Who is a T-shaped marketer?

The 3 major components of a phenomenal T-Shaped marketer

T-shaped skills

The concept of T-shaped skills or T-shaped persons is a metaphor used in job recruitment to describe the abilities of persons in the workforce. The vertical bar on the letter T represents the depth of related skills and expertise in a single field, whereas the horizontal bar is the ability to collaborate across disciplines with experts in other areas and to apply knowledge in areas of expertise other than one’s own.

Who is a T-Shaped Marketer?

A t-shaped marketer is somebody who has expertise in about 1–3 main marketing facets. For example, you may be great at content marketing. You have a proven track record of doing awesome things with your content and organic strategies.

But they’re also savvy in other marketing facets like email marketing, pay-per-click ads, building communities, and SEO.

This is a t-shaped marketer.

The 3 Components of a T-Shaped Marketer

As you can see in the diagram, the abilities of a T-shaped marketer fit into three different components:

• Base Knowledge
• Marketing Foundation
• Channel Expertise

1️⃣ Base knowledge

◾️Behavior Psychology

Knowledge in this area helps you better understand why people do what they do.

◾️Storytelling

Storytelling is about knowing how to put together a narrative.

◾️Data and Analytics

It’s essential to have a foundation in the general concept of data and analytics

◾️Research

Research means checking with your audience to learn their experience, their problems, and their wishes.

◾️Design and UX

Do you have good taste? Can you identify the elements of design that lead to high quality?

◾️Branding and positioning

How you can create and develop brand

2️⃣ Marketing foundation

◾️Copywriting

Copywriting is about knowing the best words to use in order to get a message across.

◾️Sketch, Canva, Photoshop and Wireframing

Once you know the principles of design, how far can you get with creating something yourself?

◾️A/B testing

Do you have a testing mindset? If you think about testing, do you have the ability to bring basic scientific tests into your area of expertise?

◾️Video

For many companies, video is a channel all its own.

◾️Statistics and Excel

Are you able to put together a solid spreadsheet to track numbers and goals ?

◾️Funnel marketing

How does a customer become a customer?

◾️HTML and CSS

This level of code knowledge can come in handy in so many places: blog posts, landing pages, email design and so on.

◾️Customer experience (CX)

Could you answer support tickets or thinking through the potential customer impact on launches, content, etc.?

3️⃣ Channel expertise

◾️Paid ads

Most often when we talk about paid ads, we refer to social media advertising — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. However, a paid ads expert may also be adept at search engine marketing (SEM), media sponsorships, and banner and display ads.

◾️CRO

This can also be classified as bottom-of-the-funnel marketing. The goal here is to improve conversion rates by lots of different avenues: landing pages, CTAs, ads, content, and more.

◾️Content marketing

Content marketing is primarily about blogging, though the true definition of content extends to anything you might create. More and more, the “anything” seems to fit on the blog as well: video, audio, slideshows, etc.

◾️SEO

This is anything to do with search engine optimization, both the content/strategy side and the technical side.

◾️Social media

It’s not only about posting cats.

◾️Viral marketing

There are a lot of different levers that can make this happen, not the least of which is a referral or loyalty program, as well as a deep understanding of virality, psychology, and network effects.

◾️Biz Dev

Business development is the strategic relationship-building of key people and companies.

◾️Partnerships

Partnership marketing is more focused on collaborations for marketing objectives.

◾️PR

PR is accountable for driving interest and mentions for the brand.

◾️Events

An events expert can do everything from a meetup to a conference and tie back the event efforts to business impact.