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I guess I'd consider myself "quasi-technical." I do digital media, marketing, and analytics. I can hack together a website, have been teaching myself Ruby, RoR, some basic devops, etc. in addition to my knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS. I know enough to have a somewhat technical conversation with engineers or PMs, and I know enough to setup my own conversion tracking most of the time. I'm also intimately familiar with many of the technical reasons tracking can be off or break since that is critical to understanding performance. My core responsibility is to make my company lots of money by efficient and effective deployment of our marketing budget through various efforts. I spend a lot of time staring at spreadsheets and analytics dashboards "reading the runestones" in search of insights that will improve growth. I then take those insights and craft them into a strategy and business case to sell it in to key stakeholders so I can get the resources needed to execute on my strategy and make it a reality. Marketing in general has actually gotten very technical over the last decade. My personal opinion is that one cannot be considered a "10x marketer" (if there is even such a thing) without having some understanding of the technical aspects that go into it. This means things like understanding data (how it flows, what it means, what it doesn't mean, where and why it breaks, etc.), how various channels play together, testing, automation, etc. At the very least you need to know enough here to hire the right people who are experts at those things since this industry is plagued by people claim to do more than they are really capable of. On top of that there's the softer skills. Understanding messaging and positioning and the overall creative process. Marketing is just as much an art as it is a science. There's also a lot of people skills required for collaboration across teams of very different skill sets and personality types. You need to work with a team of creatives VERY differently than a team of engineers for example. Being able to effectively serve as the glue between various functional groups is a skill that has paid off in spades for me over my career. |
There are dozens of us.