Jobs related to marketing made several appearances, with SEO/SEM marketing taking the eighth spot, followed by marketing campaign management taking 11th spot which put roles such as online marketing manager, digital marketing specialist, digital marketing manager in the spotlight. Mobile development also took the ninth spot, featuring jobs such as mobile engineer, mobile application developer being in demand.

The report also highlighted the demand of some hard skills relating to data management and analysis making several appearances in the ranking, with roles such as data scientists and data analyst being in demand.

1. A marketing back office renaissance. That drop in marketing budgets is largely due in part, according to Gartner, to marketing leadership being too distracted by tactics and execution. For that reason, we predict a renaissance of the back office – meaning a greater focus and investment on the strategic arm of the marketing organization (basically everything that is happening behind the scenes within marketing.)

2. Alliance between the CMO and CFO. As budgets are tightened, marketing teams that succeed in 2018 will build a closer relationship between Marketing and Finance.

3. A new Chief of Staff to the CMO, Marketing Operations. These trends, along with the newfound pressure for marketing to run more like a business, have created a new VIP on the marketing team; Marketing Operations. For many organizations, MOPs has emerged as the most capable resource to step in and help the CMO in their quest, especially with responsibilities related to data cleanliness, marketing resource management, and marketing performance management.

eMarketer estimates that US business-to-business (B2B) advertisers will spend $4.07 billion on digital advertising in 2017. The B2B digital ad market is growing steadily, and in 2018 it will jump 13% to reach $4.60 billion.

Seek Out “The New Marketer”
It’s a whole new type of marketer that is skilled at all forms of communication, but also has an inherent talent for all things digital. This person can login to your CMS, build a landing page, gain insights from analytics, work effortlessly across a number of tools, find creative ways to drive better engagement, track campaigns through a CRM, generate meaningful reporting, and use data to adjust strategies. This is the new superstar of marketing. Build your team around people like this. 


Invest in Technical Depth
Marketing today is much more than branding, messaging, and great design. It’s a complex time for marketers with more accessible data than ever in the history of humanity! Data provides insights-insights that will improve your decision making, optimize your channels, and increase conversions. You must embrace data. Which means, you must invest technically. A modern marketing team needs developers, front end designers, data analysts, and digitally-savvy marketers. Creating a strong technical foundation within the marketing team will prepare you to handle the speed at which technology moves and changes, while also putting you in a position to make data-driven marketing decisions.

1. Asked to identify the top organisational goals for the business, companies expect their marketers to grow revenues (20.75 per cent), acquire new customers (20.6 per cent), and improve the customer experience (17.9 per cent), as their top priorities.

2. Marketers are investing in programs to better demonstrate the value of their work. However, these are often unsophisticated. 

3. As such, marketing is still poorly perceived by its management peers. Barely 15 per cent of respondents said their peers saw marketing as a primary business driver and revenue generator. 

4. Marketing technology has made huge strides improving the lot of CMOs over the past decade, and most companies have made investments across a range of disciplines. The top five functions identified by marketers in the survey were CRM, Social Media Engagement, Email Marketing Platforms, Marketing Automation, and Data Management.

5. As to their own goals, marketers want to build a bigger personal profile (interestingly, in the deep dive this was partly motivated by wanting to demonstrate the value of thought leadership to their peers). They also aspire to taking a larger role in business strategy and see gaining additional skills and capabilities as key to this.

An example of technology driving employment is the role of the data scientist, which was little known ten years ago but is much sought after today. Next year demand for data scientists is expected to exceed supply by over 50% worldwide, creating huge opportunities for those looking to enter this profession. 

It’s not only ‘experts’ such as data scientists that need to work alongside new technologies, the role of marketers is also evolving to include more technical aspects. With data usage becoming commonplace in modern day business, marketers are conducting simple data analysis themselves, as well as interpreting insights provided by data scientists through more complex analysis. Data is generated by real people and so requires a flexible human brain to comprehend it and generate the right insights – a task beyond the machines’ remit.

Instead of replacing job functions, tech developments should be used as tools to support marketing efforts. According to a DMA Awards survey, almost three quarters of marketers (74%) believe a machine can never replicate the creativity of a person, but marketers still need to be open to new technologies and adapt their roles accordingly.

The 15% drop in martech spend sounds more surprising, at first, until you consider three things:

Enterprise CMOs are still allocating 22% of their budget to marketing technology, and that is a large investment. 
Some of the cash pulled from martech was reallocated to paid media — but within advertising, it’s notable that 67% of CMOs are increasing their digital spend while 63% are decreasing offline spend. 
The other place where martech cash moved was services, which rose from 22% to 25% as well. Combined with the 27% of the marketing budget allocated towards internal staff, CMOs are spending over half of their budget (52%) on people. This is where budget should be going! 

Martech capability is essential, what can you do as a marketing leader to assure you and your team have adequate martech chops?

Look in the mirror – It’s difficult to lead a martech-centric team without being proficient yourself. 

Know what your team can do – Helping your team begins with an accurate assessment of where they are now relative to martech expertise. Good leaders know the strengths, gaps, and opportunities for their teams.

