Technology plays a central role in growth and overall operations in business today. Driving revenue growth and improving customer experience are top initiatives for businesses, and marketing is often tasked as the driver behind innovating customer experience. At the same time, technology has taken a permanent seat at the table, making an effective and collaborative relationship between marketing and technology professionals essential for overall corporate success.
Marketing was a hot topic at the Teradata Partners Conference 2015, as 87% of marketers consider data an underutilized asset. Fortunately, there are a few ways that companies can work to utilize data, enable effective collaboration between marketing and IT, and drive towards business value.
Align to a Strategic Vision
In order to effectively market to an audience, it’s important for marketing and technology teams to align themselves with, and help the other achieve, a unified, strategic vision. This requires organizational support to identify and enable technology that will make a difference. Some key questions to consider: Are your initiatives with marketing aligned with the businesses strategic vision? Are you able to make big decisions to differentiate yourself from competitors? Do you have a collaborative approach that will ensure business success?
Remove Latency to be Agile
Marketers must have the ability to bring campaigns and promotions to market faster. When a trend or opportunity arises, the marketer races against the competition to get their message and offer out first. If the competition beats them to the market, the consequences can ultimately impact revenue. Marketing teams should be able to control their data to provide competitive insights to their marketing initiatives, and determine and overcome any latencies that might prevent their teams from effectively reaching customer. For this, having the right platform to enable marketing decision-making is essential.
Develop a Customer-Centric Strategy
Today’s customers are often overwhelmed with competing offers. Knowing this, marketers need to prioritize offers across their product portfolios to deliver unique, individualized engagements. The best approach is one that allows marketers to gain key insights into members of their audience to differentiate from the competition. It’s also pertinent to have a pre-determined next step in place, to follow up appropriately with individuals, based on their response.
Enable Marketing to Drive Value
Marketing departments often source their own technology or enlists third-party providers, thus creating shadow technology departments. A true understanding of marketing’s challenges can help IT provide the right technology solutions, freeing marketers from technology decisions and allowing them to can focus on marketing alone. Organizations should take into consideration how they work with their marketing department to provide technology solutions, as well as how they’re enabling marketing to experiment with new and innovative technologies.
Share Success
As marketers achieve success with analytics, it’s important for them to share that success with others throughout the company. A technology platform designed to enable marketers to share and learn from each other allows the business to maximize the value of their success.
As new marketing technologies continue to enter the market, it’s important for marketing teams and organizations as a whole to keep these tips top of mind. By taking these steps, marketers are able to get the most out of their technology in order to better engage current and potential customers.
Learn more about Teradata marketing solutions and services.
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