‘But I’m a marketer, not an IT geek…’
With the current acronym obsession running rife through the world of marketing, you'd be forgiven for thinking every marketer was an IT specialist. This isn't just a problem for the marketers - it can filter down to the customers themselves - explains Rob Kain.
Every area of business has had the digital tsunami crash over it, and the effect this force has had on marketing is off the scale.
It all started with the first marketing email in the late 1970s and ramped up after the invention of the internet and the creation of Hotmail in the 1990s. And, as they say, the rest is history as the web accelerated from squawking 14k dial-up modems to useable broadband data speeds.
This brief trip along the information superhighway brings us to today and the current proliferation of customer data platforms such as Salesforce and Alterian. Not to mention the gargantuan social media giants, a plethora of digital profiling tools, and of course, the spider’s web of entwined APIs and cloudware that sits between them.
Do you feel like you’ve accidentally started reading an article on IT Weekly? Well, that’s exactly the problem…
Modern-day marketers seemingly require an ever-increasing level of IT knowledge. Though if your passion for marketing lies closer to the consumer than a server cabinet, then there’s an obvious and growing conflict in your working day.
The world of hyper-connected digital marketing clearly enables incredible opportunities for marketers, but if you’re the kind of person who struggles to hook-up your Foxtel box to the TV, then all the IT techno-babble can also bring a world of complexity.
The issue has been brought to the forefront in client organisations as they realise the potential value in their customer databases. With greater results often needing to be achieved for less, attention is turning more than ever to customer databases that have been often neglected in the server room or floating around in the cloud.
And this is where it can get tricky. You know all about NPS, LTV and the RTB, but what the hell is an ECPM, SERP, SML or PaaS? (Ok, so I made the last one up, but who would know?)
So, do you really need to be across all this IT tech-talk? Yes and no.
Yes, you need to understand enough of it to be able to define what you want the marketing outcomes to be. You need to be able to understand the technical abilities of the platforms and how they can power your marketing plans and business goals.
And no, because the last thing you want is to get stuck in the technical quicksand that your CIO can somehow miraculously walk right across the top of. It’ll bog you down, suck you in and take your focus off the purpose of the technology – more effective marketing.
Today’s critical need for brands to extract value from their customer data runs the risk of great results getting lost in the gap somewhere between marketing and IT in client organisations. The old questions of who owns the data, privacy issues and whose budget is going to pay for the project, all hinder the marketing opportunity and stifle potential new revenue. I’ve seen this first-hand in large client organisations where I have previously worked.
The good news is that there is an emerging group of CX consultants who can help you bridge that gap between what you need and the complexities involved in achieving it. The technology platforms themselves are never going to give you all the answers, but they can help you visualise the data and bring it to life, so you can more easily hone in on opportunities. We always map out a brand’s ecosystem and align it with the business’ goals before we suggest any specific technology or platform.
Another great thing about a well-designed CX solution is that it can be set up to largely look after itself. It will be able to give you actual customer insights, rather than just dumping indecipherable volumes of data on your desk. If you put the right platforms in place from the start and leverage great content, it can even turn your dormant data into high value and loyal customers.
There is an army of marketing technology providers out there, but I believe that marketers need to focus on marketing and ignore the trend to become some kind of mar-tech hybrid. Technology is a purely method, not marketing mastery…
Rob Kain, CX director at The Core Agency.
Oops! Looks like your first paragraph is duplicated 🙂
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Thanks for picking that up, Maddy. All fixed.
Regards,
Paul Wallbank
I agree. There’s too many stupid, irrelevant acronyms around now. What does CX mean again?
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Yikes.
My first modem was dual speed – 75 bits per second (to guarantee data stability) or 300 bits per second (for mind-numbingly quick transfer). A pretty piece of work as well, gold anodised aluminium case with polished wooden end pieces.
There was no such thing as Comms packages – you scripted your own.
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PaaS = Platform as a Service. So not as made up as you seem to think.
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Gods article. FYI, PaaS is Platform as a Service. It’s not made up just a little silly.
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Those marketers getting it right collaborate with IT and Digital experts so they don’t need to know it all
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Definitely have to have a high under standing of both disciplines so as to get most out of your IT dept and marketing dept. Putting scope into your data is the key so as not to drown, and then drill down into the data when patterns emerge .
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Some of us are born marketers and IT geeks….some of us are born for media glory!
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