Marketers: Harness Tech to Transform Your Brand Stories into Powerful Sales Triggers
With a solid content marketer on your team you can guarantee that great copy is written, fantastic content is shared, and your brand story is honed to perfection. But is it delivering sales?
Marketing can’t just be about the best stories and highest quality writing. It has become a tech-driven discipline—even if you’re consistently producing exceptional quality content, if it’s not being seen or delivered in a strategic, effective way, it won’t deliver results. Underpinning the success of marketing your brand and marketing technology is the need to coordinate and integrate with IT.
78% of U.S. marketers and 63% of European marketers now believe that understanding marketing tech (“martech”) is critical for success in a senior marketing role. Further to this, it is critical that the outdated silo-driven approach to strategy is given up too, with departments merging for success and to drive sales.
There has been a significant rise in Chief Marketing Technologists (CMT) in top companies as they ensure that IT and marketing are perfectly merged, as Scott Brinker says: “CMTs facilitate and prioritise technology requests from marketing, translating between technical and marketing requirements and making sure that marketing’s systems adhere to IT policies.”
How does this translate for your brand? The first step is to stop looking at your tech department as the Department of “No” and realise that it’s the Department of “Know”.
Tell your story with tech
Storytelling is driving modern marketing. It’s what customers like; it keeps them engaged and respects that they are more intelligent than to simply be bought by a hard sell. Your stories need to be the best they can be, but they also need to be fed through a marketing system that ensures they reach the right audience, can be tracked and analysed, repurposed if necessary, and reimagined for future use.
A good marketing story should never be used just once, but without the right technology you may simply put out a piece of content and never think of it again. This is extremely wasteful behaviour; your best marketing content deserves to be used in as many ways as possible, to once again drive engagement and in turn sales. Every 60 seconds 700,000 Google searches are performed. No one is looking for your story so you need to make sure it is seen, and that it is seen by the right people.
Seeing marketing as a purely creative art form is foolish; today it is much more sophisticated and essential than that, and it is driven by technology. With the acceptance of technology as core to successful marketing, we must conclude that far from simply being an art form, marketing is also an exacting science. To succeed in tech you need a systematic and strategic approach, and of course you also need the expertise of IT professional support. You also need to be innovative in your thinking—look to the future and see what technologies are emerging (such as blockchain) that could be game-changers now, but become standard practice in the future.
Embracing martech means embracing IT
There are many things you can probably put together without direct support of the IT department, but in some instances their support and collaboration are essential. With the strategic alignment of marketing operations and technology, IT input is integral. The following areas are key moments where IT are a necessary component of marketing operations:
Marketing app integration
Your business probably has a number of different marketing apps for different purposes. For real, cohesive success they need to integrate, and to do this there are complex tech requirements which rely upon IT expertise. Integrating your marketing apps requires the use of APIs or direct integration, which must be facilitated by IT.
Central data store
Management of your company’s data needs to be treated with real respect and organisational focus. A central data store, cloud-based or otherwise, is essential for easy analysis and deployment when required. IT can help ensure this store is created, managed, and maintained.
Set company standards and processes
For effective strategy going forward, you need standards. Your IT department should create foundational data governance and systems that allow for access to high-quality data for all users, apps, and departments dependent on permissions. The architecture of the data store and processes is a feat of IT which ultimately improves the marketing process.
Data security
Data protection compliance and ensuring all data is held securely in line with company policy is, again, a necessary function of the IT department. Any data breaches or data issues can ruin a business’ reputation.
Engineer the tech stack
Your marketing tech stack should be an agile yet robust construction. The tech required for your business is something you will build brick by brick, and supporting you in this are the IT professionals who have the technological expertise to integrate and connect your stacked technologies where necessary.
The days of an adversarial relationship between IT and marketing are over. The only way to succeed is to be joined at the hip with your colleagues in IT. It may not be a relationship that forms overnight, but as changes are made, both parties—not to mention the company as a whole—will reap the benefits.
