What the hell should a Chief Marketing Technology Officer do anyway?

The emergence of marketing automation tools such as Hubspot and Marketo with their addition to traditional database marketing, customer relationship management systems and social media marketing tools, has given rise to a new role that’s a cross between a traditional chief marketing officer and chief technology officer.

The evolution of the mix of these traditional roles has given birth to the chief marketing technology officer (CMTO) who is focused on marketing, but not in the commonly understood sense of the role. Rather, the CMTO is helping companies make sense of and exploit vast amounts of customer data and market data by using significant technology and analytical expertise.

The key focus areas of the CMTO are managing various technologies bolted together to enable this analysis – transforming social data into actionable insights and sales and ultimately delivering coordinated marketing campaigns in multiple channels, simultaneously. In other words, a multi-tasker of note.

Do trends dictate roles?

In some instances, yes. Some trends tend to be so powerful that they can dictate the actual job description of those operating within the realms of those trends. Big data has been bandied about as one of the most prolific trends which incidentally has given rise to the re-description of some job roles.

With the continuation of customer and market data, the chief marketing officer’s role (CMO) is becoming more measureable than ever before. Opinions about what customers actually want to see or which ads will work, are being replaced by hard analytics – this has given rise to a numerically-focused role that the CMTO has morphed into.

The growth of technology in marketing

According to a February report by Gartner, it has been predicted that by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than CTOs, therefore marketing budgets are larger than IT budgets, and growing. Some facts:

• In 2012, the IT budget decreased by 0.4% annually.
• The annual high-tech marketing budget however increased by 0.7% in the same period.
• Much of the budget increases have already been spent on technologies to assist marketers with analysis, analytics and automation.

How are marketing professionals responding to tech adoption in their organisations?*

The stated technologies in the table all require a faculty with numbers and technology that the CMOs of the past did not need and on average 30% of marketing-related technology and services are bought by marketing directly.

CMTOs are more strategic than tactical

Marketing professionals today are expected to be more technically proficient and are also turned to for strategic guidance as opposed to straight-forward tactical implementation. Here are 10 practical scenarios where Experian says the CMTO would be valuable:

• Managing the tech stack.
• Understanding cross-channel interaction.
• Delivering coordinated, multi-channel messaging.
• Delivering more relevant display advertising.
• Measuring marketing performance.
• Turning social media data into actionable insight.
• Addressing the CEOs strategic concerns.
• Breaking free from IT-marketing deadlock.
• Enabling agile marketing.
• Dealing with new marketing technology still to come.

What’s the big deal?

The emergence of the CMTO will enable new efficiencies in organisations, while giving the new role more ownership and influence than either CMOs or CTOs had.

*Sources: Gartner and Experian