In the past few years, digital marketing has exploded. This evolution, along with the vast options for marketing channels, has made it difficult to cut through the noise and effectively get your message out. That’s why so many companies have turned to adaptive tactics within a full-stack marketing strategy.
This strategy allows for improved marketing, rapid testing, and fast scalability. It makes for an agile environment that can handle just about any marketing need or challenge that arises.
What Is Full-Stack Marketing?
The concept of full-stack marketing owes its origins to the world of computer developers. In computing circles, a full-stack developer is something that has experience and the knowledge to provide insight across every step of the development stack. Instead of experts for each phase of the stack, a full-stack programmer understands the entire process and can facilitate production throughout the development cycle.
A full-stack marketer is able to work in diverse areas of marketing. The full-stack marketer has the practical working knowledge to do hands-on work in each phase of marketing. They can work cross-platform in any area that’s needed for their B2B lead generation strategy.
In a world where we have valued specialists with deep knowledge in one area, these marketers are generalists who can work in every area of marketing.
It sounds like full-stack marketers are super employees able to leap tall projects in a single bound! That’s the goal when you hire a full-stack marketer.
How A Full-Stack Marketing Strategy Can Help Your B2B Business Grow
Successful marketers work across every step of the customer journey and find ways to engage customers at each stage. Only the largest companies can staff teams of specialists that understand each stage and can create amazing content that will push customers through the buying funnel.
Full-stack marketers are proficient in each stage and provide a host of benefits for organizations:
- Faster development cycles since there’s no need to coordinate and communicate across teams and departments. Since full-stack developers can handle each aspect of the marketing project, it’s a huge time saver.
- Agility is at a premium with full-stack marketers. Because they handle a project from concept to completion, they can move quickly and adapt rapidly when needed.
- Full-stack marketers are, by nature, entrepreneurial and self-directed. This means less oversight is needed.
- Operational costs can be reduced because you limit the number of specialists you need to have on payroll.
Adopting A Full-Stack Marketing Strategy Into Your Organization
The most effective way to adopt a full-stack marketing strategy in your organization is to start by assessing your resources and comparing them to the job you need to get done.
Do you have people with the skills to work cross-platform effectively in different areas of marketing?
Full-Stack Marketer: Key Skills
Here are the key skills you need in true full-stack marketers:
- Analytic abilities to monitor, measure, and optimize performance
- Strong communication skills
- Marketplace economics and competitive research
- Great copywriting skills
- Strong storytelling skills
- Mobile marketing skills
- Predictive marketing (Machine Learning, Data Mining, Modeling)
- Pricing optimization
- Publicity and Public Relations
- Inbound Marketing
- Outbound Marketing
While they need to possess these skills so that they can handle each aspect of marketing projects, they also have to be big-picture thinkers that understand the underlying business goals.
Full-Stack Marketer: Proficiencies
Here is a list of just some of the areas in which full-stack marketers should have proficiency:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Pay Per Click (PPO)
- Email Marketing
- App Store Marketing / App Store Optimization (ASO)
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing, including Blogs and Guest Posts
- Affiliate Marketing
- Video Marketing
- Lead Generation
- Web Development, including UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface)
- Landing Pages
- Influencer Marketing
- Remarketing
- Customer surveys
They should also be experts in split testing. The ability to test out different versions of marketing materials to determine which works best is key to optimizing performance.
In reality, if we listed all of the skills and proficiencies you’d want in your full-stack marketer, it would take up several more page.
A Full-Stack Marketing Strategy
If you can find people that can do all of this, that’s awesome. Congratulations!
The reality is it’s almost impossible for one person to be a full-stack marketer. In startups and small companies, there may be a need to wear every hat, but that doesn’t mean they will all fit.
Rarely is someone so skilled they can handle everything (and you can afford to get them to come work for you). Even if they could do it all, the workload of a modern marketer often prevents them from having the time to be proficient at everything.
You can certainly find marketers that have the necessary breadth of experience across disciplines. The real question is whether you can find ones that also have the depth of expertise you need in each area? You want someone that truly is a Jack of all Trades. However, you need to avoid those that are a Jack of all Trades and yet a Master of None.
One alternative is to hire lots of people that are experts in every phase of development or marketing. That’s expensive. It can also be inefficient as you’re paying for skills that might not be needed every day. On top of that, there’s the cost of constant training and learning as new tactics and technologies evolve.
However, there’s another alternative that organizations are using that brings together the strategies behind full-stack marketing while being cost-efficient.
Full Stack Marketing As A Team Sport
Here is the more common scenario that many organizations are adopting. They are looking at full-stack marketing as a team sport.
They are employing a full-stack marketing strategy to build a team that can handle everything and augmenting that team with outside agency resources to be cost-effective.
Can you build team pods that possess the necessary skills and complement each other so that they can work across disciplines independently? If you’re like most companies, you’ll find that you fall short in some of the critical areas where you need expertise. Adding in agency workers that specialize in the areas where your pods are lacking can fill in scaling gaps in a cost-effective manner.
To manage the process of mixing internal team members and outside resources, you need to have strong processes and team structure with defined goals. With the proper structure, you can create a full-stack marketing team without hiring additional specialists and carrying them on your payroll as projects change.
Many Hands Make Light Work
Quite simply, you can cover more ground with agency augmentation in your marketing initiatives and organizational growth plans. It’s impossible to be great at everything. When your full-stack marketing team lacks specific expertise in any particular area, you can fill in the gap with agency specialists.
Conversely, you can outsource basic work to free up your own specialists and allow them to fill these specialized roles within your organization.
Either way, you can better manage the workflow, output, and quality levels without breaking the bank.
