The T-Shaped Marketer (As a Framework)
SEO used to be easy in the good old days.
You threw some white keywords on a white background, purchased (or swapped) some links, sprinkled some magic Google dust (jk), and waited until the visitors (and money) poured in.
Unfortunately for marketers (consumers rejoice!), that’s not the case anymore.
A slew of zoo animals including Pandas, Penguins, and Hummingbirds have swept through and altered the landscape.
SEO tactics look a bit different today as well. Someone with 15+ years of SEO experience may not have evolved either, still trying to force the same old playbook into this new world (making the quantity of experience alone an irrelevant figure in digital marketing).
Today, it takes a diverse skill set to properly execute even a single SEO campaign. You need to understand how to develop customer personas, create a blog, setup information architecture, create ‘skyscraper’ content, get high-quality links, and more.
How can you possible hire, let alone train, someone for this new environment?
The best example I’ve seen is the T-shaped marketer, a theory developed by much smarter people than myself.
The objective is to build a broad set of skills in various areas, so you understand how all the pieces fit together. You need not be an expert in all but do develop a deeper knowledge to allow more focus in one or two of these areas.
Rand Fishkin from Moz does an excellent job highlighting some of the benefits of this approach in this post about T-Shaped Marketers:
1. Ability to Understand
Succeeding in this brave new world requires a strong working relationship with people from a range of backgrounds. For example, having an ability to understand and communicate with a developer on their level will enable you to get much better outcomes than speaking through a go-between who has to translate for you.
Being more versatile in this respect enhances your chances of coming up with creative solutions to tough problems through combined expertise.
2. Satisfies our Innate Drive
Blasting out generic, untargeted email communications on a daily basis isn’t the most rewarding work. Rand cites Daniel Pink to show that people crave mastery, which deep domain knowledge can bring over time.
This T-Shaped model brings together the (a) spontaneity and freshness of working across multiple disciplines, but (b) also allows for specialization to satisfy that deeper learning for the best and brightest digital marketers.
3. (Good) Redundancies
Having only one person in your organization who understands those complex lead nurturing email workflows puts you at an extreme disadvantage. Instead of ‘siloing’ information, having people with overlapping skills allows them to help each other out and stay on top of what the entire team is trying to accomplish – pitching in where appropriate or covering for another colleague in a pinch.
Others have echoed these same sentiments, with a particular focus on the need for technical skills.
Way back in 2012 (which feels like a couple of decades in “Internet Years”), Jamie Steven argued that every marketer should be technical because “You have to know what to ask for and how it’s done. Without both of these capabilities, you’re prone to be less efficient than a colleague or competitor who does”.
In other words, that’s what separates the Unicorns from everybody else.
It’s easy to verify this too.
Pull up Glassdoor or any other major job listing site.
Take a look at the requirements for a Digital Marketing Manager with POM Wonderful (you know, the pomegranate juice in the funny but awesome bottle):
Let’s recap. The individual they are looking for needs to:
- be strong in social trends and measurement.
- understand digital media buying at an expert level.
- have complete mastery of the latest Search (both Paid and Organic) techniques.
- have strong analytical skills.
- be fluent in how these affect CRM and loyalty programs.
- have a working knowledge of UX, content production and more.
- have technical ability to understand what HTML can and can’t do.
No pressure or anything.
Or how about this one from Outdoorsy on Inbound.org:
Again, one lucky guy or gal who will get to ‘growth hack’, lead PPC, Social, Email Affiliate and Partner marketing. All at the same time, perhaps whilst juggling and chewing gum. Talk about a lot of hats!
The point is, the marketing landscape has never been more fractured or complex. It now takes a variety of touch points in multiple channels on various devices to eventually get someone to buy (and buy again).
That means the marketers running those campaigns need to be well versed in all of these different techniques too.
This doesn’t even begin to touch on all of the ‘soft skills’ critical to the job either. Like if you’re jumping on the social media front lines and responding to angry customers. Or trying to explain to a new client (or boss) exactly how that new content budget is going to drive backlinks, social mentions, and someday, hopefully, new customers. Or just being a good human that gets along with people and colleagues enjoy working alongside.
It at all sounds impressive (and daunting) in theory. But how are you supposed to manage all of those skills at once?