Scott Brinker says marketing has become a technology power discipline, and marketers must infuse technology and the techniques it offers into their DNA to be successful. The editor and chief marketing technologist at ChiefMartec.com joined the LeadsRx Attribution Marketing Podcast to riff on the state of MarTech today and the bright future ahead for marketers who use technology tools to their advantage.
Scott also makes these fantastic marketing technology infographics which you might have seen across the Internet.
“Marketing in the past 10 years has just been on this incredible ride of the expansion of the scope of the responsibilities that marketers have, of the capabilities they have,” said Brinker, who is also VP of platform ecosystem at HubSpot. “All these new technologies have swept through the consumer world and have made their way into the business world.”
Marketing technology was already taking off, but 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital marking and digital business, Brinker said. Marketing attribution is one tool that is helping marketers and agencies tremendously, especially with offline channels, such as broadcast TV and radio advertising.
Scott Brinker on Highly Measurable Customer Journeys
“Instead of ‘spray-and-pray,’ we’ve gone to ‘aim-and-pray,’ which is a bit of a step forward,” Brinker said with a laugh. “I’m an advocate for this rapid evolution of MarTech.”
He added MarTech focuses on performance-oriented and highly measurable technologies and journeys for customers. Marketers that do not take advantage of MarTech are dinosaurs, he said.
Brinker said you don’t even need 100 percent accuracy to make intelligent decisions, as long as you are getting a directional signal that is validating the hypothesis you are testing and experiments in your marketing campaigns.
“At the end of the day, sales, in fact if we really want to get down to it, it’s not just revenue, it’s profitability,” Brinker said of the burden of proof put on marketers. “The challenge for marketers is, again depending on what your selling, there is this time that elapses between various marketing touchpoints and getting to a place where you actually measure profit.”
Any review of marketing campaigns needs to be through the lens of revenue and profit, he added.
Listen to the full podcast for more, including Brinker’s thoughts on ecommerce as it relates to attribution, the work he’s doing with HubSpot and more about his ChiefMartec.com site, a true passion project and labor of love for him.