Marketers and IT staff too often see their interests as competing, placing themselves at opposing sides of the conference table. Traditionally, marketing focused on higher-level brand strategy and sales optimisation, while IT dealt with product development and back-end infrastructure.
These departments worked in silos with little two-way communication to mutually assess priorities or goals and marketers too often viewed IT as a service department – an area to be bypassed whenever possible – while IT thought marketing was disinterested in their business ideas and strategy.
With technology expanding the way marketing is understood today, organisations are beginning to change how they operate and shift the roles in the C-suite. Because of increased customer engagement opportunities and the technologies required to drive these efforts, digital platforms are both more important and less controlled than ever. Each innovation is instrumental in helping to secure new customers, build their loyalty, and introduce them to new products, but they also deepen the need for convergence between marketing and technology.
The current digitisation of everything has significant implications for businesses – particularly for marketing and technical departments – and extends to changes around staff, responsibility, and structure. Having a sophisticated, multi-platform customer engagement plan is no longer a nice-to-have but rather a core requirement for companies. This is, subsequently, driving the need for marketing to gain more of a technical understanding and for IT to be more business-focused.
A recent article in Loyalty Today explained the evolution of the CMO and CIO roles with CMOs now “both required and empowered to drive innovation to reach and convert more customers. They need technology to perform their job and much of it is accessible without the blessing of the CIO.”
Areas such as monitoring data collection by vendors and tag management no longer falls solely on the terrain of the CIO; marketers need to be more quantitative and be able to convert this information into operational strategies. In the same token, CIOs need to leverage their technology expertise to be able to articulate analytical insights and explain the effects of technological changes on the marketplace to the rest of the executive team.
While the call for increased collaboration between the CIO and CMO roles has gained traction, significant challenges and shifting priorities still exist. A study conducted by Accenture revealed that “45% of CIOs report that they put marketing IT near or at the top of their priorities, whereas 54% of CMOs think marketing IT is placed at the bottom of the CIOs priority list.” This gap is driven by a number of factors – while marketing is focused on extracting data and turning it into relevant customer experiences, IT is concerned with customer privacy and security and brand protection. Often times, these goals conflict with each other.
Additionally, as expectations rise and the number of vendors an organisation needs to manage increases, departments tend to communicate less with one another. More often than not, CMOs and CIOs don’t trust each other, resulting in misalignment on how technology should support and enable marketing performance. This communication gap has been magnified by cloud solutions and third-party adoption across departments, and this is especially the case in companies that have not assigned a leader to oversee all vendor selection and implementation. The danger of poor marketing cloud management is that it jeopardises optimisation efforts and can cause operational risk, inefficiency and security issues.
In order to survive as a business today, the disconnect between department heads needs to be reconciled. Forward-thinking enterprises are paving the way with the creation of a hybrid role: the Chief Marketing Technologist (CMT) who not only technically manages third-party tags, but also oversees their strategy and effectiveness. In fact, over 81% of big companies now have a CMT in place. As for CIOs, their role is becoming more business-focused with a venture capitalist mindset towards vendor management. Interestingly enough, Gartner predicts that by 2017 the CMO will spend more on IT than the CIO.
Cross-department communication and trust are vital towards creating greater collaboration and an optimised marketing cloud. The Accenture study revealed five imperatives to help improve marketing and IT performance that include:
- Identifying the CMO as the chief experience officer
- Accepting IT as a strategic partner with marketing
- Agreeing on key business levers
- Changing the skill mix to ensure that both departments are marketing and tech savvy
- And last but certainly not least, developing trust.
At the end of the day, good cloud management begins with marketing and tech working together to maintain and grow their customer base. Transparency is key to ensuring that all relevant players are aware of what’s going on beneath the surface. At Ghostery, we’ve seen clients who have successfully implemented these initiatives into their own business and have experienced very positive outcomes. We encourage more businesses to do the same.
