“Jack of All Trades, Master of None or… is it really a Master of Many?’

You have heard it all! “The Man-of-all-Work,” “One-Stop-Shop,” “Go-to-Guy,” “Swiss Army Knife.” Someone you lean onto when you just want to get the job done, but what if you want to go beyond? Enter “Full-Stack Marketer.”

Table of Contents:

1. What is a Full-Stack Marketer
2. Skillsets of a Full-Stack Marketer
3. The Full-Stack Process
4. SEO
5. Social Media
6. Remarketing
7. Advertising
8. Tools & Reporting
9. What can a Full-Stack Marketer Offer to Your Business?
10. Something More than a “Jack of All Trades”?
11. How to get started with the Path to Full-Stack?

What is a Full-Stack Marketer?

The term “Full-Stack Marketer” originally comes from the World of Programming and Coding, where people who specialize in both Front-End and Back-End as well as other areas like UX/UI are branded as “Full-Stack Developers.” This versatile breed of professionals is mostly not masters in all of these fields but has a decent working knowledge.   Recently, the two words “full-stack” are getting replicated inside the Marketing world as well with a new breed of Digital Marketers emerging, calling themselves “Full-Stack Marketers.”
A Full-Stack Marketer has broad knowledge covering a wide range of digital tactics with in-depth knowledge in 1 or maybe 2 specific areas in a similar vein. Hiring these professionals can lead to a lot of benefits for your Business while this term has the likelihood of disrupting an entire industry that Thrives on Innovation.

Skillsets of a Full-Stack Marketer?

Here at Furlough, we think a Full-Stack Marketer is someone who has Expertise in 4 Verticals. Let’s see what they are. 

The Full-Stack Process

A Full-Stack Process comprises of all marketing efforts targeted towards the Four Main Verticals of Full-Stack Marketing;

• SEO
• Social Media
• Remarketing
• Advertising

This process has all the detailed Strategies that would take place in each of these verticals. Analyses and Reporting will make up the business end of a Full-Stack Process.

For a business to truly figure what platform to target, which strategy to implement, and the goals to be outlined, there needs to be the presence of a streamlined process that entails the whole journey of getting to the goal.

Having a Full-Stack Process can help your business achieve the following:

• Figure out which areas to define and target; social media platform, remarketing strategy, UI/UX.
• Analyze what’s working and what’s not & easily Identify Gaps.
• Identify action steps to mitigate issues and optimize business processes.

This process, in essence, is an Audit of your whole Marketing Plan.

Read More about Full-Stack Audits:
https://furlough.com/lifestyle/full-stack-audit-thalia-capos/
https://furlough.com/travel/mezcal-la-medida/

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of increasing the Quality and Quantity of search results in order to make sure your website ranks on the first page of Google through Non-Paid efforts.  This achieves two things:

• It increases awareness about your brand and drives traffic to your website.
• It’s a good way to present your USP (Unique Selling Point) to potential customers without paying for them. 

A Full-Stack Marketer can offer you unparalleled expertise in organic growth for your website.
Do you know around 75% of searchers don’t even look at the 2nd page of Google while 51% of all traffic comes from Search Engines in an Organic or Non-Paid way? Fortunately, by implementing full-stack marketing, this will become a lot easier.

SEO is one of the core functions behind any company’s Marketing Efforts. Especially in 2021 where Marketing has become this competitive with companies spending millions of dollars in Advertisements to rank their page on the 1st page of Google, the time for implementing an effective and trackable SEO Strategy is one of the first steps a business SHOULD take. 

2. Social Media

While you shouldn’t expect a Full-Stack Marketer to handle everything on the creative side, do expect them to be adept at creating strategies that will help you achieve your desired goals.

Over 3.5 Billion Social Media users worldwide spend an average of 3 hours/day spending Quality time on it.

That number sounds like Money, right? Wait for a second… Just because you have created a page on Facebook, Instagram or other social networks doesn’t mean you’ve done the job.

You need to have an established full-stack strategy to increase brand awareness on social platforms. This includes everything from what kind of people you will target to what type of content you will target them with. An effective Social Media Strategy aims to:

• Educate – You should aim to provide Meaningful Content to your Audience that inhibits learning in them and establishes you as a Credible and Authoritative Brand. This should be reflected in your full-stack process.

• Entertain – You know it! Most of us on the Internet are just there to have a good time. A good Social Media strategy aims at doing just that by sharing relatable and relevant Content that attracts potential prospects like bait and gives them something to think about. 

