Getting IT right: How marketers can combine creativity and data
As everyone who was involved in The Drum’s Roses Creative Awards knows only too well, the ability to engage with super-connected digitally-savvy consumers is being driven by the use of technology. As a result, marketing has had to change beyond all recognition. Long gone are the days of defining the best channel for your next great campaign using intuition and perception to understand customer behaviour.
Today’s marketing function involves a complex blend of mathematician, designer, service specialist, creative and technologist – specialisms that have traditionally resided elsewhere. This is leading to a set of issues that we need to address. Chief amongst them is the conflict that often rears its head between the marketing and the IT departments.
You want your next digital campaign launched big, fast and yesterday? Your IT team wants more time to check that the platform driving it is robust and secure. Never mind, you get your technology-minded designer to spin up a server anyway.
Who is right? Neither department can operate in isolation any more so it’s time to work with your geek squad to stay on top of the latest developments and drive your business forward.
Here are three major marketing trends that you need your IT department for:
Big data
We are currently gathering behavioural data in fantastic volumes on a daily basis so we no longer need to second guess what the consumer buys, when and how. Double the amount of data is being created each year both structured and unstructured which is both a challenge and an opportunity.
This data is marketing gold, allowing accurate targeting of audiences and justification of spend. As Peter Markey told The Drum when he joined the Post Office as chief marketing officer last spring, “It’s a really important one for me – where we take our data and analytics capability. I want to sweat our data harder.” It is vital that this data is approached from both the marketing and IT angle.
Marketers must be able to access, analyse and act on this data but the IT department must ensure it is secure, archived properly, easy to retrieve and complete. To be able to use data properly it is important to have a storage platform that has capacity to grow and that can also be used to carry out complex analysis. Ask your colleagues in IT what the best technology available is to support file sharing, keep your data protected, and analyse that data so you can use it better. Buy-in from them will make you better judges of how successful your campaigns have been and will help produce better insights for your clients.
Content marketing
What happens if your content goes viral? Can your infrastructure cope? If you have not collaborated with your IT department the content you produce that suddenly goes stratospheric on social media could end up not leading to the touch points and call to actions you want with your audience. If you have not built in the ability to spin up more capacity to cope with the hits to the website you or your client have built to support that campaign, its success will be short lived.
Managing a diverse set of technologies to drive successful campaigns cannot be done in silos. Content and campaign strategy has to be aligned with the IT infrastructure being used whether that is use-as-you-go cloud services or on-premise dedicated servers.
Cloud control
Do you know who is using the cloud in your department and what they are using it for? For a busy agency launching new campaigns, designing new websites and creating new apps for clients, this is a major need-to-know. If you are the spider at the heart of this IT sprawl you need to be sure you’re not endlessly spinning up a web of new cloud services that are costly, messy, and unnecessary.
The availability and ease of access to cloud-based solutions allows individual teams to make short-term and decentralised IT buying decisions. You might hire an external developer to build and host an app or buy some AWS resources for a short term digital campaign, neither of which you will run past your IT department.
Marketers are among the biggest spenders on technology, deploying it directly to connect their clients with consumers without checking with the IT department whether it will work properly and whether it would have been cheaper and better from another vendor.
But that’s not the biggest issue here. How would you feel if one of your client’s campaigns got switched off because a credit card had expired on a public cloud account and had not been updated? Or the marketer who purchased the server left the business, leaving no admin access details behind. Could either of these situations happen in your company? Would you just assume that the IT team would sort it out?
A good plan is central to any successful marketing campaign and that should stand for any cloud services you are using too. The simple solution is a solid IT strategy which everyone in marketing buys into and understands. Marketing and technology are now firmly entwined in the search for richer consumer engagement so the two must find ways to work better together. If we want to change the world, we first have to change ourselves.
Matt Gardiner is sales and services director at Melbourne Server Hosting, which sponsored May's Roses Creative Awards