Martech Alliance Featured on Latest 'This Old Marketing' Podcast

As a bonus for attendees of our recent MarTechFest Global event, and for anyone who is interested in martech, we're featured on the latest This Old Marketing Podcast from Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. 

Joe and Robert have been reading The Martech Report 2021/22, produced by MarTech Alliance in partnership with Moore Kingston Smith. 

There were some fascinating comments on the report, particularly on the difficulties of recruiting martech talent, and the split between IT and marketing in terms of responsibility for management of marketing technology. 

57% of respondents in our survey agreed that the market is lacking marketers with the necessary martech, data or marketing operations skills and knowledge. 

Joe and Robert found this interesting in the context of how the management of martech is split between IT and marketing. Our survey found that, in the majority of cases, the responsibility is shared, though perhaps it leans more towards marketing than IT. 

IT marketing split

The view from Robert is that this is not a technology issue, but management of martech is often passed to IT because of the complexity of the tech, and the lack of knowledge mentioned in the survey. 

While IT may have the skills to deal with some of the tech issues, the day to day management of martech - sending emails, analytics, publishing etc - has to be the responsibility of marketing. 

As Robert says, using martech can be hard, and marketing needs to adapt: 

"These are expert systems that are hard to learn and we need experts in not just implementing them but managing them. Marketing hasn't invested in that yet. We need to just be okay with the fact that marketing technology is difficult. Nobody expects you as an accountant to run and be able to run a financial system on day one, you have to learn it, you have to get involved in it and you become expert at it. The same thing should be true with marketing technology and we shouldn't shy away from that."

In other words, whatever the organisational split, it will be marketers that are using the tech, and they need the skills and knowledge to understand and use it. 

With skills shortages in the market, this means organisations need to invest in the martech training to overcome these barriers and enable marketers to use the tech they need. 

Check out the podcast episode on the MKS and MarTech Alliance Report, easy-as-pie now we've linked the full episode below. You can't say we don't spoil you 😘