IDC logo 200They point out that the fastest growing
job categories in marketing today include campaign management, marketing operations, intelligence/research, sales enablement, social media and marketing IT. Many of these verified tourism data categories hardly existed less than a decade or less ago.
Analytics and automation
All of these roles require – to varying degrees – a primarily systems orientated mind-set rather than a creative one. They make use of measurements, metrics and data to identify and eliminate bottlenecks, focus resources and improve performance.
Then you’ve got to factor in the implications of
the rapidly growing investments in Marketing Automation – a little over 3% of the average marketing budget last year, but projected to rise to more than 9% in the not-too-distant future.
No silver bullet
As many of the companies I speak to have realised, investing in marketing automation is no silver bullet, and in this respect it’s no different from any other technology: it has to be implemented and managed thoughtfully by people that know what they are doing.
At a superficial level, you might conclude that traditional marketing creative types are probably not perfectly equipped to cope with the left vs. right brain thinking involved. But I think the underlying issue is different from and deeper than that.
Patterns and connections
You see, many marketing departments still appear to be operating at the campaign level, without much regard to what happens to the leads they end up generating. They feel a sense of relief when the campaign is finally launched, and typically turn their attention immediately to the next one. It’s a treadmill.
I see them having issues with making
the time (or having the mind-set, which is more worrying) to step back, absorb the big picture, identify patterns, make connections and identify how and where they could invest their resources more intelligently. If they did, they would probably end up doing fewer campaigns better.