Chief Content Officer meets marketing technologist

The latest issue of Chief Content Officer magazine has just been published, featuring an article by yours truly: Rise of the Marketing Technologist.

Although the gist of the piece is already well-known by readers of this blog — from posts such as my marketing technologist presentation at Search Insider Summit last year — the story of how marketing’s DNA is changing continues to be refined and expanded. I was thrilled that CCO magazine felt that this dimension of marketing’s evolution is as important to content marketers as much as anyone.

What words do you associate with marketing? Branding. Positioning. Advertising. No doubt, these are classic foundations of our field.

But increasingly, marketing has some new — and very different — word associations. Configuring. Coding. Computing.

At first, these words seem foreign. Isn’t the IT department set up for all that tech stuff? Not long ago, software of any kind was clearly the domain of IT. Marketing had neither the inclination nor expertise to get in the weeds of technical implementations.

But take a good look around, and you’re likely to be surprised at all the technology that’s entwined in marketing today. Web analytics. Bid management. Marketing automation. CRMs. Content management. Post-click marketing platforms. SEO auditing. Social media monitoring. Attribution management. Digital asset management. And so on.

There are now thousands of software applications available for marketers, underpinning nearly every aspect of our work.

While many of these solutions are designed for non-technical marketers, the process of selecting the right software, configuring it to your specific needs and connecting it to the other pieces of your digital ecosystem inevitably requires a certain technical savvy. Even a little knowledge of web protocols, scripting languages and database schemas goes a long way in managing this growing federation of marketing technologies.

Read the complete article here.