As a marketer, it’s important to have all the tools and resources you need to build, measure, and optimize your campaigns. But just as important, it can be a tall order for IT to keep your marketing team equipped with all of the tools you need to be successful.
Traditionally, marketing and IT departments operated in silos, but these boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred in the digital marketplace. As Accenture Interactive reports, “The ripple effect of digital disruption is giving rise to a more integrated enterprise center on the customer experience.” Marketers who recognize the potential this presents will see the value in working with their IT colleagues to find technology solutions that allow them to seize the customer experience and benefit the entire business.
Buyers are increasingly driving their own journeys, so the scope of the tools you need in order to reach and engage them is expanding. These days, 87% of people demand a meaningful brand experience, according to Edelman Consulting. Add this to the fact that as much as 90% of a buyer’s journey being self-directed, as reported in the Forrester Research report “Don’t Let Muddled Messaging Compromise Customer Experience,” published 2015, and the stakes have never been higher.
To drive value across the organization, marketing and IT need to team up to adopt a marketing automation platform that’s a partner for growth—listening and responding, collecting data, and automating processes to make millions of customer connections measurable. To connect and build meaningful relationships with buyers, marketers need a way to get personal at scale, with a platform that delivers in these three key areas:
1. Ease of Use
It’s critical, for both your marketing team and your organization, to work with IT to find a marketing solution that’s easy to use at implementation and beyond. Ease of use also results in no loss in productivity or system abandonment when key users leave.
Look for a robust, complete solution, rather than a “good enough” solution, that offers a high level of functionality without making things complicated. For example, most solutions in the market support basic workflows, like creating email campaigns and landing pages. But after you’ve built a flow once or twice, you’ll soon wish you could do more—and more easily, with a comprehensive platform. Complete solutions will support marketers in a number of ways, helping them build out different parts of programs and processes at different times, clone forms across multiple campaigns (and still track separate conversions), trigger workflows based on just about any criteria, and listen and immediately react to key buyer interactions.
2. Low Burden to IT
With many solutions out there, IT may be needed to build or adapt campaigns, monitor and troubleshoot integrations, oversee maintenance issues, and provide technical support. But this isn’t scalable, is it? In an ideal partnership, marketing and IT will team up to evaluate technologies and oversee the integration together, both on the front-end and back-end. But from that point forward, IT’s involvement should be minimal, freeing them to focus on strategy, not support.
Your marketing automation platform will also provide the foundation for other marketing technology integrations (companies’ MarTech stacks continue to grow in size, with the landscape of solutions currently estimated at 3,874 and growing), so it’s important to find a solid platform that will support multiple integrations, without the need for heavy IT involvement.
3. Vision
Partner with IT to choose a superior marketing platform with a long-term marketing vision and a deeply integrated partner cloud, bringing you peace of mind that your future needs will be met in a reliable and scalable, yet timely way by building on the current solution. It’s incumbent on marketers to share their current and projected needs with IT to identify a solution that will grow with the organization, so there’s no need to rip and replace over the years. In an ideal partnership, marketing will invest time in establishing a vision and collaborate with IT to bring it to life.
Want to learn more about how IT and Marketing can partner to find a solution that will scale to meet the needs of the organization? Tune into our webinar with our resident scalability expert, Chris Pooley, Principal Solutions Architect at Marketo, to learn the ins and outs of Selecting a Marketing Automation Solution that Scales.
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