The reason "marketer" seems so common is because those who are good at marketing are inherently good self promotors. Making them far more visible than other, less common examples.
Anecdotally, supply chain and business operations are two big areas where I have success.
You don't even really need any domain knowledge to get started in those fields. I did a 6 month internship at one of the world's largest companies that has a consistently top ranked supply chain organization. They had the expense of a 10 person recruiting team (all expensive line managers and directors, not HR personnel) coming to campus for 3 days, and only gave offers to two of us. And I explicitly said during my interview I knew jack all about supply chain. Their response was that supply chain was their expertise and they had training for that if I needed it, but my general analytical skills and Excel knowledge were far more rare (in their applicants).
Turns out they were piloting a new inventory management methodology and were using Excel-based "models" to trial it manually at a dozen manufacturing plants before deciding if it was worth the 8- or 9- figure cost to have SAP make that an official model in their system. It involved running batch exports from SAP every morning, putting that into Excel, updating the figures, and sending that out to the plants. But the pilot had scaled to a high volume plant that basically maxed out Excel, and they were struggling to make it work. All I did was essentially refactor a lot of logic to do batch operations (made a few VBA scripts that connected to the Excel spreadsheet with an ODBC connection and ran a series of SQL statements instead of in-cell functions).
It's been about 5 years since then, and I still get calls every few months for contract work essentially doing the same thing (Excel got bogged down -> needs a refactor).
Part of my day job involves essentially doing the same thing, but in a more generalistic sense on business operations. Process engineering is a portable skillset across verticals. Whether it's in supply chain, sales, marketing, or operations, there's always a bottleneck that's preventing growth or efficient resource utilization. I am a piss-poor programmer. I have never once been hired or paid explicitly to program, and I don't have enough experience in any particular language to pass even a junior level programming interview. I get paid to make irritations or problems go away while causing the least amount of friction utilizing whatever constraints exist. In the course of doing so I've tweaked C# and PHP programs. I've written bash, awk, perl, VBA, Python, and NodeJS scripts. I've written a whole lot of SQL. And I've refactored an incredible number of Google Sheets and Excel workbooks. I'm not valuable because I can program; I'm valuable because I can reliably and consistently resolve whatever issue is thrown my way in a self-sufficient manner, and ramp up on whatever knowledge or tool is needed to do so incredibly quickly whether I have prior exposure or not. I'm not a consultant that provides a report that then requires additional resources to execute; I provide a working solution (or prototype) that immediately solves the issue. And in the case of a prototype, provides a stopgap solution that (crudely) solves things in the immediate term and provides an explicit, working example of the functionality that their engineering resources need to incorporate into their internal tools/processes for a long term fix.
One piece of advice that seems to serve me well: people hate change. And people also tend to hate relying on others to perform their job. The greater the change, or the more reliance on a programmer to make modest changes to a process, the more resistance and ill will you'll create. Engineers thrive for perfection, and invariably lean towards "optimal" solutions that are very invasive and supplant existing practices, rather than supplementing them. patio11 didn't create an entire Customer Management System or appointment management system that had automated appointment reminder functionality. He created a simple system that supplemented whatever process and system was already in place and added incredible benefits with minimal additional steps.
As a marketer I've started thinking that the marketing operations side actually has a ton of value to unlock for many orgs for similar reasons to what you stated.
I've taken 50MB Excel reports that took a couple hours to pull manually and reduced them to <1MB and updating automatically with data connections. That's real time savings.
Then there's the other marketing plumbing like properly setting up analytics (non trivial), conversion tracking, tag management, connecting various ad platforms, setting up automation in an ESP, etc.
It actually shocks me how many senior marketers have no idea how to do this stuff, but then again that is my marketplace advantage.
It actually shocks me how many senior marketers have no idea how to do this stuff, but then again that is my marketplace advantage.
A lot of senior marketers come from traditional marketing/advertising backgrounds. Where they work with marketing channels that operate on imprecise exposure figures and ballpark ROI calculations. That's what they expect, so when moving into a medium like online advertising they're perfectly fine operating in the same mental framework.
And to be fair, software engineers also tend to suck at that type of marketing plumbing. Did engineering put your conversion snippet directly within an onclick event on the submit button? Then they chose a poor implementation method with a lot of gotchas that could compromise your reporting. You could be over counting by including clicks on submissions that never go through due to validation handling. Or you could be under counting conversions because they didn't properly intercept the submit event and there's a pretty little race condition between the page submitting and your conversion code executing. Or a half dozen other potential pitfalls that need accounted for when using the onclick or onsubmit event.
Marketing Engineering is definitely a good niche to be working in.
For sure. Oddly enough, a lot of people in the traditional/advertising backgrounds do get how to use the mediums effectively, or even how to measure and optimize within them, but when it comes to the technical aspects of setting them up, they are clueless, and don't grok the minutiae.
I wouldn't call myself a Marketing Engineer by any means. I am learning how to be a better coder, but, despite the buzzwordiness of the title, I feel like Marketing Technologist is a better descriptor (for me at least).
Can you talk a bit about how you market yourself? I've fallen into a similar role at my current employer and am enjoying it, but I'm not sure what options I have for growth.
It's very situationally dependent. I don't market myself the same to any two companies, because my value to a company is dependent on the company itself. As a boss early in my career put it, I excel in the role that every company needs but no company hires for. The most successful strategy I've had is the Trojan Horse approach.
