Do you remember when your whole family went to the same doctor? Believe it or not, that wasn’t uncommon not so long ago.
That one doctor was the go-to resource anytime you or a family member got sick, hurt themselves, or needed medical advice. You’d have a checkup once a year. And you’d only see a specialist if you needed a specific test or treatment.
Sounds quaint, doesn’t it?
A friend recently told me he’d been having chronic headaches. I said the (most unhelpful) thing everyone says: “It sounds like you should see your doctor.”
My friend paused and then asked, “Which one?”
Should he call the cardiologist who treated him for high blood pressure? The ENT who fixed his ear infection? The ophthalmologist who checks his eyes? The endocrinologist he’d seen for something else? Or his primary care physician, who he’d wait months to see because the practice has so many patients?
The number of physicians focusing on a specialty has steadily increased for the last 60 years. From 1961 to 1970, 10% of internal medicine physicians went into a subspecialty. From 2011-2015, that figure was 88%. In fact, only about 25%. of U.S. doctors handle adult primary care.
But what does any of this have to do with marketing?
Marketing suffers from the super-specialization trend, too
One of the biggest marketing challenges today is balancing the number and type of team resources needed. Modern marketing plans have always changed frequently. But shifting plans once meant simply shifting marketing generalists’ attention to different tasks. The resources remained the same — the team members just performed different activities.
In 2024, though, a marketing operation requires hundreds of niche skills. Some specialties emerged around technologies or platforms (think CRM, e-commerce, marketing automation, content management, customer data platforms, digital asset management, and analytics. Some revolve around creative specialties (design, editorial writing, copywriting, social media content, email writing, multimedia creators/editors, and event management). And then there are platform specialists (SEO, content strategy, influencer wranglers, ad network managers, etc.).
And now, of course, artificial intelligence specialists are in the mix.
Here’s a sneak peek at the upcoming 2025 Content Marketing Career and Salary Outlook for 2025 (publishing in September): About three-quarters of marketers (76%) say they need to master specialized or niche skills to remain relevant in the face of modern technologies such as AI.
Modern marketing is becoming a super-specialized practice. Balancing the need for specific skill sets to execute your existing strategy against the need for agile teams of generalists who can handle inevitable strategy shifts might be the most significant marketing operations challenges companies face.
Specialist or generalist? That’s the question
So, what can we do about it? Does it make more sense to hire more deep specialists or more generalists?
Specialists know a great deal about one thing but perhaps little about anything else. They’ll help you differentiate on one particular thing.
Generalists, on the other hand, know a little bit about many things but may lack deep knowledge about one particular thing. Their range gives you the agility to shift priorities quickly.
This question reminds me of a story that might be an urban legend (but I like it anyway). As the story goes, someone asked the UPS CEO how they encourage such differentiating customer service from their drivers. The CEO answered, “We don’t hire drivers and teach them great customer service. We hire great customer service reps and teach them to drive.”
If that sounds like an argument for specialists — it isn’t (because either skill could be considered a specialist role. Instead, it argues for a conscious decision by the company on where they want to focus their employee development.
Does that approach work in marketing? I think it does.
Should you hire talented content creators and teach them how to understand an analytics report, work with AI, or excel in social media? Or should you hire deep analytics, AI, or social media specialists and teach them to create differentiating content?
The decision doesn’t matter — as long as you make a conscious decision one way or the other.
But I’ve found the first way works out better.
The software company where I was CMO years ago operated in a niche market that required considerable subject matter expertise and technical knowledge. We settled on a content marketing approach as the primary strategy, and I knew from my days as a writer in the entertainment business how rare content creation talent is.
So, my philosophy was to hire the best content creators and designers (specialists) I could find. I felt I could teach them the basics of media buying, analytics, and other classic marketing planning. In other words, I hired fantastic content creators and taught them the industry and marketing.
Spoiler alert: It worked. But only because two fundamental things ended up being true:
- The business agreed to invest time and resources to help the content creators develop subject matter expertise and marketing skills. Developing expertise isn’t an overnight thing — it’s an ongoing process.
- The content creators wanted to learn to become better marketers. In my consulting work, I’ve encountered many marketing teams made up of specialists who don’t have any interest in the topics important to the business. They say, “I don’t care about our industry. This is just a job.” I’ve even had some say, “I don’t care about marketing even though I’m in marketing. I just do great content.” Those people feel their job is simply to make sure the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed while earning better pay than they could in other jobs. I tell these folks to start looking now – because they won’t be with the company for long.
Assuming your company meets these requirements, you need three elements to balance your team’s skills.
1. Create an education program
I often advise my consulting clients that they create ongoing knowledge-sharing opportunities. For example, in my CMO role, I ran a program called Pizza and Knowledge Sharing Fridays. We’d invite technical subject matter specialists to give an informal class to marketers over pizza. They’d talk about industry trends, go in-depth on a particular challenge, or provide 101 education on how a specific technology worked.
But I didn’t just end their education on pizza day. All the marketers would need to demonstrate their new knowledge in a real-world application for our business.
2. Integrate generalist ride-alongs into your specialists’ processes
A CMO friend recently told me about the incredibly advanced content strategy for his brand’s website. His team had gotten personalization and targeted content set up and integrated it into their Salesforce platform. But now he’s worried. “We’ve trained these martech specialists to become some of the deepest experts in the field,” he said. “I’m petrified that they’ll discover how much they’re now worth in the job market.”
And that’s another reason to have people work cross-functionally. When you have more people who understand what’s going on, you reduce the risk of losing that knowledge when someone leaves. Because every specialist will, at some point, be in high demand and recognize their market worth.
So get your specialists involved in marketing projects. I’ve yet to find a marketing concept that isn’t relatively straightforward to understand. As my mentor, marketing professor Philip Kotler, once said, “Marketing takes a day to learn. Unfortunately, it takes a lifetime to master.”
3. Consider renting (outsourcing) as you scale
You want to invest in people you believe will stay with you for some time. So, most education investment should go into employees rather than freelancers. But sometimes, it makes sense to rent rather than hire your specialists.
For example, projects (such as implementing a new digital asset management system, search taxonomy, workflow, or content marketing approach) don’t require full-time hires.
You wouldn’t hire a full-time plumber for your home, right? But you also wouldn’t invest time in learning more than plumbing basics. So, you shouldn’t purchase a complex content management system, for example, and leave the marketing team to figure out the implementation plan and workflow changes independently.
Instead, create a resourcing strategy that can handle temporary initiatives that require specialists for a specific time and set of activities. One side effect of marketing’s super-specialization is the rise of fractional marketing services and the plentiful availability of freelance help.
Build a balanced strategy
Over time, you can build a strategy that balances specialists, generalists, and outsourced experts. For example, you might find that you end up with levels of expertise that can be applied as marketing strategies evolve.
For content creation, as an example, you might have:
- A level-one expert content creator — an in-house SME who can write and even teach other writers
- A level-one expert freelancer — an outsourced SME who creates content occasionally or creates frameworks within which the team can create
- A level-two expert creator — an in-house marketer who knows enough about content creation to write the framework or transform raw material into great content
- A level-three expert creator — a freelance writer who is always available to help transform raw material into well-constructed articles (with some input)
- A level-four expert — A junior in-house or freelance writer who needs well-formed topics and subject matter support to turn out a decent article
Perform an audit of your current team skills. Then, build your hiring, education, and freelance plan to develop your marketing team strategy.
Once you do, you’ll know which doctor to call for every marketing pain.
It’s your story. Tell it well.
Updated from a March 2022 article.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute