Marketing’s great expansion (a survival guide)

When I first started working in marketing, we used to talk a lot about unicorns.

No, not that kind of unicorn. Nobody in marketing was sending virgins into the forest to tempt out a mythical beast.

No. The unicorn we meant was the marketer who did it all.

She was faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound…a bird, a plane, a super-marketer!

All jokes aside, this elusive marketer had a little of everything. She developed your strategy, built your website, designed your campaigns, wrote your copy, managed your email, and probably never slept.

And here’s the thing: She was rare then, and now you should consider her extinct.

Because technology has evolved more in the last 50 years than in hundreds of years before that—and marketing has expanded with that evolution. In 2019, the average enterprise company was using 91 marketing cloud services. Tens of thousands of apps are released every single month now. And the skills and opportunities of the marketing landscape are only going to keep expanding—with no end in sight.

In other words: There is no unicorn who can keep up with it all. And you wouldn’t want someone to try. Shallow knowledge of 10,000 apps is just shallow knowledge.

Which means we all need to shift our expectations and embrace specialization.

That goes for those aspiring to a marketing career and those hiring marketers.

So if you’re looking to hire talent, find an agency, or dive into a marketing career, what kinds of specializations should you be thinking about?

Here’s where I’m seeing the lines drawn today (and even within each grouping, the more your individual marketers niche down, the smarter your overall marketing will get):

Branding

What is your brand? How do you maintain it? How do you communicate it? And who’s in charge of keeping it up? Branding experts dive deep into the nitty-gritty of building (and, more importantly, keeping up) a brand.

Demand generation

If your passion is for generating buzz and creating a reliable pipeline for your sales team, this is where you’ll find your niche. Demand gen is all about moving your audience through the sales pipeline—which means understanding your unique pipeline, your customer journeys, and how to support those customers every step of the way.

Design

From eye-catching billboards to well-shot videos to social media graphics that stop scrollers in their tracks, design is tackling plenty of visual and special challenges, as always.

Media/digital marketing

Ruling the marketing roost, as usual, is digital marketing—the art of communicating digitally with your prospects and customers. This means email marketing, social media, and web-based ads, among other things.

Content

We could talk about content all day, every day, but the bottom line is that it touches pretty much every part of your marketing. Digital. Physical. Brand decks. Taglines. White papers. Messaging. This specialization (and its many sub-specialties) will impact everything else you do.?

Product marketing

From product positioning to messaging (and even sometimes to development), this marketing niche is all about (you guessed it) product. If you are a product company, chances are you now have a person or team entirely devoted to marketing not just your brand, your services, etc., but very specifically, your product.

Marketing operations (tech)

If the average enterprise uses 91 marketing cloud technologies, it’s no wonder there are now whole teams specializing in marketing tech and operations. Somebody needs to pick the right tools, keep them up and running, train teams on how to use them, and update as needed.

Your unicorn is actually a herd

The days of the single unicorn are over. The more complicated marketing gets, the more you need lots of specialists working together.

This is why if you look at the best marketing teams, they’ve got all these components. And whatever they don’t have in-house, they have on-call—smart, specialized freelancers or agencies they can loop in as needed.

This means access to deeper knowledge across a wider variety of subjects.?

And the marketing teams that take advantage of that depth of knowledge? They’re the ones that are going to keep standing out.

Because this great expansion of marketing that we’re talking about: It’s only going to keep getting bigger. And expecting a single person or small team to know everything about ABM, Instagram Stories, influencer marketing, email trigger campaigns, and how to write a badass white paper? That’s a recipe for failure. ??

So if you are looking to get into marketing, we say: Go niche! Lean in on the skills you’re best at and love most. Go deep. Dig deeper.

And if you are a team leader looking for more specialization—deeper and wider expertise—well, that’s what an agency like Catalyst is here for. We’ve got strong talent in-house and a long list of kick-ass freelancers who niche way down into the weeds on everything from B2B tech white papers to the latest strategies for ABM.

Contact us anytime to talk strategy and skills.??