You’re prob­a­bly read­ing this col­umn because you’re either research­ing how to inte­grate mar­ket­ing into your entire orga­ni­za­tion, or you’ve already done it and need ideas to keep it run­ning smoothly. It’s prob­a­bly also true that in your orga­ni­za­tion, Mar­ket­ing and Devel­op­ment aren’t aligned as tightly as they need to be to make your com­pany run smoothly, and you’re look­ing for solutions.

I never intended to become an inter­me­di­ary between Mar­ket­ing and IT, but some­how, even from my early days of inter­net mar­ket­ing con­sult­ing back in the ‘90s, I ended up there. There were times when I wasn’t sure whether I was a mar­ket­ing con­sul­tant or a tech­nol­ogy con­sul­tant, but that blur­ring was the exact bal­ance needed at the moment.

The field that needed this blur­ring became Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing. To func­tion, a dig­i­tal mar­keter needs to know how tech­nol­ogy plays in defin­ing the cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, in deliv­er­ing strate­gic cus­tomer insight, and in the dig­i­tal engage­ment itself. Tech­nol­ogy is, quite sim­ply, inher­ent in dig­i­tal marketing.

The dan­ger that comes with this is falling in love with tech­nol­ogy, and for­get­ting that tech­nol­ogy must always be sub­servient to purpose.

2 Prob­lems Work­ing With IT Solves

One exam­ple is that Mar­ket­ing will often take on a tech­nol­ogy project in the name of it being a “mar­ket­ing project”, when they would be bet­ter off col­lab­o­rat­ing with the IT depart­ment. Mar­ket­ing doesn’t have the tech­ni­cal exper­tise to do it well, so they end up in var­i­ous sorts of trou­ble, often with with scal­ing or secu­rity. These are par­tic­u­larly prob­lems with mobile and social tech­nolo­gies. Either the com­pany ends up in trou­ble, or IT has to come in and fix up the mess, both of which aggra­vate the rela­tions between the two departments.

The worst result, from a cor­po­rate per­spec­tive, is that Mar­keters spend their valu­able time tin­ker­ing with tools rather than engag­ing with cus­tomers (You’ve heard of the Social Media black hole, haven’t you?).

A sec­ond exam­ple is the use of ana­lyt­ics tools. Mar­ket­ing peo­ple all too often fall in love with their ana­lyt­ics tools, as if the tool will replace think­ing, empa­thy and insight. The result is motion, com­mo­tion, and much action, but not progress. What is miss­ing is the human-​​to-​​human con­nec­tion that comes when peo­ple read past the data into the lives of their cus­tomers, and then adjust the mar­ket­ing cam­paigns in ways that result in more conversions.

Oddly, the prob­lem in this case is sim­ply infor­ma­tion over­load, and that is where col­lab­o­rat­ing with IT would help.

Mar­ket­ing needs to com­mu­ni­cate KPIs and other mar­ket­ing goals to IT, and let the tech depart­ment tune the ana­lyt­ics sys­tem to them. Then the Mar­ket­ing peo­ple can spend their time doing what is most impor­tant — adjust­ing the cam­paigns to meet the KPIs, not sift­ing through moun­tains of con­fus­ing and largely irrel­e­vant data.

Finally, tak­ing the reverse rela­tion­ship, I found in my orga­ni­za­tions that tech didn’t hate mar­ket­ing as much as lore would indi­cate. They just wanted a lit­tle respect. They really appre­ci­ated it, for instance, when I involved them in our web­site tech­nol­ogy analy­sis work instead of only call­ing them when there was a cri­sis. The analy­sis was for mar­ket­ing pur­poses, but the request showed respect for the exper­tise and capa­bil­i­ties of the peo­ple in the IT department.

I could give you more sto­ries, but the moral of each is that the two work­ing together can do more to cre­ate kick-​​ass cus­tomer rel­e­vance than either work­ing separately.

Take a fresh look at your orga­ni­za­tion and see where the two depart­ments can seam­lessly work together. See how much bet­ter things will go when they do. See if you can get the col­lab­o­ra­tion started.

Related arti­cles

• Avoid These Top Five Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Mis­takes (customerthink.com)
• Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing: What’s Next For the Dig­i­tal World? (digitalvegetarian.com)
• Adobe To Acquire Dig­i­tal Mar­ket­ing Agency Effi­cient Fron­tier (searchengineland.com)
• The Evo­lu­tion of Mar­ket­ing Agen­cies and Con­sul­tan­cies (marketingprofs.com)

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