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The definition
What is a marketing engineer?
mar·ket·ing en·gi·neer noun
A marketer who uses AI to learn exactly why people buy, then puts on-brand marketing on every channel, at a pace no traditional team can match.
StrategicProcess-drivenCreative
maths, science and creativity rolled into one
By Mary-Anne Da’Marzo, The Marketing Engineer
· Facts checked 18 October 2026 · 11 minute read
Brand first
The brand sits in the middle. Everything a marketing engineer does plugs into it. Hover or tap a point.
Read moreI’ve been talking about AI on my channels since January 2023. I first wrote that marketers were becoming marketing engineers on LinkedIn in January 2025. A few weeks later, on 10 February 2025, I said it on camera: “Marketers aren’t just Marketers anymore... we’re Marketing ENGINEERS.” (watch it on TikTok). I’ve called myself The Marketing Engineer ever since, and people still ask me what that actually means.
Search for it and you’ll mostly find one answer: a technical person at a big tech company who builds automations. That’s one slice of it. This is the whole thing, from someone who does it every day.
The receipts
I've been talking about AI since January 2023
It started before AI, at 6am in a Starbucks in 2020. My first AI video went out eight weeks after ChatGPT launched. By 2024 I was feeding custom GPTs our clients' brand guidelines. In 2025 I gave the job a name. In 2026 I built the brain. Step through it in my own posts.
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Mary-Anne Da’MarzoThe Marketing Engineer · 11 Dec 2025I built my first AI frameworks at 6am in Starbucks in 2020
because I had £2,000 and no senior staff.
When I started the business, I couldn’t afford experienced hires.
I had grads. Hungry, brilliant but brand new.…see more· Where it started (told on LinkedIn, 11 December 2025)
Frameworks before AI
"I built my first AI frameworks at 6am in Starbucks in 2020 because I had £2,000 and no senior staff."
"I didn't realise until this year that with these very frameworks... I'd already built the foundation for AI."
Read the story on LinkedIn -
TikTok · Instagram · Video
My first AI video
"So you will be able to get an AI full answer for a search query instead of just a list of links."
Eight weeks after ChatGPT launched.
7,511 views48 comments
Watch on TikTok Watch on Instagram -
TikTok · Instagram · Video
Brand first, already
"If you're using a custom GPT and you've fed it with the right information, the results are outstanding."
We were already feeding custom GPTs our clients' brand guidelines: "It's like having another member of our team that's fully, fully embedded into the client's brand."
46,500 views1,048 saves241 comments
Watch on TikTok Watch on Instagram -
Mary-Anne Da’MarzoThe Marketing Engineer · 18 Dec 2024Want to build a GPT tailored to your brand?
I’m continuously building custom GPTs for my agency, and I think I’ve now got it down to an absolute science.
What actually makes a GPT brilliant is the knowledge you upload.…see more· LinkedIn post
The knowledge is the point
"What actually makes a GPT brilliant is the knowledge you upload."
Read the original on LinkedIn -
Mary-Anne Da’MarzoThe Marketing Engineer · 22 Jan 2025Marketing Agencies as we know them are dying. Here’s my take on where we’re heading and why I’m SO excited.
Agencies won’t just create campaigns; we’ll engineer the marketing machines that drive them.…see more· LinkedIn post
The first time I said "marketing engineer"
"Agencies won't just create campaigns; we'll engineer the marketing machines that drive them."
It ended: "Are you ready to become a marketing engineer? Pass me the spanner, I'm all in."
Read the original on LinkedIn -
LinkedIn · TikTok · Instagram · Video, then on LinkedIn
Most watchedThe video that named the job
4 million views on LinkedIn
"I believe marketers will end up becoming marketing engineers."
TikTok: 28,800 views744 saves226 shares
Watch on LinkedIn Watch on TikTok Watch on Instagram -
TikTok carouselOpen on TikTok
· Carousel
From prompts to systems
"Anyone can prompt. The people pulling ahead are building the system behind it."
"Prompts are cheap. Systems compound."
Watch on TikTok -
TikTok · YouTube · Video
Brands that mean something
"Marketing engineers create brands that mean something."
