And Then What…Becoming a Marketing Engineer in 2012
If your goal is to make lasting connections with consumers and drive them into a retail environment, then map your way to that.
If your goal is to make lasting connections with consumers and drive them into a retail environment, then map your way to that.
One of the major roles I play as my company’s CEO is to act as an educator. It’s one of the most satisfying things I do in my career – I see people both on the client side and agency side transform from marketing experts to online marketing engineers.
Becoming a marketing engineer is one of the real challenges people face in becoming or transforming themselves into genuine online marketing experts. You need to bring everything together to connect the dots. You cannot be an expert in just one thing because everything is interrelated. The success of one step is dependant on the success of the next step. You need to map the whole ROI path from impression through engagement, conversion to retention, and finally tracking and analysis. Of course, it doesn’t stop there – you need to look at the whole cycle and say, “How do we improve?” And connecting all these parts requires knowledge of not just media and creative but the underlying technologies that drive people down the click and engagement path to success.
Now don’t be alarmed or intimated. You don’t have to be a coder to understand technology or be a marketing engineer; you simply have to understand what the technology does and be conversant in it. You have to know what different marketing technology applications and elements do. And to do this you simply have to a) surf the web and act like a consumer and take note of what happens, and b) Google industry terms that you hear people throwing out every day and read up on them. OK, there are some more complex technologies you should get your head around like cookies, web analytics, and marketing automation. But again, you don’t need to be a coder – you just have to understand what this stuff does.
So to get you on your way, I’m going to give you the trick to becoming a real digital marketer and true marketing engineer. It all boils down to asking one simple question.
“And Then What?”
Now say it again. And again. Now one more time. Asking this question over and over will help you to connect the dots. It forces you to map the whole customer and ROI journey you’re trying to encourage. It forces you to become a marketing engineer!
When you’re looking at your media plan, search ad, or banner (or any part of your marketing program), keep asking “And then what?” until you hit the ultimate end. That end may be conversion but typically it should go beyond that to include retargeting, retention, and analytics.
So let’s explore what asking “And then what?” yields in terms of user flow and tactics. If you can conceptualize this flow and understand it, congratulations! You have graduated and become a digital marketing engineer!
Sample “And then what?” user flow (B2B):
You see what I’m getting at here? Whether you’re doing B2B or B2C, it doesn’t matter. If your goal is to make lasting connections with consumers and drive them into a retail environment, then map your way to that. The web (and the mobile web for that matter) has built in response and engagement potential that allows you to target, engage, convert, track, and in general escalate prospects to sale. It serves all phases of the customer lifecycle journey. Digital marketers understand the whole path and it starts by simply asking “And then what?”