Question

Describe the skills and competencies of a Marketing Technologist. How do Marketing Technologists support modern Marketing functions? Give three examples and explain the value of each one to the enterprise. In your opinion, what are some of the greatest challenges that Marketing Technologists will confront in the next 7 years? Support your opinion with reasoning and analysis. Finally, what technologies do you believe will make the greatest contributions to Marketing’s ability to anticipate and satisfy customer expectations. An example of how Marketing will benefit from of each of the technologies mentioned must be provided. The answer must be written as an integrated essay. (this is a e-marketing subject)

Answer 1

Information technology is everywhere irrespective of the domain or field of work. The new emerging trend of the collaboration of marketing domain with the information technology has given birth to the marketing technologists. The position of marketing technologist is currently present at almost all the firms from consulting to the FMCG sector to pure advertising firms. The importance of this job profile lies not only in being up-to-date with the market trend but it is also essential for the strategic growth of the organization.

This designation requires a combination of skills and competencies like:

- Marketing creativity and conceptual knowledge (A/b testing, multivariate testing, email marketing, etc.)

- Advertising know-how (CRM, pay per click, bid management, etc.)

- Fluency with social media and mobile platforms (behavioural targeting, social APIs, etc.)

- Content and digital marketing aspects (SEO, SEM, video blogs, etc.)

- IT operations and basic programming knowledge (cloud computing, HTML, javascript, etc.)

- Big Data Analytics (extraction, cleaning, mining, analysis, etc.)

The above-mentioned skills and competencies are just a broad description of what a marketing technologist should know. Their competency should extend to being a cross-functionally active team player as they have responsibility equivalent to that of CMO and CTO combined. They tend to have a broader voice in the organization spanning from planning to operations to sales and marketing.

The modern marketing functions involve technology right from the word go. Starting with data collection (using survey, questionnaire, etc.), the marketing department is well guided by various technologies ensuring fast and smooth gathering of data. Further, the data needs to be cleaned and mined before it is analyzed. CMTO (Cheif marketing technology officer) play a very crucial role in data cleaning and mining. After this, the CMTO contributes heavily to data analysis and developing insights, trends and patterns. All these insights are then used in planning and product development or enhancement by the company based on the customer requirements, needs and wants. The post-production processes of sales and marketing have now become intertwined with an abundant amount of technology. Digital marketing, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, etc. form the core foundation of marketing of any product in the current day and age.

Example 1- CMTO in FMCG sector

CMTO studies and analyzes the needs and wants of the customer and helps in planning the new products or variants of the existing products based on trend, pattern and demography-geography factors. Also, social media marketing plays a huge role nowadays in the marketing of a product on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, etc. For example, Oreo advertising campaigns on Instagram, McDonald's vs Burger King twitter advertising war, etc.

Example 2- CMTO in Advertising firm

CMTO analyzes the trending ways of communication with the target group and helps design the advertisement in the most innovative and trending way possible. For example, movie trailers during Super Bowl games, digital advertisement on elevator doors, etc.

Example 3- CMTO in E-Commerce firm

Here, the CMTO not only facilitates the marketing and promotion of products on an e-commerce platform but can also help in enhancing customer engagement through interactive Instagram advertisements, introducing games on the app, etc. For example, the e-commerce giant, Flipkart (India), has introduced Flipkart video and games and quizzes to enhance customer engagement.

Greatest challenges that can confront marketing technologist in coming years are:

- Capturing a genuine view of each customer: The data collected by companies from a target group varies based on the platform being used by the customer, the place where he/she is, the mental state and their own perspective towards a product or service.

- Collecting enough good data: First-party data obtained by organizations through direct interaction with the firms is good data. But it is not big enough to capture the trend and need of the market. Third-party data obtained via vendors in inaccurate, incomplete and irrelevant. Now what remains is the second-party data from the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Pinterest, etc. This data is priced heavily by the companies and also under far too many regulations and policies to use it in a free manner. And hence, the so-called "Big Data" is not exactly good data.

- Market competition: Every company is trying their hands on something innovative and something out of the box. In this race to excel, it is generally the marketing creativity that comes to play rather than simply IT related skill or competency.

Technologies that will affect the marketing's ability to anticipate and satisfy customer expectations are:

1. Video advertisements: the face to face connection and feel provided by video advertisements will go a long way in the personalization of the experience for the customer in the digital era.

2. Chatbots (real-time messaging customer care): Customer expectation can be best captured if the customer thinks that you (the organization) are available online 24x7. The chatbots of various companies provide a solution to a good amount of problems faced by customers and hence help in meeting customer expectations.

3. Blockchain: the invention of blockchain-based Smart Contracts can go a long way in payment related issues faced by customers. This can surely ease the tasks of missing payments and other trivial complaints about an e-commerce customer support and can instead work towards providing value to the customers.

4. Big Data Analytics: this is the most widely used and needed technology to anticipate customer expectations. This is what quantifies the customer expectations and helps the organization in understanding and fulfilling the customer expectations. The data collected from first, second and third party (as discussed above) plays an important role here.