What is technical marketing?
Technical marketing is the use of digital technology in executing digital marketing strategies.
The pillars of technical marketing include:
- Integration – systemising processes and methods for digital marketing planning/reviewing, implementation, and promotion
- UX – influencing the visitor’s user journey to achieve a certain outcome
- Agile development and/or project management – building platforms/sites/tools e.t.c. through iterations tailoring to a sites user base
- Lean analytics – maximise, learn and align marketing efforts to make incremental improvements ongoing.
- Content – using creative copywriting for building products or drawing targeted visitors.
Specialised roles such as growth hackers and inbound marketers came about as a result of the increasing technical requirements in digital marketing. But, yet both technical and non-technical digital marketers work towards the same goal of attracting, converting and retaining customers.
The t-Shape marketer
So how can you pick apart a non-technical vs. technical digital marketer? The CMO website provides a good explanation of this, by defining the T-shape model. “T-shaped marketers’; people who have a broad understanding of the capabilities, function, and roles of all the various elements of marketing (whether the other parts are being delivered by the in-house team or an outside agency). In the future, the best marketing teams will comprise people who have a detailed knowledge of their own specialty, but also have a broad understanding of the entire marketing mix. They will make decisions based on how their activity fits together with the activities of others.”
To summarize, there are digital marketers who specialize in a few fields but have enough understanding and context in other fields that will allow them to make more holistic decisions/considerations, instead of having a narrow focus.
Being a successful technical marketer
Being a technical marketer in the digital publishing industry these days actually is awesome. Imagine being the central point for driving the growth efforts of your online audience. One day, you might be reviewing your site’s analytics to assess its performance, another day it might be coming up with an experiment to see how you can continue improving the sites monetization value. All remaining days can then be focused on building and promoting that product – through coding and content creation.
So what are the keys to success in being a technical marketer? Here are the main ones below:
- Be able to holistically review a site in order to maximise spend and performance
- Drive more traffic to the site you are working on and be able to develop an audience (user base)
- Create long-term plans which include the entire digital marketing mix/the user lifecycle
- Grow awareness and traffic to the site, with SEO and media coverage (earned media)
- Basic coding skills to build and test landing pages
- Be tech savvy – understand email, e-commerce and web technologies
- Analytics and excel for testing, data manipulation and being a statistical ninja.
http://technicalmktg.com/ is a great resource for understanding the skill requirements for technical marketing.
The time has come to become more technical. Are you up for the challenge? Write your thoughts below of this article, about your interest and experiences to date.
