Although the marketing technology MarTech is becoming more and more influential and important in marketing, many enterprises have specialized in MarTech, but as a relatively new type of work and category, what is MarTech's job responsibility? What on earth is it doing? What is the function?
Recently, ChiefMartec has conducted a global survey on MarTech, and once again sorted out the operation, management, responsibilities and even salary of each company. In this research, all the data sources are people who are specialized in MarTech or management. However, the data provided by those who only use MarTech as a part of their digital marketing are not included. Therefore, the accuracy, purity and even professionalism of the data are very high, which can be used as the guidelines for the strategic layout of MarTech.
This year is the second year for this research. Last year, 432 people participated in the research, and this year, 371 people. So when we compare the data of the previous two years with the data of the previous two years, we can clearly see how the role and role of MarTech are evolving with the progress of time and the changes of the times.
Five core responsibilities of MarTech
From Martech executives to management to more senior vice presidents and directors, all of them agreed that the five core functions of MarTech are as follows, and these perceptions have not changed significantly in the past two years:
- Research and recommend new MarTech products
- Operate and manage MarTech products as an administrator
- Train marketing personnel to use MarTech products and provide them with support services
- Integrate MarTech products
- Monitor the data quality of MarTech products
If you happen to be looking for a MarTech employee and don't know how to describe his job responsibilities, these five core responsibilities can be used.
In fact, we can just map the five largest Martech responsibilities to the five forces model of MarTech operation:
- Centralization+automation: operating MarTech
- Decentralization+automation: integrating MarTech products
- Centralization+humanization: training and supporting marketing personnel
- Decentralization+humanization: monitoring data quality
- Change: Research and recommend new MarTech
The basis of MarTech management is the centralization of technology and data, that is, the "operation" in marketing work. In fact, the last part that plays a role is usually connected to other parts of this network.
Training and supporting marketing personnel is the key to modern marketing ability. Integrating Martech, which may be scattered in various areas of marketing, can help teams use more special tools instead of allowing them to be isolated by silos.
Monitor data quality, find anomalies in customer experience, and authorize front-line employees to identify and repair error information.
Researching and recommending new MarTech is a key factor in embracing continuous change.
Changes and problems in Martech's responsibilities
However, we can also see that the frequency of Martech's responsibilities has decreased significantly. The responsibilities of MarTech personnel involved in the survey this year have been reduced, including:
- Technical review of MarTech products (- 11%)
Reducing technical review may be one of the mature effects of Martech's products. Many products have been polished more before they are launched, many have existed for a long time, and complete tracking records have been established. More of these products are certified cooperative products in the mainstream Martech platform ecosystem, which can obviously simplify their integration process and also provide some guarantee for their quality and interoperability.
- Identify and eliminate obsolete or unused MarTech products (- 10%)
In terms of identifying and eliminating obsolete or unused Martech, the 10% decrease is not significant. On the whole, however, only 47% of MarTech personnel, that is, less than half of MarTech personnel handed over, believed that this was one of their responsibilities. Perhaps this is not the top priority in the plan for an infinitely scalable Martech stack. After all, many of these tools are cheap or free, and there is no need to eliminate them. However, perhaps a good marketing stack environment should have a higher priority.
There are also two changes in responsibilities that are worth pondering. For the second year in a row, the duties of data privacy and compliance review and security review ranked last in Martech's responsibility list, and even dropped by 2-3 percentage points. This has to be said to be very disappointing and worrying.
In the current environment, privacy regulation and data security violations have brought more and more risks to the brand. It seems unwise to exclude these responsibilities as "not my job" in terms of finance, reputation and MarTech operations.
Perhaps there is an excuse that can be accepted: in addition to market operations, there is a dedicated IT or security team that is responsible for managing privacy and security. It is very wise to have specialized security experts and teams to do this work. But even if this excuse is true, it does not mean that MarTech personnel do not need to take these factors into account while managing their MarTech stack responsibilities. In marketing, safety should be everyone's job.
Differences in responsibilities between junior and senior Martch personnel
Junior positions: ordinary staff and managers
Senior positions: Director, Senior Director, Vice President and C-level (CMO, CTO, CGO, etc.)
This is a comparison between them. The first data is for junior personnel, and the second data is for senior personnel:
These differences are not surprising. However, there are the following responsibilities that are more strategic. The overall score is relatively low, but the ranking among senior Martech leaders is significantly higher. These responsibilities include:
- How much to spend on MarTech from the budget (71%)
- Negotiate the terms of purchase of MarTech products (68%)
- Approve or reject the purchase of MarTech products (68%)
More than 2/3 of these senior Martech positions have the above authority. We can add these three responsibilities to the core job descriptions of these roles. In addition, most Martech senior leaders also bear the following responsibilities:
- Design the overall marketing stack for all MarTech products (69%)
- Monitor MarTech product performance and other services (56%)
- Combining MarTech products with non marketing systems (58%)
- Technical review of MarTech products (56%)
- Identify and eliminate obsolete or unused MarTech products (59%)
- Identify and integrate the same or similar MarTech products (56%)
It is also encouraging that 44% of Martech executives conduct data privacy and compliance reviews, up 9% from the overall average of 36%. But in fact, this should be the responsibility of most of these roles. And still only 27% are responsible for security audits. As a profession, we have the obligation to ensure that our work is legal, compliant and safe.
No need to customize the Martech
This year's data also showed that the proportion of participants who customized Martech products through software development declined slightly, from 43% to 35%.
This may be because the out of the box capability of Martech products is constantly increasing. In particular, there are many ready to use MarTch products in the marketing platform ecosystem. Usually, these products are provided by third-party developers certified by these platforms, which also reduces the demand for customized Martech software.
Another factor may be the rapid development of MarTech's democratization process. With the rapid development of more and more development and integration tools for non professionals, now every marketer can be an application developer, even if they do not know this. Marketers are now customizing MarTech for themselves according to their specific workflow and customer experience, but in fact they have not explicitly used professional Python or Javascript and other programming languages for "software development".
We are moving from a strict dichotomy of "build and buy" to a world of custom applications and operating systems based on public platforms.
From the data in recent years, it can be clearly seen that MarTech management, as an emerging profession, is maturing, and its roles and responsibilities are becoming more and more clear, which may give more inspiration to more MarTech practitioners.