I was first introduced to the idea of a "T shaped marketer" in Mike King's session "Technical marketing is just the price of admission" at Inbound 2015. It gave me a better understanding of where marketing is today and what I need to do to be a successful marketer.
If you've been in inbound marketing for very long you know that no piece of inbound marketing can succeed on it's own. In order to succeed, your different inbound tactics have to work together to form a comprehensive strategy. As I showed in my post "The B2B Inbound Solar System: Dimensions of A Solid Inbound Strategy" you can't do SEO if you don't have content, you can't have content if you don't have a website, you can't have social media if you don't have content and so on and so forth.
Because of this, it often helps to have a broad understanding of inbound marketing to be effective. But you can't know everything about everything, so what's the balance? The solution to this predicament that many have proposed is the "T-shaped marketer."