Be proactive about development – Building on the knowledge of where your team’s martech skills are today; a good marketing leader is proactive about developing martech skills. 

Practice continuous calibration –  All the previous points are in constant motion. New vendors and team members entering the mix, skills within the team are evolving, and the needs of the business continue to shift. Effective marketing leaders are highly-tuned to all these changes and commit to creating a culture where everyone is continuing to enhance skills, educate others and see where new martech-related opportunities exist.

1. Severely outdated technology 
2. Marketing measurements that are simply not actionable – Our study found that only 6% of marketers feel that their measurements help determine the next best marketing action. That leaves 94% of those in our study without prescriptive guidance on where to spend their limited budget and resources.
3. Misalignment between Marketing and the business 
4. CFO and CMO relationship troubles – The best organizations in our study were 3X more likely to align the functions of Marketing and Finance. However, only 14% of marketing organizations overall saw Finance as a trusted strategic partner, and 28% either have no relationship with finance or speak only when forced to. 
5. Poor investment, budgeting, and planning data quality 
6. Lack of visibility into baseline metrics 
7. Inconsistent use of MarTech

They have also created explicit roles that deal with martech

We have also worked with marketers and agency leaders to identify where the knowledge and capabilities gaps exist.

1. Do you know all the key technology providers in your marketing and advertising tech stack and the basis on which they are engaged? Do you understand the cost drivers?
2. Have you assessed the technology skills gaps in your organisations and do you have visibility over what skills you are likely to need this time next year that you currently do not possess?
3. Do you know which agencies are responsible for you adtech solutions?
4. Do you know who owns the data if your data is held in a third parties systems?
5. How confident are you that when someone arrives on your website you know who they are?
6. What other non-marketing systems collect personally identifiable information about your customers and are you able to marry these up to data in your marketing tech stack?
7. Do you run programmatic advertising campaigns and who manages the programmatic buying desk, your employees or your agencies?
8. How integrated are your teams when they plan campaigns? For instance does your social desk talk to your search desk, and do they know what display campaigns are running in the market at any given time?
9. Does your direct marketing team have visibility of search, social and display campaigns?
10. Thinking of search, social, display and video do you know how your agency is structured and whether they have an integrated or disjointed approach to managing your campaigns?
11. Is responsibility for search, social and display split across agencies?
12. How sophisticated is your attribution modeling? Are you still relying on first last clicks and are you able attribute across multiple formats and channels? And perhaps more importantly, how quickly can you respond to the insights derived from your models?
If you can answer yes to most of these questions positively you are doing better than many of your peers.

“Doing marketing” refers to the execution of marketing. This includes all those tactics related to attracting, acquiring, and retaining customers, areas like email, social, content, events, advertising, and much more.

But the other job marketers have is strategy, otherwise known as “running marketing,” which covers everything going on behind the scenes to make marketing tick. It’s managing budgets and having visibility into where the team is investing, understanding what results those investments have delivered, and most importantly, earning confidence to know what to do next.

To Run Marketing means to optimize its impact on the business, a core tenet of Marketing Performance Management.

What are the most commonly used organizational structures for marketing departments - matrixed, networked, command-and-control? And how do they correlate to revenue growth? Find out!

1) US businesses are adding tech jobs at a fast pace. Coveted professions, such as application developer and security specialist, have seen impressive annual average job growth rates above 7% over the last five years. Professions related to the management and analysis of tech systems have grown at CAGRs above 3%. Both rates are well above the national average of 1.9%.

2) Tech wage growth has been lackluster—indicating that competition for talent is reasonable. Despite the large number of tech jobs added to the US economy, the average annual growth of mean wages for most high-demand tech professions has been below 3%. This is not too far off the national average of 2.0%, and considerably less than other non-tech professions that are in high demand, such as credit analyst (4%), pharmacy aides (4.9%), and personal financial advisor (7.9%).

3) The growth of tech graduates has been outpacing that of tech jobs. Graduation data from the US Department of Education indicate that the number of individuals graduating with tech-related degree and diplomas has been growing faster than the number of new US tech jobs.

It’s a different way of looking at profit, Joe Knight, author of HBR Tools: Business Valuation explains. Think about how company income statements usually work: You start with revenue, subtract cost of goods sold (COGS) to get gross profit, subtract operating expenses to get operating profit, and then subtract taxes, interest, and everything else to get net profit. But, Knight explains, if you do the calculation differently, taking out the variable costs (more on how to do that below), you’d get the contribution margin. “Contribution margin shows you the aggregate amount of revenue available after variable costs to cover fixed expenses and provide profit to the company,” Knight says. You might think of this as the portion of sales that helps to offset fixed costs.

It’s a simple calculation: Contribution margin = revenue − variable costs

Analyzing the contribution margin helps managers make several types of decisions, from whether to add or subtract a product line to how to price a product or service to how to structure sales commissions. The most common use is to compare products and determine which to keep and which to get rid of. If a product’s contribution margin is negative, the company is losing money with each unit it produces, and it should either drop the product or increase prices. If a product has a positive contribution margin, it’s probably worth keeping. According to Knight, this is true even if the product’s “conventionally calculated profit is negative,” because “if the product has a positive contribution margin, it contributes to fixed costs and profit.”