• Engage – For a brand to build up a Loyal Customer Base, it has to keep in mind that it needs to engage with them just as an ordinary person would seeking to provide value with every conversation. The Full-Stack Marketer will provide in-depth insights on how to improve these areas.

These Three Fundamental Characteristics of a Social Media Strategy will essentially give your Business a Voice for your Target Audience to get accustomed to. It will aim to generate Intrigue, Curiosity and Interest and help in pushing your customers down the Funnel. By cutting down the costs of hiring a whole creative department with a specialist creative director, you can choose to delegate these responsibilities to a Full-Stack Marketer who has a good understanding of growth on social platforms. 

3. Remarketing

Remarketing is a strategy Marketers employ to reach out to people who had previously connected with a business. This can mean anywhere from interacting with the website or mobile app to signing up for a Newsletter. These people had previously expressed “Interest” in our products, one principle of a Marketing funnel. By connecting with these customers and sharing meaningful info, Marketers aim to just give them a nudge over the edge to convert into sales. And you don’t need specialists to take care of this because Full-Stack Marketing has your back!

We do have to create One Distinction between two terms that are constantly thrown around as the same thing: Remarketing and Retargeting. Retargeting uses Paid Ads to re-engage previous customers while Remarketing uses Email to re-engage these customers.

According to “Aspedia”, 43% of Companies use Remarketing for “Brand Awareness & Recognition” while 56% use it for gaining new customers. From a purely Consumer-centric view, “CMO”, 25% of Online Users enjoy seeing Remarketing approaches from companies while 43% are most likely to convert into paying customers. That does sound enticing, right? Just imagine, with a properly established Remarketing Campaign, you can increase your sales by 25%! Retargeting campaigns can become quite expensive but a Full-Stack Marketer with ample experience can craft a strategy that will utilize the best of your resources.

4. Advertising

Advertising is a Paid approach to gaining new customers. We all have seen those spammy Banners on our favourite Blogs, those Atrocious Unskippable Ads on Youtube, or those Click–baity Ads on Facebook and Instagram. But done right, Advertising can help your Business Ten–fold and generate revenue in 7-8 Figure realms. 

There are essentially 2 Ways to use Advertising to Target your Audience and Generate sales:

• Search Engine Marketing (SEM): SEM is the opposite of SEO. It is a way to drive traffic and rank websites on the first page of Google by paying for them and getting in a bidding war with other such websites to see who comes out on top. 

• Social Media Advertising: While the process behind the Ads on Google and on Social Networks is similar in many ways, they do differ fundamentally. Social Media Advertising is focused more on customers not searching but Socializing on the platform.

Through utilizing these two spaces, you can Unlock new possibilities for your business and be able to Promote them in a better way. According to “Power Traffick”, Small Businesses receive an Average Return of $3 for every $1.60 they spend on Google Ads. Social Media has its Ups as well with over 27% of users finding new Brands through Ads on Social Networks. 

While the strategy differs from Industry to Industry, it has to be noted that Advertisements play a Huge Role in the overall growth of a company. 

Tools & Reporting

A Full-Stack Marketer has expertise over a variety of different tools. These range from Analytics tools to Content Management Systems, so on and so forth. 

In our opinion, there are four things a Full-Stack Marketer must have expertise over: 

1. Publishing
2. Analysis
3. Interpretation
4. Reporting

In the Publishing Phase, the full-stack process will center around content or information across multiple streams like websites or social media. To publish content, you can use Content Management Systems (CMS) to schedule posts across all platforms. Tools like Hootsuite, Hubspot allow Marketers to share content to a variety of platforms. Coming to websites, we can publish articles using WordPress. For running Advertisements, we can use Google to run different kinds of ads to our website or use the Ads Manager integrated within social media platforms to run ads to those platforms. Alternatively, we can utilize Ad Networks to run ads e.g. Taboola (great for running Native Advertisements), AdCash, TrafficForce, TrafficJunky, etc. 

In the Analysis Phase, a Full-Stack Marketer will analyze the data coming in from the marketing campaigns which were published during the Publishing phase. Using tools like Google Analytics or Google Data Studio, the marketer can analyze visual data in the forms of bar charts and graphs and use that information to make adjustments to campaigns which are done in the next phase.

