New Name, Same Niche

Posted January 17, 2023

I used to call my marketing-plus-tech skills "hybrid." Now there's a new term and a searchable keyword — martech — for people like me.

The world moves fast these days. It seems like only yesterday I was lamenting my chances of ever becoming a developer then BOOM! Three years passed, and I'm a well-established martech maven.

To be honest, I was already a martech specialist in 2020. I just didn't know it, because the term wasn't coined yet. For all I know I was the first one! With my marketing-oriented degrees and 20+ years of technical experience — from learning HTML and CSS to full-stack certification and digital automation — I've straddled the space between talking to people and using the best digital tools to reach them my entire career. And now, thanks to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot, Zeta and many other technical marketing tools, more employers realize martech specialists' ability to bridge the gap between departmental silos can improve their bottom line.

My head was always in both worlds

When I took a free HTML class at KU in the late '90s, it was my first post-grad school continuing education opportunity. I took to website building like a duck to water, in part because as a writer I already understood direct access to the web let me circumvent print publishing. The latter moves slowly, and I wanted my words out there NOW, so FTP was my golden ticket.

Thanks to my spouse's new job, I moved to Kansas City in 1997 looking for digital publishing work. I didn't find what I expected, but I did find a job at a small agency where clients were starting to ask for websites. Nobody knew anything about them but me, so I created our first client site as well as the agency's first web presence. It was simplistic by today's standards, but at the time it was a big step forward — and definitely not in my job description.

As anyone who's worked online for a while knows, today's sites are drastically different from those in the early 2000s. Interactivity, blogs, databases, cloud computing, SEO, analytics, automation, UX and more have changed our online experiences and expectations in ways we couldn't imagine 23 years ago. And with GA4, AI and Web 3.0 poised to keep evolving the web, the only thing certain is more change lies ahead.

So why does martech matter?

Remember the Sunday school story about The Tower of Babel? If not, it went something like this: A bunch of people were working together to build this big tower, and suddenly they all spoke different languages, could no longer communicate, and the project flopped. I'm skipping some details, but it's a metaphor for the modern workplace, only now the tower is a website and the people are IT teams, marketing departments, UX specialists, project managers, etc. Every group brings its own skills and requirements to the project, but they don't always have the same priorities or understand where their knowledge ends and another teams' begins.

These unintentional gaps result in modern-day flops: websites with amazing back-end functionality that are void of front-end usability. Content management systems that effectively automate processes but cripple marketing efforts because character-limited content fields are maxed out by product names with no room for actual marketing. Digital marketing efforts that fail when Company A acquires Company B, and even though their needs and constraints don't match, nobody considers how Company B can acclimate with Company A's systems. And so on ...  

Breaking down silos & bridging gaps

To succeed, martech specialists need to be involved in projects from the beginning, and they're not a cure for every digital ailment. But they can work with the UX team to ensure new page functionality is also user-friendly. They can provide input before a CMS tool is built to remind developers the company's lengthy product names must be factored into back-end character limits. They can enforce naming conventions and menu structure so files are searchable, which increases the likelihood they'll be found by website users and updated by site managers in a timely manner. They can track worldwide audiences to ensure customized page content accounts for different spellings and dialects. And so forth ...

Wherever marketing goals intersect with the technology that provides the experience, martech mavens can ask the right questions and suggest the best solutions to help ensure the final product meets everyone's needs.