Watch on TikTok Watch on YouTube -
Instagram · LinkedInSee the carousel
· LinkedIn post
Marketing Engineers goes live
"Two and a half years of building. Wall after wall. Then, in the last 10 days, everything clicked."
The do-it-yourself home of B.R.A.I.N.™ opened its waitlist.
Join the waitlist -
· This page
Where I've landed
"We have to take 17 steps back to take 1,000 forward."
The machine still matters. It just has to know who you are first.
Why now
Why the role exists now
Being a good marketer has meant juggling a ridiculous number of tools. Analytics. Research tools. A dashboard for every social channel. Meta ads, Google Ads, Search Console, Google Analytics, Tag Manager. ManyChat, Klaviyo, and the list goes on. The different types of Amazon seller account. Then the creative itself, and making sense of your market, your culture and every conversation happening across the web.
Go on, I dare youGo and find any agency owner and tell me subscriptions aren’t one of their biggest spends.
So we tab-jumped. We downloaded spreadsheets, ran VLOOKUPs and tried to stitch a picture together before the week ran out.
Then the tech caught up. AI can now research, write and publish. And most people use it to churn out more AI slop: content that sounds like everyone else, because nobody taught the AI anything first.
A marketing engineer uses AI the other way round. They teach it the brand and its buyers so deeply that everything it makes lands.
The job
What a marketing engineer actually does
- 01
Breaks the brand down into every layer
Vision. Mission. Values. Why people should choose you. Tone of voice. And the real people who buy. A marketing engineer writes every layer down properly, because AI can only be as good as what you teach it.
- 02
Finds the real people behind the “target audience”
A customer avatar isn’t “women aged 25 to 35”. That’s where you start, not where you finish. A marketing engineer uses AI to find real conversations, happening in real moments, in every group of people who buy: what they say in their own words, and what they’re happy, sad or fed up about. We call these deep avatars. (More on this in buyer persona vs customer avatar.)
- 03
Knows why they really buy
Then they get to the core of why one particular deep avatar would buy one particular product. That takes human psychology and sales methods. In our world it takes The Hierarchy of Desire™, my own framework for why people really buy, plus more than 50 frameworks I’ve built over 13 years in sales and marketing, baked into how we read customer psychology and how we sell to each person.
- 04
Knows every channel inside out
A marketing engineer knows every place on the internet where video, photos or words can go, and the small rules of each one. On this platform you can put links in the comments; on that one you can’t. This one wants these sizes, not those. They cover paid and organic, search and social, email and newsletters, TikTok and TikTok Shop, Amazon and your own website.
They know when a platform launches a new format, the day it lands.
- 05
Lives in three places at once
A marketing engineer sits in the culture of right now, in the head of their deep avatar, and in the numbers, all at the same time. What’s the web talking about this week, channel by channel? Does it match what we’re promoting, in every single thing we put out?
Knowing what people share today, exactly who you’re talking to and what’s working, with every channel at your fingertips? That’s when you move like a creative cannonball across the whole business.
- 06
Knows the story of every asset
Every photo, video and piece of copy a brand has ever made matters. A marketing engineer knows where each one started, why and when it was made, every edit and version since, where it lives now and how it performed.
When assets live on one person’s desktop, or an old hard drive, they disappear the day that person leaves. Not here. And once every asset knows how it performed, your analytics stop being a report you dread and become the thing you create from.
One real asset, its whole story
“We’re Marketing ENGINEERS”Video · 2 min 15 s- Startedmy first video naming the job
- Whyto say marketers are becoming marketing engineers
- When10 February 2025
- Livesone shared library, tagged and searchable
- Went outTikTok and Instagram, same evening
- Performed28,800 views, 744 saves, 226 shares on TikTok
The weekly question
Tone deaf or tone dialled?
This is the question I ask about every brand, every week. A marketing engineer doesn’t look channel by channel. They look across the whole brand, and they ask:
- What’s the web talking about this week? Does it match what we’re promoting?
- Does our website tell the same story as our socials, our emails and our ads?
