ech Salary and Career: Saidah Abulhaqq discusses the creation of a unicorn

We interviewed marketing professionals as part of the MarTech Salary and Career Survey. Saidah Abdulhaqq is the senior digital architect at Enterprise Holdings. In that her career path is not typical for a marketing technonologist, it has resulted in a specialist who has done some of everything.

Q. How did you get here?A. My career path was not straight forward. Although I have an English degree, it doesn’t necessarily translate into marketing. However, I work in marketing technology so it makes sense. After getting my degree, I was involved in early internet communications. I used keywords to create articles online and other things to get people to visit websites.

My husband recommended that I move into generalized content, and then into an analytics role. I had to learn programming languages. This meant that I was not able to program, but could understand the context. Then, you can move on to more data-driven digital marketing.

You can dig deeper: Marketing technologists get well-respected

Before I became the current role, I was involved in very privacy-focused marketing for Medicare and Medicaid.

I don’t consider myself a true marketer, as I don’t do any brand content and SEO. It’s more about the foundational elements

Q. What is the greatest challenge for martech?

A: I believe the biggest problem in marketing technology is the lack of leadership understanding and awareness. My experience shows that a lot leadership is very operational-focused. This is akin to the “short term wins” mentality. They believe that marketing makes things beautiful. Marketing and advertising can be viewed as one thing.

Leadership is just beginning to grasp the importance of bringing in data and analytics. They don’t have the understanding to invest in technologies and they won’t give buy-in. They don’t consider the foundational marketing tools strategies, governance strategies, and other such things.

Explore deeper: 20 ways to increase the productivity of your marketing team

It can be very reactive in marketing technology. This is not the case for the work I’m currently doing. They have a much more proactive view on the importance marketing technology. They are beginning to see it as an essential foundational element and are putting in the budget.

Q. I’m sure you want to grow your team. Are you having difficulty finding the right people?

A: Yes. Because we are unicorns, there are few people who can market technology in the manner that it should be done. A certain number of us grew up with the internet, and have seen the changes and worked within them.

I have experience in almost every aspect of digital marketing technology. From content to wireframing websites to implementation, access management and the implementation of an analytics platform. This experience has allowed me to see the privacy operations side of digital marketing from a different perspective.

This is how it worked for each member of my team. Some members of my team focus on analytics and tagging operations. Others focus on site speed. And some focus on optimizing content. Each one of us has taken a different path and there aren’t many people with the same experience, knowledge, or interest in doing multiple things to achieve that particular focus.

Although there is potential for this to happen through training, I believe it will take time. It will take a special subset of people who are passionate about both technology and marketing, and willing to dig into one area. It is difficult to be a specialist in marketing technology. To do the job well, you must be a specialist.

The first MarTech article was Salary and Career: Saidah Abdulhaqq about the making of a Unicorn.