A Full-Stack Marketer is the new VP of Marketing
A lie that you are often told, you need a full-fledged marketing team to lead your marketing initiatives.
Companies think, to set up a high-performing marketing team, you need is a brand marketer, a content marketer, an SEO specialist, a performance marketing specialist, a marketing technology leader supported by a creative agency.
However, this is obsolete in the sense that now marketing is increasingly becoming technology-oriented & shifting fast to Digital, supported by tools. The lead marketer should know how interlinked each of the fields of Digital marketing is and how to leverage it holistically.
Unless you leverage technology, Marketing doesn’t make sense in the Digital world
There are hundreds of examples, Airbnb, Uber, LogMeIn but superhuman email, https://superhuman.com/ by Rahul Vohra is one of the new companies that used technology to achieve product-market fit and spread word of mouth.
Rahul’s team was coding for two years and didn’t know if they achieved a product-market fit. They used a simple Typeform survey to ask their subscribers how they felt about the product. They collected responses and threw them on the word cloud. They kept improving the product.
Once they achieved the product-market fit, Rahul didn’t begin with advertising, they created a waitlist on the website and limited the access with a brilliant tagline “THE FASTEST EMAIL EXPERIENCE EVER MADE” which went viral.
Word spreads on Twitter and social networks and the waitlist grows phenomenally. Rahul’s existing customers saw the waitlist on the email app, It had all the details like company, Job, role, etc except for the name of the users for referrals. If one wins a referral, they get email access almost instantly.
This is how modern marketing looks like, all Digital. All word of mouth and referrals with a little assistance from technology.
There is no SEO, No content marketing, No Brand Building except the use of Marketing Tech, social media, and a few tools.
A Marketing VP should increasingly rely on technology to help the company succeed.
Since I get to meet a lot of marketers what I have understood is most of the senior marketing folks have very little access to how technology enables and helps marketing. They didn’t know much about the various tools like A/B Testing, content writing, Podcasting, editing, SEO, and so on.
You can’t take your company on a brand new digital journey to spread the word, Build FOMO, acquire and engage customers unless you know how to leverage tools for better marketing or achieve engagement, etc.
A Marketer today should know about podcast tools, video editing software, a lead management CRM, Email marketing, customer user journey mapping, User behavior, Business Analytics, API and integrations, SEO, survey tools, Google ads and optimizations, and Customer feedback software. It’s not only about brand and TVC advertising anymore. Digital is all about how better you are using technology to your advantage.
All digital marketing is interlinked
A simple example here is you are producing amazing content which ranks on SEO/goes viral on Social, which leads to blog visits and later repeat visits to the website which ends as a lead or purchase. You need a marketer who knows what to do holistically when content+ SEO+SM+Ads+Martech meets and you to see them as individual and together as well.
As a full-stack marketer and if you are leading a team, you should expose all individuals to a comprehensive overview & Specialisations. You may wish them to join a course like CXL.com if they are seasoned professionals or https://www.skillcamper.com/ if they are newbies.
Finally, here is what you can do other than courses and incorporate in your daily routine
Tip #1: Explore more Tools. The more you explore and use various tools, you will find you are getting productive and getting results faster, like this article is written on typeshare.com using a template. See what other people are using to achieve results for their company.
Tip #2: Read more Digital is constantly changing, Google over a period of time is now driving search results filtered by AI, which is more conversational in nature. Are you improving your SEO and content strategy basis this fact?
Tip #3: Leverage Technology. Hire tech people in marketing. Build behavioral funnels, process flows, lead maturity, and multiple other things using technology. A brand is a comprehensive experience and you can’t leave it on agency people to manage.
Tip #4: Use Frameworks. Great frameworks help you structure what’s needed for building a website you can use the Donald Millar framework or use AIDA for Social media. A must framework to follow is See Think Do Care a digital marketing framework created by Avinash Kaushik.
There are companies that hire big marketing teams and still struggle since the teams are not equipped to manage and merge tech seamlessly within the current marketing structure.
You should turn the marketing team upside down and rebuild it for the Digital world.
