate your contact data against continually updated USPS, Canada Post and international address databases, all the way to lead validation and lead enhancement tools that make sure all your contacts work hard for you. And we make it easy to automate these capabilities, using either our enterprise-grade APIs or custom-built cloud connectors for the most popular CRMs and marketing automation platforms.
Are you a newly-minted marketing technologist? Talk with us and see how we can help build your success!
