MarketingProfs podcast on the marketing technologist

Yesterday, MarketingProfs published a podcast interview between me and Matthew Grant on the topic of Why You Need a Marketing Technologist.

We started by talking about what Matt calls the “technologization” of marketing:

“So much of the information that marketers have about who their audience is, what that audience is reacting to, is seen through the filter of software. For instance, you look at your analytics to determine what people are doing on your web site. But you’re not really observing those customers directly. [Ed: Analytics are not truly the “voice of the customer.”] Depending on how your software is configured, what sort of features it has, the default reports it shows you… it’s becoming your eyes and ears to what your audience is doing.“

We touched on the tension between marketing automation and qualitative human insight:

“People have used the phrase marketing automation a lot, and I think it’s a bit of an unfortunate term, I almost feel like it’s an oxymoron. I think there’s tremendous opportunity for what I’d call semi-automation of marketing. Which is to say, okay, there are certain tasks that we are doing that are repetitive, or there are certain pattern detection approaches that it would be better to have the software look for — great, let’s set it loose. But to still have the human brain guiding the creative, guiding the meta-process of what’s happening.”

And we also covered content marketing, customer experience, marketing’s evolving relationship with IT, the “community” transformation of marketing, technology governance, even the history of bulletin board systems that prefigured social media 10 years before the web took off.

Click here to read Matt’s accompanying post and take a listen.