In search of unicorns: digital marketers

Thanks to my friend Juanma Elices (@Juanmaelices) and thanks to John Ellett's (@jellett) post "The Rise of the Unicorns", we now have a name for that strange breed of professional the market is demanding, one that turns out to be a cocktail of marketing professionals, gals and guys with the sensitivity to understand the customer, analytical skills and, on top of that, technological distinctions to hand. That is the new digital marketing professional.

You can call them a geek or a creative or a maths nerd or a technology philanthropist... You name it! The new marketing professional is a strange mix of all these facets. As the post above comments, it is not about adapting the new marketing to the needs of technology, it is about creating alchemy between customer knowledge and the use of technology to turn data, metrics and tags into an experience worth recommending.
In my judgement, it is not about a new professional, it is about a restless, curious, resourceful person who has understood that the only way to get close to the customer now is with relevant content and technology. The new digital marketing professional needs tools in order to optimise the user experience in an environment where the contact points with our customers are neither offline nor online any more, and where the great news is that most of a customer's experience with their brand can be traced in real time.
In the team I work with day to day there is a healthy and thoroughly enriching mix of profiles: engineers, finance folks, journalists, UX experts and creatives. And it is no accident that digital marketing professionals need to have all these capabilities to hand. In my judgement these new unicorns are a combination of the following:
1.- Analytical: _"Give me one 'data point' and I will move the world"_Everything we do in digital leaves a trace, and that trace, worked well, lets you optimise each of your digital assets on a daily basis. You need the sensitivity to orchestrate the measurement of all your digital assets and to make use of that measurement to take decisions that help optimise your work. Fitting this whole data architecture together requires a mind geared towards planning the importance of data before acting. If I don't measure, I would rather stay still.
2.- Techies: _"Don't call me a geek, I grew up with technology very close by"_It takes a special restlessness to use tools that help you in daily life. Incorporating those tools as part of your life is something more than a hobby. If you are one of those who can talk for half an hour about whether this app or that one is better, you are already part of the group. You are one of those who does not need to be taught that an algorithm and a bit of code are capable of changing the way things are done. The new digital marketing professional feels more comfortable talking to an IT colleague than to an advertising creative.
3.- Philanthropists: _"You have lived through a change of era, thanks to mobile, and you have known how to understand it"_If we could bring any of us from 1995 in Spain to the present moment in a time machine, we'd be gobsmacked at our own behaviour today. We are not talking about a generational leap, it is us ourselves. You have surely heard of the concept of zombiewalking, or perhaps you are one of those who has already walked into a lamppost while reading something on their phone. The fact is that the arrival of technology has changed our lives over the last 20 years, and accepting that change and knowing how to learn from it is essential for this new professional.
4.- Marketers: "Some ads still move me, only now I watch them on YouTube or Vimeo" However much our way of making purchase decisions has changed (Google and its ZMOT), the fact is that we keep consuming content and that content makes us fall in love and we share it. The only difference is that now we no longer want to be led into buying, we want the feeling that we decide for ourselves and that we choose the information. The new digital marketing professional needs this sensitivity for content. And they need to understand that information is searched for and that it is possible to measure the jump from one piece of content to another, right up to making that purchase decision. And that campaigns are not thought out starting with a TV spot. And those are still necessary.
5.- Emotionally intelligent: _"I learn more in a week than I ever thought I could learn in a year"_When you combine tools that let you measure in real time, change and test different experiences as a basis for optimisation, combine data to change a website's content based on the behaviour of the last view, trigger push notifications by geolocation, predict behaviour by correlation, etc... You discover that everything you have in your head is hypotheses and that every day brings a new lesson. There is no longer any fear of getting it wrong, just the urge to keep testing.

Unicorn horn powder was sought after in the Middle Ages as a remedy against infertility or lack of erection. I don't think the purpose of the new unicorns is to cure any illness. What I am convinced of is that this has changed, and changed a lot, and that it keeps changing right now. If you are one of those who understands each and every one of these skills for going about your day to day, you already know what I mean when I talk about "in search of unicorns" ;-)

This post was originally published on http://bernardocrespovelasco.blogspot.com.es/2014/12/en-busca-de-unicornios-digital-marketer.html

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