Digital marketers are increasingly responsible for IT purchasing decisions- but cloud-based marketing services are cutting IT out of the purchasing cycle. Campbell Williams, Group Strategy and Marketing Director, Six Degrees Group looks at how marketers can work successfully with their IT colleagues to deliver the best campaigns.
With technology powering best practise across web, social, cloud and mobile marketing, the lines between marketing and IT are becoming more and more blurred. Modern campaigns require a strong online presence, and that makes them highly dependent on IT.
The definition of digital marketing excellence is constantly shifting and it’s no longer enough for marketing departments to be solely business focused. Marketers are not only heavy users of technology, but increasingly involved in technology procurement. This shift in spending power is rapid and dramatic – by 2017, Gartner predicts CMOs will actually spend more on IT than CIOs.
So, while many marketers have already developed deep technical knowledge to fit their specific needs, it’s clear that broader, more ‘traditional’ IT knowledge is becoming increasingly important.
Change driven by cloud
In recent years there has been a revolutionary emphasis on tech-driven campaigns. Much of this enormous technical change across the marketing industry has been driven by the huge range of applications and services delivered via the cloud.
For example, hosting website operations in the cloud provides the ability to run them smoothly whatever the size and complexity of the content they display. Marketers and web developers continue to create fantastic applications and content on company websites, but it is vital to be aware of the technology gap between creative developments and the performance limits of infrastructure. Hosting websites through a Managed Service Provider (MSP) allows in-house marketing departments to develop innovative functions without the worry of supporting infrastructure, which can sometimes be a hindrance.
Technology limitations are increasingly a concern for marketers who want to see their campaigns delivered with maximum effect. Considerations such as security, digital performance and compliance are becoming more frequent topics of conversation in and around marketing teams. This underlines the idea that as IT performs an increasingly vital role in customer engagement, communication, sales and conversion, the lines between marketing and technology are breaking down.
Marketing success keeps breaking the tech
There are many examples of highly successful marketing campaigns overwhelming the technology infrastructure that is supposed to facilitate them; great commercial opportunities very quickly turn into business and PR nightmares. This is where a broader technology perspective can help marketers, and where technologies such as cloud hosting come into their own. Is it sensible, for example, for marketers to design and implement campaigns without also having a technology strategy in place to cope with demand?
A great example is to look at organisations who face extreme, marketing-driven variations in their web traffic, such as music and entertainment festivals. Many now take a cloud-based MSP approach and migrate website operations off-premise to the cloud, allowing capacity to be added on a temporary basis. In practical terms, teams such as the one running Bestival can increase web server capacity to match key points in their calendar. They don’t have to make a capital outlay on technology infrastructure that is only ever used at peak times.
By using an MSP that can deliver flexibility on a commercial and technical level, companies that experience these peaks in traffic are able to maintain quality of service at crucial times, with minimal notice. The user therefore gets the best value out of their infrastructure, marketing departments can continue to innovate and customers always get communication and service availability. Once the traffic has calmed, the capacity can scale back down to its usual levels, saving money, time and headaches.
It is vital that companies continue to be innovative in the way they blend marketing excellence with technology know-how, and lead from the front to maintain customer engagement. This means that marketers need to continue to evolve their understanding of the technology choices open to them. Look at it this way; imagine if industry analysts were predicting that CIOs were going to spend more money on marketing than CMOs in two years time instead of the other way round? The CIOs would be expected to broaden their marketing knowledge considerably, use the latest best practice ideas, and to keep up with industry trends.
With 90% of technology spending in 2020 predicted to be driven by departments outside IT, the already massive impact of tech on organisations, employees, customers, partners, suppliers, stakeholders and especially marketing will continue to grow. The best CMOs and marketing departments of the future will be the ones that embrace technology, seek ways to make it work for them and do so much more than muddle through with tech.
Campbell Williams
Group Strategy and Marketing Director
Six Degrees Group
www.6dg.co.uk