What Is Technical Marketing?
Marketing used to be a purely creative endeavor. Now, it’s all about the numbers. From the click-through-rate to the lifetime value or customer acquisition cost, marketers need to be able to analyze, predict and experiment. As more and more companies have the capabilities to track purchase data, marketing as a field divides into two segments: creativity and technical marketing.
Marketing teaches consumers why they should buy your product. Technical marketing is the process or set of processes by which businesses design experiments to determine which of these teaching methods will be the most effective to achieve a given profit and loss goal of the business.
OK, that was a lot of words. What does this really mean? Here’s an example:
Let’s say we are running two different advertisements. For simplicity, assumelet’s say that we have perfectly split our targeting audience into two equal parts and that we are spending the same amount of money on both sections. This is called A/B testing. Variant A yields 10 purchases, while Variant B led to 50 purchases.
Technical marketing starts with this example of A/B testing and exponentially grows. If you have an online website, your funnel might look like the one below. In that case, there are 5 different steps to your funnel. Adding in advertising, that would be +2: seeing the advertisement and clicking on the advertisement.
Testing variances on the design of the website alone could be thousands of tests. And now, this same testing structure needs to get applied to each step of the funnel.
But this is just the beginning.
Technical marketing touches design, product, finance and analytics. Design and product create and structure experiments with the intent to drive purchases. Analytics bring the data together so you can make informed decisions from that data. Finance determines where marketing dollars are invested, the projected ROI, or return on that investment, and pricing tests.
In organizations without a sales team, the marketers are the closest to the customers. Therefore, marketers are the sole driver of revenue. Here’s the thing: that makes this a very difficult job. Marketing has — and always will — encompass design. But as businesses can get more data, tracking advances and everything gets more complicated, a new era of marketing will continue to form and ultimately grow. Welcome to the era of technical marketing.
