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What are the most important roles for IT to play in day-to-day marketing?
MarketingCharts staff
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of articles from MarketingCharts, which provides up-to-the-minute data and research to marketers.
A new survey of more than 200 information technology and marketing decision-makers from the U.S. and Canada finds agreement that the IT team will become more intimately involved in day-to-day marketing, although each department appears to have different notions about how IT can help.
The survey from Lytics found 88 percent of IT respondents and 81 percent of marketing respondents believe that their organization’s IT team will become more involved in day-to-day marketing over the next five years.
Marketers were more likely than IT respondents to see the most common role that IT teams have in day-to-day marketing as giving marketing access to data (75 percent to 56 percent, respectively), and providing model data for marketing/ad campaigns and targeting (75 percent to 56 percent, respectively). IT more so than marketing respondents expect IT teams to play a bigger day-to-day marketing role in helping choose technology/SaaS vendors (76 percent to 54 percent, respectively).
Asked which technologies their marketing teams plan to adopt over the next five years, marketing respondents were more enthused about investing in customer data platforms while IT respondents favored investments in blockchain/smart contracts and data warehouses.
As for artificial intelligence (AI), though about two-thirds of both groups envision the integration of AI into the tech stack, marketing respondents more so than IT saw bigger benefits in automation of marketing tasks (50 percent to 39 percent, respectively), eliminating mistakes made in segmentation (41 percent to 30 percent, respectively), and informing the messaging in ads (35 percent to 24 percent, respectively).
IT respondents saw bigger AI benefits than marketing respondents from delivering personalized ads to customers (43 percent to 28 percent, respectively). About one-quarter (26 percent) of IT respondents believe AI will inform all of their targeting/segmentation, with no human input, while only 17 percent of marketers agree.
Marketers were also found to be more frustrated with the IT/marketing relationship. While 37 percent of IT leaders describe the dynamic as a “well-oiled machine,” only 16 percent of marketers agreed.
- 8 in 10 Marketers Foresee Growing Involvement for the IT Team in Day-to-Day Marketing – MarketingCharts
- Marketing and IT: The strategic partnership – Lytics
- 1 in 4 Marketers Say the CMO-CIO Working Relationship is “Very Effective” – MarketingCharts
- Making MarTech Pay Off – CMO Council
- These Are the Capabilities CMOs Feel Are Most Vital to Support Their Marketing Strategies – MarketingCharts
- The Annual CMO Spend Survey 2019-2020 Research – Gartner
- What’s the State of the Marketing-IT Relationship? – MarketingCharts
- CMO and C-Suite: The DNA of Partnership – Infosys
Discussion Questions
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: What role should IT play in day-to-day marketing? Where do you see IT and marketing mindsets clashing over priorities and strategies?
Poll
Loading …BrainTrust
Trevor Sumner
Head of AI and Innovation, Raydiant
Peter Charness
Retail Strategy - UST Global
Maybe the question should be, will marketing get involved in IT? As the analysis of raw base data through the building of AI/ML models get more commonplace, the roles will blur. IT is not the controller of data or how it will be used, rather it’s the custodian of insuring that up to date, accurate and relevant data is available to the business. The prioritization and use of that data should as always be with the business.
To add on to this, IT has to be involved to ensure the infrastructure is in place to make sure users can get to the data without jumping through hoops.
Marketing has become a technical driven vocation, built on data, AI and automation. Effective partnership with IT is key, but what’s more important is bringing technical DNA into your marketing organization. Technology is like electricity. It must be a part of every organization these days, not just a dedicated department. What’s most amazing to me is the 1 percent who see IT as helpful in anything other than those five buckets. What about collaboration, process automation, integration into internal systems, security, etc.? I don’t know many marketing organizations that don’t need more technical help. Maybe that’s why only 16 percent see their IT partnership as a well-oiled machine.
Digital ads and in-store media are becoming an important source of recurring revenue for retailers, which makes collaboration between IT and marketing even more essential. With increasing use of technology that connects online and offline channels, as well as self-service tools and loyalty programs, IT teams should already be joined at the hip with marketers to gather and analyze all streams of customer data into an effective customer experience.
Is the marketing team data savvy? Is the IT team marketing savvy? Maybe we need one more person in the mix. Someone who assures that the data marketing receives is in an actionable form.
For me, the logic is simple – look consumer-backward. The role of marketing is to reach the target audience to create awareness, drive consideration, and create demand and loyalty for the product. The target audience can be reached less and less through print newspapers, cable channels, and print magazines – they are surrounded by technology (smartphones, smart watches, smart cameras, CTV, gaming platforms, metaverse, so on and so forth) through which they are passively or actively sharing information about themselves, their likes, dislikes, needs, wants, frustrations, and anxieties. Marketing needs to be able to harness the omnipresent consumer data effectively to reach the target audience at the right moment with the right offer to drive awareness through sales. It cannot happen unless marketing and IT come together as MarkITing.
Surveys like these are interesting because they unintentionally highlight one key fact — retailers need marketing and IT to work like a well-oiled machine although most organizations are not at that stage just yet. No surprise to me which area marketing thinks they need It with vs which areas IT thinks marketing needs them. Marketers will often tell you that everyone else in the org thinks they understand how to do marketing’s job, and these survey results seem to prove that, even if unintentionally. The key is that more than ever, marketing is tech-driven and that means they need IT to be in sync with them more than ever. IT also needs to understand that they might not be able to predict what marketing needs, so maybe the real conclusion here is that both teams need to work together more regularly to understand each other and deliver the results they need for the retailer to be successful!
I remember a few years ago reading a prediction that by 2020 the CMO would have a larger IT budget than the CIO. Given the move to understanding customers through data this is not surprising.
Over the past 20+ years I have seen many examples of where operational teams — like marketing professionals — have had less confidence in new technology to aid them with decisions than IT. Change management is a key need here — the desire to effectively blend art and science (like AI) and give confidence takes time.
Retail marketers and merchandisers have had a hate-love relationship over the decades. They work well together when they collaborate through an aligned strategic approach to the business. IT has become integral to everything in business, and retail is no exception. Marketers must create a working relationship similar to what they’ve done with merchants. Marketing today is digital and data-driven; it is less art and more science; it is less flash and more hypothesis testing. You can’t be an effective marketer and ignore technology. Bottom line, department leaders need to create opportunities for collaborative and integrated work flows instead of throwing packages over the wall or setting one or the other up to fail.