How to hire MarTech talent for your business

 

Coined as an umbrella expression between the terms Marketing and Technology, MarTech is a buzz word that’s becoming increasingly used in the Digital Marketing landscape.

While Marketing Technology profiles are Digital Marketers in the first place, their profile is typically more technical than your average Marketing employee, and thus requires a wider set of soft and hard skills.

So where exactly do MarTech profiles fit into your company staff?

In this post, we’ll help you figure out whether you should be adding a MarTech profile to your company, and how to hire the best Marketing Technologists out there.

 

What is MarTech

 

MarTech can be defined as:

The applications and platforms that allow marketers to engage with their potential customers in the digital space at every stage of the customer journey

As we can see in the definition above, the term MarTech primarily focuses on the tools used in Digital Marketing.

To better understand how MarTech fits into the Digital Marketing ecosystem, we could use the following analogy: MarTech is to Digital Marketing what kitchen appliances are to cooking. You may have the best kitchen appliances available in the market, but without a recipe and a cook to put it all together, you’ll end up eating Tesco’s frozen pizza more often than you’d wished.

To take the analogy further, we could compare a MarTech specialists to someone who installs the kitchen appliances of a restaurant, and who knows if your restaurant needs a special 400° oven to cook pizza the way it’s meant to, or if you’ll do fine with a standard 280° oven as pizza isn’t on the menu.

But as you’ve probably guessed, people who know how stuff works inside out come at a price, so you’d better make sure you’re planning to produce the finest level of cuisine before spending big bucks on your kitchen.

  

How to know if you need a MarTech specialist

 

Marketing Technologists aren’t the easiest profiles to find, and usually come at a price that can’t be afforded by all companies. That’s why we recommend to get thoroughly assessed by a professional headhunter to find out whether you need one.

Typically small businesses are built on a vertical model and don’t need as specific a profile as a MarTech expert among their staff. If you’ve ever worked at a small company, you know that it’s frequent to see the same person wearing different hats. It’s not unusual for small businesses to have one Digital Marketing expert managing your website’s SEO, Google Ads, Facebook Ads and Social media, while evaluating CRM solutions at the same time (and possibly learning basic coding on the fly to install the CRM platform themselves if the company is on a tight budget).

However, Marketing departments at medium to large sized companies tend to rely on a horizontal structure, where each area of Digital Marketing is managed by dedicated experts. Trouble is, these companies often let their IT department (who don’t have a clue about marketing) decide what technology should be used across all areas of Digital Marketing. The result is often frustrating for employees, who end up working with tools that aren’t well suited for their specific marketing needs.

Leaving Marketing Technology decision in the hands of your IT department is likely to drive your staff close to a burn-out trying to analyze real customer behaviour through anonimized aggregated data (as in, trying to use Google Analytics to do what only HubSpot can achieve), or trying to create complex email marketing workflows with Zoho CRM instead of using high-end platforms such as SalesForce.

Talking to your Digital Marketing staff to find out whether they’re happy with their current tools might be a good start, although higher level consultancy may be needed as your employees don’t necessarily know how they could benefit from more cutting-edge tools. Inversely, you might find out that your company is under-exploiting expensive Digital marketing tools while the same results could be achieved with more basic solutions, thus wasting money that could be put to better use elsewhere.

In other words, if you’ve identified your company as lacking the amount of Marketing Technology expertise needed to give the right tools to the right people, then you’re probably better off hiring a MarTech profile.

  

What skills should you look for in a MarTech profile

 

A Marketing Technologist is someone who:

• knows which tools are better suited for each of the different Digital Marketing areas within your company
• knows how to explain to top management why they should go for certain tools
• Is able to explain to other employees how these tools should be used
• has the hard and soft skills needed to interact with the IT department whenever technical help is needed to install Digital Marketing tools

 

MarTech profiles require a combination of soft and hard skills, as they need to be strong communicators to get the message across different types of people, ranging from Marketing specialists to IT directors and CEOs, while at the same time having a solid understanding of Marketing and Technology to steer the company’s SaaS investments in the right direction.

 

The best way to find out whether you’re talking to the right MarTech candidate is to assess their knowledge of the latest Digital Marketing tools. At PayPerTalent, we require our MarTech candidates to take a full 3 hours test where we put them in front of real-life case studies where they need to suggest the most appropriate tools for SEO, SEM, Digital Analytics, RTB, Social Media, CMS and CRM. Candidates who pass the test, and also show strong communication and presentation skills, are then selected to be introduced to our clients.

 

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