Many questions come up when I tell people that I am a Marketing Engineer (in the business, the slang is MarTech Engineer). MarTech is not a term that many are familiar with, and the question, “What is MarTech?” comes up a lot. So what does MarTech mean?
What is MarTech?
MarTech, or Marketing Technology, is a term used to describe a range of software and tools that assist in achieving marketing goals or KPIs. Martech teams use a range of data analytical tools, CRMs (Customer Relationship Management applications), APIs and more to provide the decision makers the data that they need to improve their sales and marketing strategy.
What’s the difference between MarTech and Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is perceived by many as an advanced mailing strategy and marketing optimization. But at its core, marketing automation is automation of manual labor by using technologies and available tools. Automation of processes is a large part of a MarTech engineer’s job.
A Marketing Engineer’s job description
As a MarTech Engineer, your goal is to find technical solutions to challenges that the Marketing team is facing. To list a few of such challenges: automating the reporting process to save manual labor, merging data and finding the most compatible tools, CRMs (Customer Relationship Management applications), tracking data and transferring it from one system into another, GDPR compliance, email marketing, and more.
As a MarTech Engineer, your goal is to find technical solutions to challenges that the Marketing team is facing.
The MarTech department usually reports to the head of marketing or the project manager due to tight work relationships.
Technical marketing engineer career path
There are a few ways to become a MarTech Engineer, and each person in the field has a different story of how they arrived at the role. You can be a data-driven marketing professional who is interested in pursuing a technical career, or a developer who is passionate about the marketing process and tracking.
Each company has a directory of their own tools that they use to track and migrate data. So the best way to a long-lasting career is to have a good foundation in API calls, tracking and JavaScript. And of course, since we live in a world with ever changing technologies, it’s always a good idea to keep yourself updated by following professional blogs and podcasts.
The Marketing Engineer’s skills and responsibilities
MarTech includes many different tasks and responsibilities, but here you can find the ones that make up the majority of the role.
Web tracking
Web Tracking is a huge part of the role of an automation engineer, so a deep understanding of web tracking tools and APIs is essential. A MarTech Engineer needs to be thoroughly familiar with Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics (Universal and GA4), to know where and how to embed Social Media pixels, and understand JavaScript to create custom tracking tags, complex attribution funnels solutions, and implementations.
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With the development in recent years of the privacy laws, GDPR, and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), the ability to comply with the strike web tracking is extremely important. If the tracking is not done correctly it can be costly, and make the business vulnerable to legal litigation.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Customer Relationship Management is the most important tool most businesses use to communicate with their clients. A MarTech Engineer’s job is to make sure that all the data in the CRM system is accurate and as detailed as possible. We want to send customer data from many different tools to the CRM by using integration or API requests so the user receives as much personalized content as possible. CRM is usually the tool that the company employs for user communication, so it’s important to have HTML and CSS skills to be able to implement the graphic designer’s mockup.
Content Management Systems (CMS)
Content Management Systems such as WordPress, Wix, Shopify and more are used to build websites and blogs for businesses. MarTech Engineers should have the ability to create a landing page and make changes to the pages according to the client’s needs. They should also be able to create and implement a tracking strategy for such assets.
Reporting
Reporting is a crucial part of any marketing effort, and automation specialists need to know how to integrate all their data sources into one cohesive report that will display the attribution funnel in a comprehensible way. Flexibility is also key: after the report automation is built, the report should be easily reusable and be open to changing its data sources if needed.
How much does a marketing engineer make?
The salary of a marketing engineer is dependent on many factors: location (salaries vary vastly from country to country), industry, type of company (In-house rolls vs. agency) and is largely based on the seniority and the years of experience of the MarTech Engineer.
Based on the latest data from Salary Expert, Marketing Engineers make between 43.5-75.7K a year with an average salary of 61.2K a year in Germany. The estimate is that the salary will increase by 16% in the next 5 years to an average of 71K a year, which is a great indication of the rise in demand for the role.
A Marketing Engineer’s ordinary day at work
A Marketing Engineer’s work day looks different depending on what stage they are in their current project. Usually an implementation or a CRM process is broken down into different phases. Creating the strategy, choosing the best tools, visualizing the tracking or implementing the project, implementation technical work, and QA. The Martech Engineer plays an essential role in all those steps.
What I like most about being a MarTech Engineer
The part that I like the most about MarTech is the combination of marketing and engineering. It requires an understanding of general Marketing ideas, as well as a lot of technical knowledge. I love the challenge of merging these two sides of the marketing world, and using both to execute a strategy of implementation, from a Miro board to a functional working system.
Summary
MarTech engineering is a wonderful career path for people who love the digital marketing process, problem-solving, and learning about new technologies and tools every day. It’s an ever-changing and challenging profession– but one that allows us to dive deep into the technologies that we use daily.
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