Are you a marketing analyst or technologist? Your job can be more than creating reports on how the latest campaign went or making sure the website is up. (I view that as extremely important work, by the way, but your job could be even more).

Marketing is increasingly about technology, analytics, and data.

• Every major business intelligence vendor has a section on their site about big data for marketing.
• “Marketing technology” is a thing.
• So are rigorous marketing experiments.
• There’s an increasing role for UX in all aspects of marketing, and there are lots of evidence-based recommendations in that area.

But in marketers’ day-to-day work, a lot of this stuff isn’t being used and the technical and analytical knowledge hasn’t spread yet.

• Email click-through rate benchmarks exist, but when was the last time you saw these benchmarks included in a spreadsheet that calculates where marketing time and money should be invested? How often are these even read, especially at small companies?
• As a digital marketer, I often get requests for “how to make content search-engine friendly”, and what keywords to use: the popular conception of SEO as keyword stuffing still exists.
• Pageviews are still used as a measure for success on the web. Even unique visitors are still used, though what really matters is something else, like revenue.
• When was the last time you did a survey of what new marketing technologies are out there, that can replace what you have? I’ve always been a CrazyEgg devotee, but then last week I tried HotJar and Inspectlet. I’ve always used Buffer, but had never checked out HootSuite, which does some things a lot better. Is ProductHunt’s Marketing list on your daily reading list?

Marketing is not as creative, fun, effective, and efficient as it could be. This is actually our fault, as digital marketers, as analysts, and as marketing technologists. It’s our job to help our colleagues work better and more efficiently. The good news is that we can provide tremendous value to the organizations we work for by educating them on current trends, and by making suggestions for ways to improve.

So, to get back to what I was saying above: you can expand your job dramatically. In addition to running reports, you can add:

• Educating people on the latest digital marketing best practices. Maybe that’s just one quick email every couple weeks. Include sources, and data for what you say.
• Understanding best practices for reporting, and suggesting metrics that are aligned well with what your organization is trying to accomplish.
• Automating everything you do and giving your colleagues the tools to do it themselves.
• Suggesting better technologies that replace what you’re currently using. Using what you have more efficiently.

In doing so, you become a trusted advisor within your organization and help drive better performance.