Are you interested in learning more about the single biggest breakthrough to accelerate all your programs and technologies? We have discovered through our daily consulting with clients that most marketers and analysts aren’t aware of all the data they already have in their back-end systems.
We have developed a 3 Step Process to begin your pursuits towards using your data to a higher level. In this article, I am only going to focus on the benefits of Step One — the importance of Marketing engaging with IT. So, in short, if you, as a Marketer want to drive deeper personalization, segmentation and targeting on your website, you better think about bringing donuts to the IT group. Seriously, though, you will need to start learning the language of IT so that you can communicate more effectively about your shared goals.
In our upcoming webinar “How Marketers win with the Data Layer” we will discuss more about how to speak a common language. But for now, I want to give you more rationale for breaking down the barriers between Marketing and IT.
Step One: Engaging with IT
In 2012, Gartner famously predicted that in five years, marketers will spend more on technology than IT will.* At the close of 2015, we can firmly say that CMO’s are well on their way to making good on this prediction.
Would you believe that there are over 3,000 martech (marketing technology) vendors today and that their ranks are swelling by 300-500 vendors a year? With the choices for technology solutions proliferating and the budgets required to support them expanding, too, it is critical to be collaborative to deal with this complexity most effectively.
More Benefits of Marketing and IT Collaboration
There are some additional benefits you will realize as you build the communication bridge between IT and Marketing. And once you have this foundation you can really start to uncover not only what data you are already capturing and not using to its highest potential, but also what other data sources you could mine for your marketing efforts.
- A stronger focus on the customer. IT has typically focused on the back-end and Marketing the front-end. This leads to a siloed view of priorities and requirements from each group. Given the need to truly balance investments on both sides of the business to serve your customer effectively, it is best to come together to make these decisions and see where you can find synergies as well as conflicts with your forward looking strategies.
- Cultivating and Agile and Data Driven workplace. When IT is engaged with the decision-making around marketing technologies, IT can transform to have a more end-to-end view of the technology solution. IT will no longer see a technology as something tied to one program. IT begins to see how their systems can offer holistic solutions and IT can be more effective across the organization by having the vision to derive insights and share them broadly.
- Having the user experience as the coalescing function. Both functional areas need to be in lock step to create the most seamless customer journey. So having the teams working together through the creation of solutions and development of marketing programs ensures tighter integration.
I hope you are compelled to learn more about this topic. Our webinar featuring Matt Coers, Numeric’s Digital Architecture Practice Lead and Ensighten’s James Niehaus, VP of Strategy and Analytics offers a truly unique and visionary look at this important topic. Matt provides the technical landscape of the data layer and why it’s important and James colors in this vision with real-world client examples and challenges that bring the concepts to life. You are guaranteed to learn something actionable to apply towards your marketing plans or at least some inspiring water cooler talk to share with your colleagues.
Register for the webinar here
* CIO-to-CMO Transition of Power Is Becoming a Reality, Tom Kaneshige, CIO, October 14, 2014.
