What Does a Marketing Technologist do at Direct Development

I began working at Direct Development in August of 2015. When I was initially hired, I was given the role of an intern. Before I knew it, however, I was promoted to a Marketing Technologist and asked to be the lead tech on multiple accounts. While I was quickly given large responsibilities with little experience, it was the perfect way for me to really learn and grow.

As the name implies, a marketing technologist assists project managers in transferring their marketing strategies and content into the virtual world. Many of my daily tasks involve designing and deploying website pages, landing pages, blog posts, social media posts, database management and cleaning, list management, and marketing automation. While all of these aspects of my job are important for day to day operations, I find my marketing automation projects to be the most fulfilling.

Let me explain why.

Inbound Marketing

In order to really explain why I enjoy marketing automation as much as I do, I need to explain the methodology behind it.

At Direct Development, we implement inbound marketing strategies specifically for higher education and nonprofit organizations. You're probably asking what inbound marketing is. Well, it's actually pretty simple.

The foundation of inbound marketing is essentially this: understand the person behind the screen, the path they take until they purchase your product, and then turning them into evangelists. While the technicalities of inbound marketing will differ depending on who you ask, the main point to take away is that as an inbound marketer (and in turn, a marketing technologist), you need to know how to empower the potential customer.

So, as an inbound marketing technologist, I make sure that the strategies and content made by others are put into practice. One main way to do this is to nurture leads as they interact with your organization, encouraging them down the buyer's journey and optimally turning them into customers. An effective way to do this is through marketing automation or workflows.

Marketing Automation

In order to effectively nurture leads, you need to provide content that is relevant to them. The old strategies of cold calling and spamming them with generic content or offers to purchase your product right off the bat no longer work. People are sick of email spam and are hesitant to give their information to organizations they don't trust just yet. So where does marketing automation come into the picture?

Marketing automation is accomplished through the implementation of workflows. These workflows are behind the scene workers that I set up in my role as a marketing technologist. This is a basic example of what they can do.

Let's say your organization uses a membership-based business model. Obviously, you want to increase the number of members you have. As the senior marketing manager at your company, you've heard of inbound marketing and want to implement as part of your own marketing efforts. You might then hire a company like ours to implement inbound marketing strategies to increase your membership base.

Long story short, we would develop content that educates your potential members on the benefits of what your company provides. One important part, however, is that we would not focus on how your company specifically provides that service. The purpose is to educate the potential customer.

With this in mind, we would develop blog posts, guides, case studies, social media posts, webinars, and a whole plethora of educational material that not only educates the potential customer but also establishes your thought leadership and builds trust between your company and the potential customer.

This is where I come in. When a visitor visits your blog, reads a few posts, and then subscribes to your blog, they become a lead. In order to encourage them further along the buyer's journey, we would evaluate the types of blog posts they viewed and then send them information that is related to what they viewed. This relevant content would be either guides, eBooks, webinars, workshops, or even infographics.

Workflows are able to send all this relevant content to these leads through emails. I would set up a workflow with this logic:

1. Contact has filled out form A

2. Set up an if/then branch

3. If Contact has viewed the blog post about Topics B and C

   1. Send them a link to the guide that talks more about B and C.

4. If they haven't viewed blog posts about Topics B and C

   1. Send them a link to read 3 of our top blog posts.

While this is a very basic workflow, the potential workflows provide is massive. As you can see, I could then set up a separate workflow that nurtures contact who filled out a form to get the guide on topic B and C. Eventually, as we gather more information about the contact each time they fill out a form, we get closer to understanding what they are looking for and how your company can provide a solution to their problem. The part I find most interesting is designing the actual logic of the workflow. Branching logic can make workflows quite messy, so it is my job to design an efficient yet effective workflow.

Workflows can quickly become quite complex and can overlap very easily, so it is important to have an effective management plan for understanding the possible overlap so that your nurturing efforts don't end up hurting you.