Once again, Scott Brinker from chiefmartec.com has published his list of marketing technology solutions, updating the count to 8,000 from last year’s ~7,000. In conjunction with the update, a survey by MarTech Today and chiefmartec.com shows that marketing technologists cover an array of responsibilities while spending the largest amount of time on marketing automation and campaign management solutions.
The term that Scott Brinker uses to describe the professional that work with these vast swathes of tools is a “marketing technologist”. But what do marketing technologists and which tools do they use most often? Here are a few survey highlights.
What Does A Marketing Technologist Do?
In terms of their day-to-day responsibilities, the survey shows that the majority (82.2%) of marketing technologists cite training and supporting staff on the use of marketing technology (martech) products as one of their main responsibilities.
Another key function for marketing technologists is to research and recommend new marketing technology products, with eight in 10 (81.8%) reporting this to be one of their functions. As such, the “marketing technologist” title, where available, may be useful for martech vendors to target in their demand generation efforts. While this title may not be too commonplace, it’s also true that a 2016 survey found two-thirds of respondents reporting that their company had a Chief Marketing Technologist in place.
Meanwhile, today’s marketing technologists are also operating marketing technology products as an administrator (77.1%), designing and managing internal workflows and processes (76%) and integrating marketing technology products with each other (74.8%).
About two-thirds (67.8%) are also responsible for monitoring data quality within martech products. This is a particularly important task as maintaining high-quality data has been shown to increase efficiency, increase customer trust and enhance their satisfaction as well as help to make informed decisions.
Despite an emphasis being put on data security by many brands, fewer (40.7%) marketing technologists are responsible for performing data privacy and compliance reviews of martech products.
What Tools Do They Use Most?
To determine where marketing technologists are spending their time, the survey sought answers about the tools that respondents spend at least 10 hours per week using. The results indicate that marketing automation platforms top the list, used for 10+ hours a week by 7 in 10 respondents. But about the same portion are spending that amount of time with spreadsheets, too.
Integrating CRM systems with other technologies has been shown to increase ROI. As such, almost 60% of martech professionals are spending at least 10 hours per week with their CRM or other customer data tools. Another half are spending that time with project management platforms, while fewer are using content management or business intelligence tools to that extent.
What’s the Role of Operations?
The role of marketing operations is playing an increasingly important role in marketing. Not only that, but it’s also one of the roles most difficult to hire for within marketing.
Brinker dubs those with an internal and process focus as ‘maestros’ – these are the professionals most likely to orchestrate operations internally. For this group specifically, the survey found they are increasingly addressing reviews of both tech and data privacy as well as perform security reviews.
They are also more likely to recommend martech tools (88%), approve purchases (49%) and negotiate with martech vendors (50%) than other roles within marketing. Furthermore, they are most likely to pay for martech products out of their budget (54%). Therefore, it might make the most sense for vendors to identify this group when it comes to finding the strongest purchase influencer.
About the Data: The results are based on a survey of more than 250 marketing technologists.
