Aligning marketing and IT for digital success

You likely won’t have a strong omnichannel CX without committing to becoming a digital-first business. Your digital transformation is the foundation for that, 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 project timelines is a major factor in 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 can work at twice the speed of IT, digital CX projects are likely to create a “hurry up and wait” scenario, as the Marketing team has to wait while IT completes its tasks. Or perhaps your organisation is launching a new website function. If there is time to develop and test the backend satisfactorily, the CX won’t be disjointed.

2. Joint thinking

Not being involved in early planning is, understandably, a huge frustration for those who will be working on a project. Organisations 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 organisation 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 organisation 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 organisation has and support innovative solutions, such as machine learning or AI.

By aligning Marketing with IT, organisations 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 is needed to move forward with your initiatives, it’s essential to involve both Marketing and IT 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 good fit 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 personalised content.

It’s home to the tools that help teams launch and evolve unique experiences, driving successful engagements with greater flexibility than ever before — while addressing key pain points for marketers, developers, and IT professionals alike.

If you would like to start your Sitecore digital transformation journey, contact us today.