The makeup of a modern marketing team has changed drastically in recent years, with critical new positions forming and traditional roles evolving to take advantage of innovative technology and tactics. While not every organization will be recruiting digital marketers to fill every emerging marketing position, there are a few hot jobs that we anticipate will start joining the ranks of marketing departments and agencies in large numbers this year:
Influencer Marketing Manager
Celebrity endorsements and product placement are quickly taking a backseat to earning the favor of wildly popular “influencers.” An influencer can be nearly anyone with a widely-heard voice and respected opinion, like a hot radio DJ or talk show host. But today the most popular and effective influencers tend to be online: bloggers, YouTube stars, podcast hosts, social media entertainers, etc. These individuals may not always have the largest audience; but they typically hold sway over a very targeted niche.
Earning the attention, favor and interest of influencers either organically or through paid means is an incredibly effective (and usually very cost efficient) way to get your brand and products associated with whatever thoughtful insights, hilarious comments, valuable information, or unique personality quirks that make them popular. But engaging and interacting with influencers requires a unique strategy; they’re usually not experienced public figures with agents or established systems for brand partnerships. Often they’re just busy professionals who operate a podcast in their spare time, or young bloggers that aren’t even old enough to have a career yet.
Creating and nurturing relationships with these kinds of personalities requires a delicate touch and a thorough understanding of an influencer’s audience, niche, and content. Many PR and brand marketing executives are realizing this and recruiting digital marketers specifically to manage their influencer marketing campaigns and relationships.
Data Security Analyst
The news is full of corporate data breaches. Sometimes it’s due to hackers or some other malicious entity, but much more often the data is compromized by mistake or oversight by someone within the organization.
Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, recently named data security the most important issue businesses face. “Data security is a major problem for any company that has valuable information to protect, and that means most companies these days. Just about every week there’s a fairly major cyber-security event that gets talked about in the public–and there are many more that don’t get talked about,” he said.
Marketers at all levels are suddenly privy to extensive and often very sensitive customer and corporate information. This enhances their marketing and improves experiences for the customer, but it comes with risks as well. These professionals might be quite smart and analytically minded, but don’t necessarily have the technical and legal understanding of data collection needed to use it safely and in accordance with regulations.
As marketers increasingly get their hands directly on Big Data, it’s becoming more and more important to embed technology and personnel directly in the marketing team to ensure that it is handled properly.
This kind of job has existed for some time now in IT and occasionally Finance operations. But as the lines between technology and marketing blur and budgets for marketing data balloon further, marketing departments can no longer afford to be separated from data security experts. The Marketing Data Security Analyst not only works with a firm’s marketing analytics staffing, but the marketing team as a whole to ensure they’re adhering to the best practices and doing their due diligence to ensure data security.
Customer Experience Manager
Some 80-90% of customers will abandon a brand after just a single negative experience. With stakes this high, it’s no wonder that CMOs have begun diverting a greater share of their attention and resources toward maintaining and enhancing the customer experience in recent years. And with so many potential touchpoints–from augmented reality to social media interaction to customer service to omnidevice engagement and beyond–it’s crucial that brands be able to establish a compelling and consistent experience across all channels.
Some roles have already emerged to tackle this challenge at the highest level: recent years have been full of Chief Experience Officer and Chief Customer Officer executive searches.
But not every organization is in a situation that calls for a dedicated executive to oversee their customer experience. And of those that are, sometimes a single senior leader isn’t enough to carry out the day-to-day tactical execution required. The customer experience manager fills a more mid-level role focused less on leadership and big-picture strategy, and more on day-to-day maintenance and execution.
