Marketing Technology Stack

Been seeing a lot of "marketing data science" positions appear in the Pacific Northwest on job boards lately and many of the job postings look like employer wish lists. The pay scale for such a mythical position varies as well, from entry level wages to all the way past $150K/year for larger, global firms. This is not the same as a Marketing Technology Stack (or, the tools and resources used that a marketer uses to deploy digital or mixed media campaigns).

 A typical technology stack for marketers involves the following examples of software:

 General Marketing Tool Categories

  • Project Planning: Wrike, Trello, Asana, Basecamp
  • Social Media / Group Social Media: HootSuite, SproutSocial, Buffer, MeetEdgar
  • Social Listening: mention, talkwalker, buzzsumo, brandwatch
  • SEO: ahrefs, moz, serps.com, SEMRush
  • Video: vimeo, brightcove, wistia
  • Content Management Systems (CMS): WordPress, HubSpot, contentful
  • Email Marketing / Marketing Automation: MailChim, emma, aweber, GetResponse, Campaign Monitor, Pardot/ExactTarget
  • Customer Relationship Management (CRM): salesforce, infusionsoft, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics
  • Analytics: Google Analytics, kissmetrics, Adobe Analytics (formerly Omniture), Google Data Studio

Is there a "data stack" for marketers? Yes and no. It depends on how complex and/or robust analytics data is. Are you reporting on enterprise data where you need to show campaign performance by sales region, territory, product groups, etc.? You might need something more than Excel's Pivot Charts and a flashy Powerpoint.

 Is it possible to find a marketing technologist with a data analysis stack? It's possible, but not very likely. Though, marketing job requirements have been trending in this direction since the end of the great Recession (circa 2010) when people are expected to do more work with fewer resources. This trend was born out of industry need not because it actually helps companies make better pivots with marketing spend in their budgets.

 Most companies want a software developer with marketing experience; while, a marketer with analytics experience doesn't offer the same level of technical skill (for software or methodology implementation). How often is a digital marketing (e.g., SEO specialist, email marketer, paid ad buyer) going to do their own campaign analysis and compare it to historic spend in order to create predictive models for future campaign spending?

 What's in a typical data stack for marketers, if they are inclined towards software development?

  • R or SPSS
  • Python
  • Tableau (for data visualization - makes pretty pictures from data)
  • Excel
  • Google Analytics / Google Data Studio
In my digital marketing career, how many times have any of these come up as tools for marketers to use while doing marketing campaign analysis? Tableau, and only at one company.
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