The new marketing mandate: Learn fast

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Marketing has changed. It used to be that we wrote ads, built brands, ran events and published content.

But digital marketing is so much more. Everyone on your team needs to be a data analyst. Your blog manager needs to understand Google Analytics. Your product marketers need to understand who’s in your database. If you’re a CMO, you have to understand your entire martech stack, what it can do for you and what it can’t. We all have to learn new ways of doing our own jobs — and of working together — in order to be successful.

In this new environment, the most effective digital marketing teams will be those that learn the fastest. And marketing technologists are uniquely placed to help. We understand both the human and the technology side of marketing — and as a result, we can be facilitators, advisers and guides for our fellow marketers.

The result? Better, more effective, and more responsive marketing.

Here’s how.

New technology in the organization

I want to talk about heart surgery for a second.

Specifically, this Harvard Business Review article, “Speeding Up Team Learning.”

For the study, the authors followed surgical teams at 16 major medical centers, as they learned how to perform a new type of minimally invasive heart surgery. This surgery has much better outcomes for patients, but technologically, it’s much harder to learn for surgical teams.

One of the first observations that the authors make is that this new technology “significantly alters the nature of the team’s work.” And this is a key point. When new technologies arrive, they change the way people work together. It isn’t just about layering new technology on your existing organization. It’s about changing the way your organization works. Accepting this change is an important part of taking advantage of new technologies, in the operating theater or anywhere else.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]


Some opinions expressed in this article may be those of a guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.


About The Author

Justin is an independent marketing consultant. He specializes in customer acquisition, marketing technology, and marketing analytics for enterprise software companies. He has previously led digital marketing functions at fast-growing organizations, including enterprise unicorn MongoDB and Gates Foundation grantee One Acre Fund. Justin has an MBA from the Wharton School in Entrepreneurial Marketing, and lives in sunny Portland, Oregon.


 

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