If you're looking for W2 work and are on the business side, focus on analyst, specialist, or strategist roles at fast growing small- to mid-sized companies. Too large and the duties will be too defined for you to grow; too small (or not growing) and you'll likely be too expensive for the value you provide. Look for job descriptions that are written as fishing expeditions; these are indicative of an environment that's changing too fast to define precise duties. Which is also indicative of them hiring for general aptitude rather than specific experience, and the role will expand to the extent of your abilities. If there's a particular area you want to grow, find a role that could justifiably expand to include that. Focus on the existing pain points during the interview, resolve those when you get hired, then fill your newly available excess time at work by systematically seeking out and resolving other pain points (this is where you'd try to work you way into the area you want to grow, if there's a specific one). As for salary growth; there are quite a few strategies to getting larger than usual annual raises if you execute well, play to the companies political landscape, and articulate your value in the right way during your reviews.
If you're looking for contract/consulting work, it's essentially the same thing. Advertise for and resolve specific pain points you've solved in the past, get recurring business by fishing for additional pain points once you're in the door. You'll organically grow a portfolio of work that'll make it easier to get in the door at new companies, and you'll have a steady stream of recurring business (once you've demonstrated your competence, companies are more willing to take a chance on engagements outside of your prior experience). In fact, most of my contract work has come from previous W2 employers that got really used to the convenience and flexibility of having me around.
My email's in my profile; feel free to contact me if you want to chat more about it. My approach is optimized around me, but if I know more about your situation I can probably give more relevant advice for you.
It's also just indicative of differing expectations. IT and programming evolves at an incredibly rapid pace. Technically proficient people are used to continually shifting tools, best practices, and thought paradigms. If there's a way to drastically streamline or improve something, it's basically second nature to choose that solution because you're going to have to learn something new sooner or later anyway.
But this is the exception, not the rule. Digital marketing is the only other area I can think of that also has a rapid pace of change, and coincidentally is also the most exhausting area I've done work in because of the amount of ramp up it takes to relearn the landscape if there's even a small gap in engagements. Most other business functions are slow changing, and workers in those functions resist drastic change simply because drastic change isn't part of their usual expectations for their working environment. Small, incremental changes are a lot easier to work in. As long as each incremental change brings enough benefit to be worth it, it's easy to win people over. But a completely new process will have just as many warts (whether training-, process-, or expectation- based warts) as their existing process, and just replaces one set of problems with another. So they'll resist it.
Anecdotally, supply chain and business operations are two big areas where I have success.
You don't even really need any domain knowledge to get started in those fields. I did a 6 month internship at one of the world's largest companies that has a consistently top ranked supply chain organization. They had the expense of a 10 person recruiting team (all expensive line managers and directors, not HR personnel) coming to campus for 3 days, and only gave offers to two of us. And I explicitly said during my interview I knew jack all about supply chain. Their response was that supply chain was their expertise and they had training for that if I needed it, but my general analytical skills and Excel knowledge were far more rare (in their applicants).
Turns out they were piloting a new inventory management methodology and were using Excel-based "models" to trial it manually at a dozen manufacturing plants before deciding if it was worth the 8- or 9- figure cost to have SAP make that an official model in their system. It involved running batch exports from SAP every morning, putting that into Excel, updating the figures, and sending that out to the plants. But the pilot had scaled to a high volume plant that basically maxed out Excel, and they were struggling to make it work. All I did was essentially refactor a lot of logic to do batch operations (made a few VBA scripts that connected to the Excel spreadsheet with an ODBC connection and ran a series of SQL statements instead of in-cell functions).
It's been about 5 years since then, and I still get calls every few months for contract work essentially doing the same thing (Excel got bogged down -> needs a refactor).
Part of my day job involves essentially doing the same thing, but in a more generalistic sense on business operations. Process engineering is a portable skillset across verticals. Whether it's in supply chain, sales, marketing, or operations, there's always a bottleneck that's preventing growth or efficient resource utilization. I am a piss-poor programmer. I have never once been hired or paid explicitly to program, and I don't have enough experience in any particular language to pass even a junior level programming interview. I get paid to make irritations or problems go away while causing the least amount of friction utilizing whatever constraints exist. In the course of doing so I've tweaked C# and PHP programs. I've written bash, awk, perl, VBA, Python, and NodeJS scripts. I've written a whole lot of SQL. And I've refactored an incredible number of Google Sheets and Excel workbooks. I'm not valuable because I can program; I'm valuable because I can reliably and consistently resolve whatever issue is thrown my way in a self-sufficient manner, and ramp up on whatever knowledge or tool is needed to do so incredibly quickly whether I have prior exposure or not. I'm not a consultant that provides a report that then requires additional resources to execute; I provide a working solution (or prototype) that immediately solves the issue. And in the case of a prototype, provides a stopgap solution that (crudely) solves things in the immediate term and provides an explicit, working example of the functionality that their engineering resources need to incorporate into their internal tools/processes for a long term fix.
One piece of advice that seems to serve me well: people hate change. And people also tend to hate relying on others to perform their job. The greater the change, or the more reliance on a programmer to make modest changes to a process, the more resistance and ill will you'll create. Engineers thrive for perfection, and invariably lean towards "optimal" solutions that are very invasive and supplant existing practices, rather than supplementing them. patio11 didn't create an entire Customer Management System or appointment management system that had automated appointment reminder functionality. He created a simple system that supplemented whatever process and system was already in place and added incredible benefits with minimal additional steps.