IT-Marketing: Testing Ground For Better Alignment

About 15 years ago, during my initial stint in the technology media, a seemingly endless parade of IT analysts and studies advocated, reinforced and repeated a key message: Corporate IT organizations and the end users they served needed to get on the same page regarding the use of technology.

Today, while the issues and technologies have changed, that “call to better alignment” has not.

Especially when the subject is corporate marketing initiatives.

Just follow the money. In a recent blog post, Gartner analyst Anna Maria Virzi addressed some key findings in a 2015 Gartner survey that analyzed trends in marketing spending. For example, she wrote, mobile marketing has jumped from 7.4 percent of the digital marketing budget in 2012 to 11 percent last year. Meanwhile, the study found that marketing budgets increased from 10 percent to 11 percent of revenue in 2015, and two-thirds of marketers expect their budgets will grow this year.

Virzi’s bottom line: “2016 is shaping up as yet another year of changes, challenges and opportunities for marketers.”

Little wonder, then, that research has shown that marketing departments will wield more influence over technology spending this year, and why chief marketing officers need to bring their chief information officers on board to help ramp up marketing efforts and – by extension – sales, as Stella Goulet wrote this week on IT Best of Breed in an article aimed at channel partners’ marketing efforts.

“For an enterprise to succeed today … marketing and IT must have a strong partnership and shared vision,” she wrote.

That applies to both channel partners and their customers: a lesson on alignment that can be practiced on the inside and recognized on the outside.

Talk about the perfect learning opportunity.

While it’s true that chief marketing officers – or whatever titles the heads of corporate marketing organizations hold – carry more technology clout today, well-aligned enterprises will have them working closely with their chief information officers. As Michael Porter, a managing principal at St. Louis-based solution provider Perficient told us last month. “You can’t sell the solution to the CMO alone … Marketing is so integrated into everything. We start with the CMO, but it’s imperative you bring in the IT department.

“The CMO might be able to sign off on a project, but it’s the CTO, IT and market research teams that are going to implement your solution.”

So, you might consider doing an end run around IT to get to the marketing organization – at the risk of losing the business. While technical knowledge has spread well beyond the corporate IT organization over the last 15 years, IT still holds sway over the inner workings of the corporate information infrastructure.

A perfect IT-business unit alignment may be elusive, but successful initiatives involving both marketing and IT can be held up as examples of how what has long been advocated can become the ideal.

Rick Saia, Senior Content Editor with The Channel Company, is editor of ITBestOfBreed.com. Contact him via email at rsaia@thechannelco.com, or on Twitter at @RickSaiaCRN.