Marketing today is an adventure in multi-disciplinary skills, becoming hugely complex and challenging at the same time. These are also exciting times for the industry, as the operating methods and best practices are constantly transforming, especially with the dominance of digital in the marketing world.

Marketing has long since been thought of as ‘art’. Some people had the mastery and just knew how to do it. It was the art of touching the hearts and minds of consumers through unquantifiable means by being surprising, inspiring and delightful. If you were the kind of person who always talked numbers and logic, good luck understanding how this worked.

In the last few years, things have changed. Digital marketing has emerged as an entirely new beast: a different means to the same end. The rules of the game have changed. Marketers today need skills which involve high numerical capability, ease with technology and coding, understanding of design and UX, analytical skills to set up PPC campaigns and, most importantly, to make sense of all the data.

The Entry Of Big Data And Analytics

The availability of data has placed tremendous information in the hands of the marketing community who need to find the right context for their data to extract the most out of it. These insights need to feed the minds of creatives to design meaningful experiences such that it reaches the right people at the right time through the best medium, resulting in a favorable outcome for the brand.

There a few things that keep marketers on their toes today, and they are all about understanding a few key metrics – where and when are consumers online? What stage of the buyer’s journey are they in? How did they end up on your website? What information did they consume? But these are all a means to an end. Whether marketers go the digital and analytical route, or tread the route of traditional outbound marketing, in the end, they all want to reach their customers. Most often, they don’t succeed, because they fail to strike the balance between the math, science and art of marketing.

Many Hats, One Objective

So, in essence, marketing has become an exercise in multiple disciplines more than it has ever been in the past, and has given rise to new jobs and positions. Marketing is no longer the domain of the right-brained. It takes a diverse team to create the right marketing campaigns: it needs a storyteller to unearth the right stories, an analyst to set up tracking and footprints, a creative to bring the stories to life, a data scientist to discover insights from data, and the list goes on. Creating memorable experiences for consumers is no walk in the park!

The New Breed

This trend in marketing has also spawned a totally new opportunity for people who can learn different skills and apply them intelligently. The full-stack marketer. The rare species of people who are in high demand. While there will always be a need for specialists, there is an equal need for generalists who can cut through the boundaries and speak the many different languages of marketing.

As is often the case with such diverse teams, some dominate the scene more than others, yet none is less important. A good marketing campaign calls for a well-balanced set of skills and talents and, as modern marketers, this is one of the battles we are all trying to win.

Visit Influenshine page to find out more about Swati’s work.

_{This post was first published on Influenshine blog and has been reposted on Executive Lifestyle with the permission of the author.
Edited by Nedda Chaplin}

_{Image credit:Team Meeting from Shutterstock}

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