In the Interpretation Phase, the Marketer will aim to interpret the meaning of the analyses that were done before. This can be as simple as asking yourself some questions like: 

• What kind of content performed best? Which platform did it perform best?s
• Where are most of my audience coming from? Why is it coming from that particular stream?
• Which Ads are performing best and which platform? Why are they performing best in that particular platform? 

Note the special emphasis on “Why”. We feel going to the root of the data is the best way to interpret it and make necessary improvements. 

In the Reporting Phase, the Marketer takes all the data collected from the software and presents it in a way that makes sense to the stakeholders of the company. The reporting is adjusted to eliminate jargon so that the business owners can understand the context of what is reported. To make things easier, using visuals to make data easier to understand is a great way of presenting the information. This can be done using tools like LucidChart which allows the user to create flow charts, diagrams and pretty much anything. Other tools like PowerPoint, Rebrandly also provide unique features for Reporting.

These tools will vary from Marketer to Marketer as everyone has a different way of looking at data and interpreting it. There are tools that have excellent Premium features while there are different Free Tools as well. Which one you go for depends on the resources and the budget you already have. But, it’s not a hard & fast rule. Marketing keeps on evolving almost on a daily basis and as Marketers, our job is to adapt to these evolutions and make sure we don’t get caught behind in the rat race. The full-stack process is just the latest evolution and it’s not going to stop there.

What can a Full-Stack Marketer Offer to Your Business? 

“Business has ONLY two functions: Marketing and Innovation”

Milan Kundera

According to the CMO Survey, companies with revenues below $25 Million spend an average of 11% on Marketing. This number is only going to grow in years to come. Marketing is the Lifeline behind Sales for any business. In this day and age, customers don’t only buy products for the sake of it but indulge in more complex processes like relationship-building and the Dawn of the Internet has made it more difficult for businesses to make sales as they did before. 

Because there are so many different processes and functions in a Marketing Strategy, most businesses spend huge chunks of their revenues on Marketing Specialists; these are people who specialize in one particular subset. This means that a big-budget has to be allocated for filling in the roles of several such specialists:

• Specialists in SEO and SEM
• Specialists in Advertising
• Specialists in Email Marketing
• Specialists in Social Media

And these aren’t the only places. The truth is that there is an Alternative to spending this much now. Hire Full-Stack Marketers… 

This will be especially beneficial for small-medium Sized businesses who don’t have big budgets like their Corporate counterparts. Companies of big size tend to have a larger Division of Labour and hire people according to specific skills required. And they have the budget to do so! This doesn’t mean that full-stack marketers cannot survive in those environments, rather their skills would be utilized more to provide their input to other marketing teams and focus on the end results.

Small Businesses and Startups, they will be thrust to the Frontlines and have control over essentially every aspect of the Marketing Realm. This will provide them with an environment where they can make decisions for all the different aspects, work on strategies, provide advice to the teams, and overall be the point of reference for everyone involved.  

Something more than “Jack of All Trades”

After observing the impact of Covid-19 on businesses of all sizes, it’s fair to assume that a further catastrophe like it will only be averted if we adapt to modern-day requirements and focus on spending only where necessary. We cannot rule out the possibilities of a future crisis like this or an economic downfall that will cause destruction of the same level, if not more. 

This is especially true for Small Businesses that don’t have the financial strength of their corporate counterparts. They need to be smarter and Full-Stack Marketing is becoming a necessity for them. 

By hiring just one or two Full-Stack Marketers, they can utilize the power of the Internet and spend controlled resources only where business growth will occur. Full-Stack Marketers can help identify which areas they need to work upon or which untapped resources they can go for that will take their business to the next level. This can be done by what is known as a “Full-Stack Audit”.

Check out some of Furlough’s Full-Stack Audits here:

https://furlough.com/thalia-capos-full-stack-audit/

A Full-Stack Audit essentially takes a birds-eye view over the businesses’ marketing efforts and aims to identify areas where significant growth can be achieved as well as areas that haven’t been utilized to the optimum. This can help businesses identify gaps in their processes and get better guidance on how to fill those gaps.  

How do you get started with the Journey?

Are you thinking about becoming a Full-Stack Marketer Yourself? We would be happy to tell you that it isn’t something hard to do.

We have already outlined the Verticals every Full-Stack Marketer needs to have under their belt and would be happy to provide more advice and hands-on work to kickstart your journey.   

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Read More:

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https://furlough.com/lifestyle/these-paid-tools-must-be-in-every-full-stack-marketers-arsenal/

https://furlough.com/lifestyle/free-tools-a-full-stack-marketer-can-start-using-right-now/