What do you need to manage the MarTech Stack?

The breadth and volume of new marketing technologies in just the last few years is dizzying. Even B2B SMEs can’t escape this arms race. In response to larger, more complex Marketing Technology stacks, companies are increasingly creating ‘Marketing Technology Manager’ roles. So what traits, capabilities, and experience might you need in your marketing team or in a Marketing Technology Manager?

I originally put this list together to formalise my own experience and identify gaps as I look for my next opportunity. I’m dropping it on LinkedIn to share it and get feedback. Think it’s missing something? Let me know!

Would a tool for auditing MarTech capability be useful to you? Drop a comment below, and if there is interest, I’ll create one.

• A curious mindset: Asking questions and looking for opportunities. Always testing and improving – Hypothesis-driven. It requires a natural tendency to ask probing questions (e.g. to Operations, Product Managers or Sales) and develop insight from the answers received.
• Deliberate practice / methodology: Applying system and/or design thinking. Strong data analysis skills to find answers using data. An understanding of project management principles or training in project management. An ability to identify, communicate and manage risk.
• Communication & teamwork: Being able to work closely with and understand the needs of different marketing team members and other business teams/functions. This could include Product, IT, Data Protection, Finance and Sales. Large project experience is also key, preferably in a MarTech implementation such as CRM. Such projects require working closely with lots of different internal customers and managing project stakeholders and their expectations. An ability for strong external collaboration is needed too – to leverage partner and supplier relationships for support, advice, and training for system strategy and operation.
• Commercial knowledge & strategy: A solid understanding of the business context, customer journeys and customer value is key in order to design and support the right mix of systems, people, process, and data for success. An understanding of the marketing team’s KPIs and goals is needed as well as organisational strategy. How will/should the MarTech stack help acheive organisational goals? There needs to be clarity over the expected outputs and benefits (the value!) of the MarTech stack – e.g. required segmentation, channels needed for growth, how leads feed into the Sales Team, and the reports or data feeds that Finance or Leadership teams might require, etc.
• Technical knowledge: Broad knowledge of technologies and technology strategies (e.g. Cloud, SaaS, Databases, ETL, Web). Deep knowledge of marketing systems: CRM, Marketing Automation, Customer Data & Sales Intelligence, CMS, Analytics & Data Visualisation, Email Marketing, SEO/SEM, Forms, Social Media. Programming and Scripting – at least a basic understanding of front-end (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), server-side (PHP, Python), and database/data analysis (SQL, R) tools. Experience in procuring, running, and managing marketing systems. An understanding of, and practical experience in: data storage, APIs & integration, web services, email deliverability and Marketing automation.
• Process management competencies: Understanding of the marketing processes that is supported by MarTech – including the upstream and downstream customers (internal/external). Process mapping and design and process improvement: SIPOC, VSM, Fishbone. Problem solving skills – e.g. 5-Whys, gap analysis. Process automation.
• Practical marketing experience: Planning, running, and reporting on integrated marketing campaigns: targeting, positioning, knowledge of the intricacies of email campaign management, social media platform post types, DMs, and ability to automate/integrate. If the person or team supporting the MarTech stack knows how the marketing team uses it, they will be better-placed to meet their needs and spot opportunities to improve.
• System implementation & integration experience: implementing systems and working with the challenges of data, designing data / data translation. Integrating different systems e.g. HubSpot & Salesforce. CRM system implementations can fail – it’s important to have the benefit of experience to guide you.
• Data design and management: in many business models data is the fuel that drives most of the marketing output. So, the capability to design and manage data correctly is crucial. For example, the data type used to store data can impact or limit data collection and how that data can be used in subsequent processes or automation. In the same vein data integrity is essential – it requires understanding and managing ‘data-lineage’ and any collection or process risks to the data. Raw marketing data can be messy and handling this may require expertise in data integration, augmentation, managing and cleaning. Experience with collating and reporting on data from different systems is valuable, as well as helping the business to provide a ‘single source of truth’. Lastly, you need to have a good handle on the regulatory requirements for the collection and handling of data (as well as marketing communications more generally!).
• Business reporting: Competency of using data visualisation tools and designing/creating reports. Understanding reporting needs, and how to design data and processes that will support the reporting requirements of the business.

There is huge opportunities ahead and having a good mix of these traits, skills and experience will put your organisation in a great place to take advantage of them.

Remember though that you don’t necessarily require ALL of these skills and capabilities in the team, or even just in one role. By working with internal teams, such as IT, Finance or Data Protection, or external suppliers and agencies it’s possible to augment and bring in skills when needed. There are trade-offs to this approach: capacity shortages outside of your control could impact timelines, IT may lack a good understanding of marketing processes and an external consultant could lack essential business context.

Want to audit MarTech capability in your team?

I’m considering creating a tool for auditing MarTech capability in a standardised way – if this is of interest then please drop a comment below.

#MarketingTechnology #MarketingAutomation #MarTech #CRM