A recent article on CIO.com that addressed 10 things that cause chief marketing officers to lose sleep reinforced the increased clout that lines of business have on enterprise IT spending, especially marketing and sales.

In December, we underscored that importance by citing a study from TEKsystems. A key finding: Marketing and sales will account for 27 percent of IT spending in 2016, far outpacing traditional spending on IT operations.

Meanwhile, IDC predicts that marketing technology spending is expected to hit $32 billion by 2018, up from $20 billion – or 60 percent - in 2014.

That’s why the CMO is a good person to get to know – and to ease his or her pain.

But one of the 10 sleep deprivers in the CIO.com article stood out: How digital transformation is front and center, thanks in large part to the “mainstream adoption” of smartphones, tablets, mobile applications and the Internet of Things. "Marketers have to figure out how to have a connected, consistent conversation with customers across all these things," the article quotes Sanjay Dholakia, CMO of Marketo, a maker of marketing automation software.

Yet the article also cited how CMOs may not necessarily have the skills in house to execute their digital strategies to their satisfaction.

And therein lies a big potential opportunity for channel partners.

An IDC study, whose results we cited in our December article, found that, by 2020, 33 percent of CMOs will outsource some part of their digital marketing activities. That will create growth opportunities for marketing-as-a-service providers to come to the rescue

IDC says opportunities include IT and data management services, as well as creative and execution services delivered via MaaS, which “enables CMOs to outsource much of the technological complexity and pay for it out of their advertising budgets and get better integrated marketing services on top of it,” IDC wrote.

A key to always staying connected with the customer lies in how businesses connect with them visually, and that underscores the importance of “human-centered” design at the increasing number of web entry points.

That lay at the crux of last month’s announced acquisition by a fast-growing solution provider – Open Systems Technologies of Grand Rapids, Mich. – of a design specialty house, Visualhero Design.

“The combination of technology and design together is powerful and becoming more powerful every day,” OST President and CEO Meredith Bronk told IT Best of Breed.
“We saw … business design and technology converging around the customer experience,” added Andy Van Solkema, who founded Visualhero in 2005 and became chief designer at OST after the merger.