# How do marketers stay relevant to marketing today

- Link: https://www.clicademy.com/how-do-marketers-stay-relevant-to-marketing-today/
- Published: 2021-01-14T09:28:39+00:00
- Author: Clicademist

Marketing professionals need to adapt to the New Marketing driven by data and technology.
Else, they would risk losing their relevance to this profession. These words are
not dramatics.

Let us reflect on what happens when we hear or talk about marketing today. Before
long the narratives would run into words such as the Big Data, artificial intelligence,
the Internet of Things, marketing automation, etc. Marketing practitioners today
not only have to talk and hear about these phrases constantly, but also deal and
work with them on daily basis.

## What’s your strength?

Obviously, these concepts do not traditionally belong to marketing. It is a challenge
for marketers to take ownership of them. Marketing professionals’ strength has been
in creativity, communications, and strategy. They are less comfortable working with
computer codes and statistics. Likewise, marketing students tend to be more interested
in Adobe Creative Cloud than SPSS, R, Python, and GitHub. Some of them still do 
not think they would ever need to touch them.

In a field with the ideal division of labour, statisticians and software engineers
should take up the number crunching and coding jobs. But what if the labour now 
is about numbers and coding? Look again at those marketing buzzwords. They all require
data and coding skills.

## Contested field

For marketers, marketing has become a contested field. The increasing adoption of
and reliance on data and software skills see jobs going to statisticians, data analysts,
and software coders and engineers. It does not mean that creative and communication
skillsets are not essential. However, marketing job seekers have seen recruitment
ads noting analytics as essential skills and software literacy as preferred ones.

Marketing today has become technology-driven. To fuel its engine, data and computing
have joined creativity, communications and strategy to be the core career assets.
For the marketers who are strong in the latter set of expertise, their working relationships
with the number and code persons are mutual supplementary in general. But peer-to-
peer competition is looming.

In this wave of the New Marketing (We do not call it digital marketing and there
will be a post to explain why), marketers should consider any or all of the three
suggested approaches to handle the working relationships with colleagues who possess
data and coding skills: to work with them, to work like them, and to lead them.

## Relevant learning

To achieve any of these, one needs to learn how data analysts and software engineers
work. Such learning will build up data analytics and software project development
knowledge and skills. They can benefit multiple aspects of marketing. For example,
data-driven agile marketing management, consumer understanding using data analytics,
AI-assisted customer journey optimisation, new product development, automated customer
relationship management, to name a few.

Building such knowledge requires a journey but is feasible within a manageable period
of time. Clicademy in its next few series of posts will introduce concepts, tools
and approaches that for our site visitors to learn data analytics and the New Marketing
practices.

Clicademy links learning with reality. The site provides live traffic data to provide
you with the first-hand analytic insights. You will need to register a membership
to access the data analytics.