- Does everything we publish, in words, photos and video, say what our deep avatars actually want to hear?
- And against what’s happening in that corner of culture right now, are we tone deaf, or tone dialled?
Tone deaf
12%Harmony Score
DeafDialled
Drag the dial. Watch the post change.
Where I part ways
Brand first, then the machine
This is where I part ways with most of what’s written about this role.
The usual answer says a marketing engineer “builds the machine”: automations, agents, workflows. But a machine that doesn’t know who you are just makes generic content faster. That’s how you get AI slop.
I understand why people are wary of AI that writes and posts on its own. They’re wrong that it can’t work. It fails when nobody did the work first: building the foundations so the AI knows the brand, the products, the customers and why they buy.
17steps back
1,000forward
“We have to take 17 steps back to take 1,000 forward.”
That’s the difference between building with AI and making AI slop. Lay the foundations, and AI marketing lands with the people you want to reach, naturally and effortlessly.
One place
One control room, not twenty tabs
The tools we use aren’t going away. The way we use them will change completely.
Instead of logging into twenty dashboards, a marketing engineer works from one place, a brand brain (in our world, the B.R.A.I.N.™), that holds everything on the right.
So when you need to promote a product, or dream up a campaign, you start with everything in front of you. You get creative, make decisions, plan the creative and publish: video, photos or words, on brand every time.
Anyone can use AI. Plenty of people are building little prompt packs in separate chats, where nothing talks to anything else. A marketing engineer builds one place where the whole team can research, understand the market, the competitors and the data, plan the creative, make the content and get it out.
It’s an absolute weapon.
- Brand guidelines, and how it talks, looks and sounds, locked in
- Products every one, and how they’re grouped
- Customers every group, and the best way to sell each product to each of them
- Markets the communities you want to win
- Search what people look for, when and why
- Culture what the web and the media are saying right now, and how people feel
- Competitors what they’re up to, on every channel, as it happens
The scoreboard
The Echo System: three numbers a marketing engineer watches
01 · What goes out
Total Distribution
How many pieces of writing, photos and video the brand put out across the internet this week.
02 · What comes back
Total Echo
How many times the internet talked back: every mention of the brand, anywhere, this week.
03 · Is it all in tune
Harmony Score
A percentage. How closely what we say, what everyone says back to us and what our website says all match.
What you put out, what comes back, and whether it’s all in tune. If Total Distribution climbs and Total Echo doesn’t move, the work isn’t landing. If the Harmony Score drops, somewhere the brand has gone tone deaf.
The toolkit in your head
The skills a marketing engineer needs
Strategy
- Brand strategy: writing down who a brand is, layer by layer, until anyone (or any AI) could pick it up and run with it
- Customer research: finding real people, their real words and the moments they buy in
- Psychology and selling: why people buy, what stops them, and what moves them to act
Process
- Systems thinking: documenting a process so well that a junior hire, or an AI, can follow it first time
- Organisation: naming, tagging and filing everything so it can be found in seconds, by you or your AI
- Quality control: checking AI’s work the way you’d check a new team member’s, and teaching it when it’s wrong
Creativity
- Creative judgement: knowing good when you see it, and spotting the angle AI won’t see on its own
- Culture: knowing what’s happening right now, and when to stay quiet
Channels and numbers
- Channel know-how: the rules, formats and sizes on every platform, paid and organic, search and social
- Data: reading search, sales and social numbers, then turning them into the next idea
You don’t need to code. You need to think in systems, write things down properly and care about the craft. Maths, science and creativity, rolled into one.
Your browser, right now
The tools: tab after tab after tab
Here’s a short list of the apps, tools and browser windows any marketer has open on any given day: Google Analytics, Search Console, Tag Manager, Meta Ads Manager, Google Ads, ManyChat, Klaviyo, a social scheduler, Shopify, Amazon Seller Central, TikTok Shop, a design tool, a research tool, three spreadsheets and the brief you can never find.
Look at any marketer’s Chrome window. Tab after tab after tab after tab. I used to be the queen of it. A marketing engineer still uses those tools. They just reach them through an AI that already knows the brand, instead of hopping between tabs.
