Marketing knows that technology is important for building an organization that puts the customer first.
If IT and Marketing: Understanding Each Other and Working Together, companies succeed in turning their marketing strategy into reality.
IT and Marketing on Equal Footing
Marketing is impatient and wants to be able to roll out campaigns quickly. IT must dare to innovate and let go of the old ways. To move quickly, it’s no longer feasible to build applications from scratch. It’s often much more interesting to expand an existing platform by integrating it with existing applications and databases (i.e., “hybrid cloud”). IT must know what’s available and understand how to meet the needs of marketing.
The trend is that marketing thinks it no longer needs IT. But to make a marketing automation To develop the platform, it is essential that IT and marketing work closely together.
Marketing must understand that IT is responsible for the security of customer data and company information. If the marketing department wants to launch “the next big cloud marketing platform,” IT—as the security watchdog—must conduct the necessary research and take the appropriate measures.
IT needs to understand that marketing and sales must have access to real-time customer data:
- to identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities
- to view the evolution of customer value for a single customer, a segment, an account manager's portfolio, etc.
- to view the latest sales statistics compared to the set targets by territory, by sales team, by salesperson, …
- to see the response a marketing campaign generates
- …
Real-time access to this data is essential for management to effectively steer marketing and sales efforts and remain competitive.
Of course, Rome wasn’t built in a day. IT and marketing must work together to develop a roadmap for achieving the objectives in various stages. The essential shared knowledge is: knowing what data is needed to make the right management decisions and understanding how the marketing strategy can be implemented. If IT and marketing can collaborate as equals to achieve the company’s shared objectives, ‘’That's when the magic happens.".
