Popular culture tells us that marketers and technologists could not be more different. In some ways, that is true. Both are complex and creative fields, yet they operate on different timelines. In the marketing world, a project can last weeks, days or even hours. For IT, a project could require years to execute.
Until recently, this disparity was not an issue, explains Digitlab's director, Mike Saunders: "If we look at, say, the last 10 years, the digital marketing landscape was in a sense all about social media. Social media is a relatively simple thing when it comes to technical complexity. You understand the platform, you create content that goes onto that platform and learn how to leverage the mechanics of the platform so that you can get content to distribute. But as marketing has matured technologically and consumers become more tech savvy, we're starting to see that the need for marketing technology is becoming so much greater."
This shift has big implications for businesses. If marketing and technology are on the same page in an integrated digital world, the returns are incredible. Companies with cultures where marketing and IT communicate foster innovation and accurate customer-centric results.
But if there is disharmony, a type of digital divorce starts to happen.
The rising importance of MarTech
Marketing technology, or MarTech, is growing fast in relevance and capability. Vendors such as Salesforce are investing billions in growing markets with new tools powered by data and AI. As it becomes more critical to connect with customer behaviours, marketing activities align closely with areas such as sales and lead generation. But it also creates more complexity for the IT stack.
According to the Gartner Marketing Technology Survey 2020, only 58% of companies use their MarTech stack's full breadth of capabilities. And KPMG's Making MarTech Pay Off report says only 23% of companies have "very effective" CMO-CIO working relationships.
Why is this a problem for the big picture of company IT? Saunders explains: "There is a maturity in the products. Strong partners in the marketing environment bring some really interesting opportunities to clients. But the problem is that clients aren't really in a position to integrate them into existing IT infrastructures. You start to find yourself in a place where the marketing technology is adopted in an isolated environment, because it's what the marketing team needs to launch. But then IT have to work in their own silos to provide other important infrastructure, and eventually, as the new marketing technology gains traction, it creates an unpleasant internal friction as these marketing innovations become business as usual for marketing divisions. You end up with this very slow divorce of two integral parts of the business."
In other words, the very forward-facing world of marketing starts to pull away from the stable backend of IT. This results in fracturing, silos and shadow IT – all poisoning the well of an integrated digital business. But since marketing and IT are rarely around the same table, don't speak the same language, and move at different cadences, the split goes unnoticed.
Ultimately, the business suffers. As Denise Lee Yohn wrote in a Harvard Business Review article, Why Great Innovation Needs Great Marketing: "Understanding people's fundamental needs and drivers, identifying customers, and developing the entire go-to-market and usage ecosystem are the essential aspects of marketing – and the ones that the success of innovations, especially breakthrough ones, hinge upon."
Bring marketing and IT together
Aligning IT and marketing is not an easy task. Crucially, they move at different speeds. But problems typically centre around two concerns: IT doesn't have a rapport with marketing, and marketing doesn't appreciate the impact of new technologies on the overall stack.
"Marketing can be sensitive to the fact that how IT infrastructure is built has major repercussions that go beyond just launching the next campaign," says Saunders. "There needs to be an understanding of what the right pieces of technology are at the right stages. There's a space for creating a culture, an environment where people could float ideas easily within the organisation to solve problems."
How can companies build such a culture? Ultimately, it doesn't emerge from just one role. But that is the place to start: find a person or people who understand marketing and grasp technology fundamentals. They can often be the CMO – 60% of chief marketing officers with very effective IT relationships have multi-year MarTech strategies in place, according to KPMG. CIOs can also take the initiative and look at the opportunities of integrated MarTech stacks that often overlap with sales systems. Sales directors can be effective mediators as well.
"It's about building human-centric technology that people want to use," says Saunders. "Operationally, roles that connect areas such as marketing, sales and IT are very important. Companies should aspire to create those roles, and then equip them to bring in the right partners together."
This arrangement is not nice to have. It is crucial if a business wants to be competitively integrated. In a sense, the two sides have something in common. Both used to be held at arm's length – contributing to the business but not necessarily seen as core to the business. Times have changed. In a digital, data-driven and customer-centric world, integrated marketing and IT form the bedrock of innovation and success. The better they understand one another and strategise, the more the business wins.
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