Me? I run my whole business with AI now. I still open the channels myself to reply to comments, because that personal touch matters to me. AI just means I get round to more people.
Spot the difference
Marketing engineer vs similar roles
RoleWhat they focus onWhere they start
Marketing engineerThat’s usThe whole brand: who it is, who buys and why, and getting on-brand marketing onto every channel with AIThe brand and the buyer
Growth marketerTesting ideas to grow numbers, usually one channel or funnel at a timeA number to move
CRO specialist (growth CRO)Testing pages, checkouts and forms so more visitors buy or sign upA page or a checkout
Marketing operationsRunning and maintaining the marketing tools, data and processesThe tools
GTM engineerBuilding automated sales and outreach systems, usually for B2B sales teamsThe sales pipeline
Growth engineerWriting code to improve sign-ups and product growthThe product
The roles overlap. The difference is where a marketing engineer starts: with the brand and the buyer, not the tool.
Don’t mix it up
“Marketing engineering” has two meanings
mar·ket·ing en·gi·neer·ing noun
- The new role
Using AI to know a brand and its buyers deeply, then putting on-brand marketing on every channel. Most people searching for it today mean this one, the role on this page.
- The academic field
Using maths models to support marketing decisions, like forecasting and pricing (Wikipedia).
My story
What it means for me as a business owner
This didn’t start with AI (the long version is my story). I spent 13 years in sales and marketing, starting as employee number 3 at Juice, where the founding team grew it from £0 to £14m. Then I left a £130k job for £0 to start my agency.
I couldn’t afford senior talent, so I hired grads and wrote everything down: line by line, word by word, or on Loom videos, to train them. My first frameworks were written at 6am in a Starbucks in 2020. Every one of our 50+ frameworks was written by hand, by me, before AI could do any of this.
When AI got good enough, all of that became the training. What you see now has been two and a half years in the making.
Operating like a marketing engineer means I finally have the creative space and energy to get my thoughts out into the world in a way that makes me creatively squeal inside. My vision of how I wanted to share my message now matches how it actually lands, in every photo, every graphic and every piece of writing.
13years in sales and marketing
£0 → £14mfounding team at Juice
50+frameworks, written by hand
6amStarbucks, 2020: where it started
Is it you?
Who can become a marketing engineer?
Anyone who’s tired of tool-hopping and ready to do the groundwork. You don’t need to be technical, and you don’t need to work at a big company.
Creators
Who want their content to sound like them on every channel
E-commerce brandsWith products to sell to very different people
Service businessesThat need leads and booked calls, not just likes
In-house marketers
Who want to become the most useful person in the room
Start here
How to start
- 1
Write your brand down
Every layer, in plain words. If a 12-year-old can’t follow it, it’s not finished.
- 2
Find your real customers
Their words, from real conversations, not made-up personas.
- 3
Put it all in one place your AI can use
Then start publishing from it.
or let me teach you
The B.R.A.I.N.™ course walks you through building your own brand brain, step by step. Doors open 1 December.
Want it done for you instead? That’s what Firebelly does.
Quick answers
Quick answers
What does a marketing engineer do?
They use AI to learn why a brand’s customers really buy, then put on-brand marketing on every channel, quickly, from one place.
Do you need to code to be a marketing engineer?
No. You need to think in systems, write things down properly and care about the creative. AI handles most of the technical work.
What’s the difference between a marketing engineer and a growth marketer?
A growth marketer tests ideas to grow a number, often one channel at a time. A marketing engineer starts with the whole brand and its buyers, then works across every channel.
Is a marketing engineer the same as a GTM engineer?
No. A GTM engineer usually builds automated sales and outreach systems for B2B sales teams. A marketing engineer covers the brand, the customers and every marketing channel.
Can a small business have a marketing engineer?
Yes. Creators, small e-commerce brands and service businesses can do it themselves with the right foundations. That’s exactly what the B.R.A.I.N.™ course teaches.
How do I become a marketing engineer?
Write your brand down layer by layer, find your real customers’ words, and put it all in one place AI can use. The B.R.A.I.N.™ course walks you through it.