Marketing and IT working together to achieve digital excellence
You likely won’t have a strong omnichannel CX without committing to becoming a digital-first business. And the foundation for that is your digital transformation, which will allow you to scale and grow much more rapidly.
Being able to deliver and update quickly — in terms of launching new content and deploying new personalized experiences — is critical for creating connections with customers and reducing friction throughout touchpoints.
The importance of cross-functional leadership and alignment on tasks can’t be exaggerated. Not sharing priorities, knowledge, and ambitions can have a significant impact on day-to-day operations and larger innovation projects. It’s time to put differences aside. To ensure smooth progress, IT and Marketing teams need to align on goals and invest in the tools that support them.
What does successful collaboration look like?
1. Realistic timelines and milestones, faster progress
Understanding disparities in timelines for projects is a major element of success. But almost half of IT teams say that Marketing’s desire for speed is unrealistic — and can lead to compromises on security and quality.
If, for example, the Marketing team has the capabilities to work at double the speed of IT, digital CX projects are likely to create a “hurry up and wait” scenario, as the Marketing team has to hold while IT completes its tasks. Or perhaps your organization is launching a new website function. If there is time to satisfactorily develop and test the backend, the CX won’t be disjointed.
2. Joint thinking
Not being involved in early planning is, understandably, a huge frustration for those that will be working on a project. Organizations can benefit significantly from getting all the right people together at the start of a task to share knowledge and gain fresh perspectives.
3. Alignment on strategy
The best ideas can only be achieved if you have the plans to back them up. Strategic alignment is another area where Marketing and IT need to come together early. Bring together stakeholders and team members when defining goals and project plans. Here, working groups can discuss individual team priorities, identify commonalities, and determine the strategy and deliverables together.
4. Sufficient building
Half of IT teams consider their budgets insufficient. However, only 32% of stakeholders across the organization think the same. Businesses that want to innovate faster on their digital transformation journey need to ensure that budgets can cover the infrastructure and technology updates to support progress. CX is a shared responsibility; Marketing and IT need to look at their collective budgets and compare priorities and associated project costs to ensure the organization is investing in tools that enhance the work efforts of both teams.
5. New added features, such as effective personalisation
Effective personalisation depends on access to the right customer data and insights to enable a true understanding of the audience. And this is dependent on technology that can both use the data your organization has and support innovative solutions, such as machine learning or AI.
By aligning Marketing with IT, organizations are 83% more likely to adopt personalised content creation. They also use A/B testing 68% more than peers. Technology needs to support CX efforts. If an investment needs to be made to push forward with your initiatives, it’s essential to have both Marketing and IT involved in the decision-making process.
How can you achieve that?
If you think your teams could improve their collaboration process, Sitecore® Experience Platform™ (XP or digital experience platform - DXP) is a match for you. Sitecore DXP creates efficiencies for both IT and Marketing, with the latest SItecore 10 release offering even greater performance benefits. It’s a powerful digital experience platform that combines data, analytics, and marketing automation capabilities to nurture customers throughout their journey with personalized content.
It’s home to the tools that help teams launch and evolve unique experiences, driving successful engagements with more flexibility than ever before — while addressing some of the key pain points for marketers, developers, and IT professionals alike.
If you would like to start your Sitecore digital transformation journey, contact us today.