CIOs and CMOs may come from vastly different backgrounds, but there is no reason they can’t form the kind of collaborative partnership that is focused on a common business goal.
Recently there has been a lot of discussions around the increasing link between IT spending and CMOs, as well as the challenges for CIOs to stay relevant. Marketing projects may represent the kind of opportunity for both sides to provide demonstrable value to everyone: from front-line customers to employees and partners behind the scenes. As software becomes the key differentiator for all kinds of firms, marketing is a natural place to make that distinction be truly felt.
CIOs and CMOs could prove they are more of a dynamic duo than a pair of butting heads in a number of examples below.
Optimising the omnichannel
Omnichannel has been a hot topic amongst retailers for years now, but the days where customers connected with a company purely by telephone or during an in-person visit are fast becoming ancient history.
Consumers are moving towards interacting with a brand through websites and apps with a journey that includes e-mail messages, conversations via instant messenger, questions to a call centre and everything in between. CIOs know how the technology works and helps make all this happen, but CMOs have an equally deep level of insight around how the enterprise can take advantage of the data from these customer engagements. The end result will mean a better experience for customers and a more customer-orientated organisation.
The digital marketing department
CMOs and their staff are expected to do a lot more today than simply raise brand awareness and purchase advertising. The scope of their role has changed and is now being driven by mobile, social and digital technology as customers move towards applications to define their experience with the brand. In many organisations, sales teams are counting on them to help make the phones ring and bring inbound inquiries from potential customers. There are a lot of marketing tools they can leverage to optimise their projects, but in some cases major integration work and custom applications will be required to get the job done. CMOs will define the major requirements here on projects that give CIOs and their teams a chance to shine.
Building big data capabilities
When experts talk about the power of unstructured information, a lot of it tends to include things that could give CMOs and their employers a better sense of what the future will look like. Analytics is a complicated area, where CIOs will be helping create easy-to-use applications that help CMOs and their marketing teams to create a more predictive approach to future campaigns and ensuring a great experience for customers.
Marketing professionals may have never heard of DevOps (a marriage of development and operations), but it may become the kind of conversation starter that will help them establish better relationships with their counterparts in IT. Recent research from Vanson Bourne sponsored by CA Technologies showed that 90% of respondents said that one of the top benefits of DevOps was an increased cooperation. With enterprises working together using a DevOps approach, any issues that may arise can be dealt with immediately by team members instead of having to go back to square one, therefore being more cost efficient. Also by being able to work closely with the marketing team, the IT team will be able to get more insight into exactly what customers want, leading them to be more innovative and able to get apps that they want to use, faster
The good thing about marketing projects is that they tend to have highly tangible measures of success, whether it is brand awareness or driving leads into the sales funnel. In that sense, they may be a missing piece to prove that DevOps is valuable. If marketing is the art and science of persuasion, DevOps could be the way to convince almost anyone that an end to the infighting is nigh. A more efficient and collaborative approach will lead to customers having a better experience and enterprises saving time and money.
By Nicola Croxford, Director, Marketing at CA Technologies.