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Marketers nowadays often struggle to hire a person with a right blend of Marketing and Technical knowledge.
We live in a changing world. The Marketing domain is no different. Until recently, Marketing people were the ones considered to have a creative, strategic and optimistic approach to the market for the goods/services. During the last decade, the marketing saw a significant change with the onset of Marketing Automation and digital marketing. Of late, two profiles are emerging in Marketing – one with a strategic skill set where the role focuses more on strategy, planning and vision while the other is digital marketing – where the focus is less on traditional marketing skills but more towards making use of systems, tools and technical skills to support the marketing strategy and business plans.
The changing environment in traditional marketing
Marketing Automation and digital marketing has made technology an integral part of today’s marketing world. Initially, marketing professionals worked in a collaborative environment with the company’s IT staff, passing on their needs and then waiting for the technical experts to finish the job. Recent years saw the rise in the demand of marketing people with additional/optional and, at times, even mandatory skills in the technical areas. The technical skill required was initially restricted to hands-on knowledge (primarily how to operate) of Marketing Automation platfoms (Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot to name a few), but later expanded further to include knowledge of HTML, JavaScripts, Workflows, data management etc. The existing marketing workforce was unable to meet the demand of this changing technical work environment. This significantly increased the challenges for the hiring teams. There was a dilemma as to whether to hire a marketing person or a technical person because candidates with experience and skills in both were not available. Interestingly, in the recent years, the senior and executive marketing profiles are also seeing the demand of technical knowledge as the need of every business changes due to digital marketing becoming a major part of any marketing strategy.
Having said that, Marketing Automation tools require marketing people to not only possess superior creative and messaging skills but also have outstanding logical and analytical skills. Most of these the new-age tools have complex workflows and dependent programs and require strong technical aptitude to manage and operate. Without proper understanding of what a tool does, how, and why, a seemingly simple oversight can have wide-ranging impact and may eventually damage data and results.
How can marketing hiring managers and recruiters meet this challenge?
The leaders and managers spend significant time chasing their hiring teams and consultants to meet the ever-increasing demand for the right marketing resources with right mix of technical talent and traditional marketing skills. With extensive background in Marketing Automation Consulting, RightWave has identified some of the key technical skills that are required in a technical Marketing Consultant/Specialist. The most important ones among these are:
- Extensive knowledge about how marketing automation system works – setup, administration, workflows, Databases, etc.
- Thorough understanding on the impact of Marketing Automation systems on the organization
- Hands-on proficiency in using one or more Marketing Automation tools, preferably including the one used by the hiring organization
- Campaign management: setting up campaign emails, trigger emails, lead management, and assignment/modification of the target
- Database Management: understanding of data acquisition and quality including cleansing, standardization, update, aggregation and archiving.
- Reporting and Analytics: designing, defining and comprehending complex metrics and turning them in to easy-to-understand reports with the use of marketing data available from Marketing Automation tools.
Perusing résumés and traditional telephone and face-to-face interviews are inadequate to ensure that new-hires and consultants have these skills in depth. Candidates should diagram workflows, explain the structure of customer and prospect databases, and some sample campaigns and reports. However, finding single resources with all these expertise in itself is tough, let alone finding someone who also has traditional marketing skills. Most larger organizations now hire core technical people with specific expertise in their newly formed “marketing operations” group, and then within the marketing team, this group serves the traditional marketing personnel with operation of technical tools, execution of eMarketing initiatives, management of database, and running the analysis and reports. In choosing full-time employees for small marketing organizations, these technical operations skills are equally important as artistic/creative abilities. Consultants can be either operational, creative, or both.
Marketing Automation As a Service (MaaS) to the rescue
RightWave has more than a decade of experience of working on multiple and complex marketing automation platforms like Marketo, Eloqua and Pardot and CRMs like Salesforce and Netsuite. RightWave’s team includes a strong resource bank of marketing consultants, project managers, Marketing Automation specialists possessing in-depth knowledge and experience in the domain. They have the expertise to become an extension of any marketing team supporting in times of resource crunch as well as supplementing any technical skills gap. Having a consulting arm like RightWave as part of your marketing team will significantly enhance your ability to execute on your plans without being constrained by resource or skills shortage. This will also enable your existing marketing team to be much more productive without having to replace them or being dragged down by lack of appropriate expertise.
RightWave has proven success stories in the field and has often been recognized as an important strategic partner by the customers.
For more information, contact RightWave.
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