Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Why Aligning Your Tech & Marketing Teams Is a Must

In today’s digital-first landscape, marketers are relying more and more on technology to improve customer experience, drive client growth, and capture and analyze valuable consumer data. As businesses continue to increase their MarTech budgets and implement new tools, collaboration between tech and marketing teams is fast becoming a strategic necessity.

When these two departments are in alignment, MarTech tools can be used to optimum efficiency. Marketers can use their expertise to drive market differentiation and create the best customer experience, while IT teams can focus on running, managing, and scaling the technology in a streamlined and cost-effective way. The entire organization benefits from this synergy, especially when it comes to maximizing the bottom line.

Why IT Departments Matter in Marketing

Today’s digital business environment requires that all companies, regardless of the product or service they provide, have some degree of technological expertise. 
While marketing teams may be the ones responsible for creating innovative and engaging content, the success of that content now relies heavily on how it’s presented and delivered from a technological standpoint.

Data-based and dynamic creatives, for example, depend on fast and precise IT systems in order to be effective. No matter how clever the messaging may be, it won’t convert if the data is not accurate. So it’s essential that, whenever appropriate, tech leads be brought in as early as possible to help with data-based marketing strategies, including:

Evaluating New Marketing Technologies

The rise of cloud-based SaaS software has made it possible for marketing teams to find and deploy applications without any involvement from their tech teams. But this is a mistake, even for startups and small business, as it limits the criteria by which an application is evaluated.

Marketers, naturally, will be focused on how a platform performs in terms of its ability to enhance campaign efforts and provide measurable ROI. While these are important metrics, a much more comprehensive picture of the tool’s efficiency comes into view when measured alongside tech-minded criteria such as reliability, data security, integration, and support needs.

Assisting With Implementation

Because some cloud-based marketing platforms require minimal tech skills to deploy, marketers may falsely assume that all enterprise-level applications can be integrated into their existing business systems with ease. But this is not the case — the processes are much more complicated the majority of the time and require careful planning to be most effective.
 

In order to ensure a smooth and efficient transition, a number of tech-focused factors need to be considered, including data migration, synchronization with other applications, permissions, mobile strategy, and integration with single sign-on systems. It’s also important to have a clear idea of how the application will be supported by IT teams once it’s been deployed moving forward.

Optimizing Analytics

Collaborating with IT teams to best leverage analytics tools helps boost ROI. Because in all likelihood, no matter how tech-savvy a team of marketers may be, they are typically not as familiar with the intricacies of analytics software as their tech-trained counterparts. When brought in early to assist with the development of specific project metrics, tech teams can help ensure all data are maximized and turned into actionable insights.

Customizing Automation Tools

Organizations are relying more and more on marketing automation to streamline workflows and optimize campaign performance.
While there is no shortage of automation tools available for marketers to utilize, most require some level of customization to be fully beneficial.
Additionally, when marketing teams collaborate with IT to identify and automate the manual tasks that slow them down the most (including basic admin work and tedious creative design tasks such as batching editing or file resizing), they can improve their productivity and run more efficiently.

Coming Together: 4 Quick Tips for Aligning Your Tech & Marketing Departments

  1. Meet Regularly: Have tech and marketing team leads meet at least one a month to review projects and align performance objectives.
  2. Create Joint Roadmaps: Map projects with IT’s involvement from the outset, outlining the skills and capabilities needed from each team.
  3. Assign Roles: Avoid conflict mid-project by clearly defining and documenting which team owns what. Make sure all team members understand their role and responsibilities.
  4. Invest in Cross-Training: Provide opportunities for marketers to upgrade their tech skills via marketing analytics, data science, or other relevant courses.

In Conclusion

As marketing strategy becomes more reliant on systems and data to succeed, the need for collaboration between tech and marketing teams has become essential. And while this urgency has certainly increased over the last fourteen months, harmony between these two departments has proved to be a beneficial business strategy long before the pandemic. In a 2018 study from McKinsey, for example, companies with CMOs who worked closely with IT to achieve business goals were found to be more successful, increasing revenues at 10% a year.
 
A unified approach means better business all around, as well as highly targeted marketing campaigns that utilize data to deliver optimized and personalized experiences and maximize your ROI.

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