5 Ways IT Pros Can Help Marketing

My last four posts have covered the whys and hows on establishing a CIO partnership with the CMO especially around digital marketing. The post Five Tips on Starting a Killer CIO CMO relationships covers the basics of understanding goals, drivers, and KPIs. The next post covers partnering on technology selections and proof of concepts, an area where CMOs need technical guidance and CIOs have to adapt their vendor selection practices for marketing needs. The next two posts illustrate why the CMO job is hard, first because simple techniques can block many marketing efforts and second because data driven marketing requires new data and technology skills.

In this post and the next, I offer ten practical ways IT department can provide services to marketing departments. This post covers workflow and services and the next one will cover technologies.


  • Provide Workflow and Collaboration Tools - How do Marketing departments on-board, process, and fulfill new needs? How do they collaborate with global business units? How do they get sign-offs on proposed work? If you work in a small or medium sized business, the marketing department may not be using a defined process and is likely managing intake using an excel spreadsheet. Consider helping the department by either building workflow into existing CRM, document management, or BPM tools, or selecting light weight project management tools. Better yet, if the IT department is already using agile development practices, consider steering them into agile marketing.  

  • Schedule Lunch and Learns - Lets face it, marketing and IT are in two time zones with marketing often running week to week and IT from release to release. Technology and marketing jargon are two foreign languages. You can break these barriers by scheduling informal educational sessions like lunch and learns to educate members of the IT and Marketing staff and help form relationships.

  • Challenge and Collaborate with Consultants - Marketing departments often employ consultants to provide expertise and services in many technical areas such as SEO/SEM and Social Media Marketing. In addition, creative agencies are often used to develop marketing materials including websites, marketing content, and even mobile applications. IT should look to collaborate with consultants and agencies to insure their deliverables align with existing platforms and can be implemented. IT pros may also be better equipped to ask good questions of consultants to insure their recommendations make sense technically and align with marketing priorities.

  • Provide Vendor Management Services - When new SaaS vendors are selected, go deeper reviewing their SLAs and insure they provide more significant operational metrics beyond 99.9% uptime. Review and advise on cost structures, evaluate security, and provide guidance on exit clauses. Once a SaaS vendor is selected, provide technical capabilities to monitor  their service levels such as uptime, response time, and service desk KPIs.

  • Establish Technical Leads - Who can become subject matter experts and provide technical expertise and consulting even if marketing doesn't require explicit technology services. Align these technical leads with marketing groups or practices and provide them training on the appropriate technologies. Insure that these leads are collaborative and provide them tools to on-board new technology needs or communicate special marketing events.

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Last Call for Collaborative CIOs and CMOs - Winning at Data Driven Marketing

Does anyone still believe that Marketing can be successful following intuition driven practices? Is it sufficient to spread marketing investments across a number of channels to successfully reach and convert prospects? Does your CMO fully grasp the new table stakes in competing for new customers?

Let's examine some changes and opportunities facing today's CMO 

  • Diminished response on traditional marketing channels and a complete bombardment of marketing messages through these channels.
  • New marketing automation technologies and innovative content marketing approaches are more easily available to CMOs to drive experiment and measure results.
  • The dispersion of consumers' attention from a handful of media channels to multiple devices and context aware mobile applications

The Data Driven Marketing Organization


The challenges of reaching prospects is not insurmountable, but it requires marketers to consider a new paradigm. 

Today with many media channels, many approaches to develop contextually relevant marketing messages, and many technologies to consider, the best and most successful marketing groups are fleeing "big bang" marketing campaigns with broad messages reaching many prospects, to implementing smaller targeted tests to learn what works reaching strategic segments of customers.

Hopefully you can see the importance of this critical shift and its implications:


New capabilities, technologies, and media outlets driving the Data Driven Marketing Organization


The three shifts pictured demonstrate how much more CMOs today have to be sophisticated with data and technology. They are using more sophisticated segmentation techniques leveraging more data to help develop and maintain granular customer models. They are designing multitudes of marketing tests and often leverage real time contextual data to help target customers. They are experimenting with new ways to reach customers including social media and task driven mobile applications.

Add this all up, and you'll see why marketers to be successful today need to be data driven, have talent in data science, and have a partnership with technologists and the CIO. Marketing, more than ever before has become science with experiments yielding results, that should translate to smarter/better experiments.

So, CIOs and technologists - how are you helping your marketing departments?? CMOs, are you engaging your IT department on a partnership? How are you driving data driven practices?


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How to Clean Your Inbox and Drive Marketers Crazy

Email Marketing by Bill Rice
If you want a tool to keep your Inbox cleaner, try this. Create an email filtering rule that looks for these phrases, "privacy policy", "webinar", "webcast", or "unsubscribe" and move these emails to a separate folder. I call is the "Noise" folder. You'll be amazed how many marketing emails get pushed out of your Inbox with this simple filter allowing you to focus on the emails that really matter. I look at the Noise folder once a day for any relevant messages or to enhance the filter.

I'm not the first one to make this suggestion and here is a step by step guide from Wired.

That's not the only approach to battling digital marketers who are trying to grab your attention. There is the Inbox Zero approach to email management with many tricks published to achieve this objective. See here, here and here. There is also the new GMail enhancement that was rolled out last year, automatically separating your email to two new tabs, "Social" and "Promotions". Guess where most digital marketing email goes?

Why The War on Email?


Many of us are 100% digital now. Get on a commuter train and count the number of people reading iphones and ipads versus the numbers looking at newspapers, magazines, and even laptops. Some of us are reading books, websites, and twitter streams while others are playing the latest games featured in the Apple or Android app store.

Many of us will be distracted when the email alert announces a new mail and some of us will stop what we're doing to switch to the email app to review. And many of these emails fall into the category of marketing emails or newsletters which might be important, but not worth distracting us from what we were doing.

And the same thing happens at the office. Your name ends up on a marketing list, the emails come in, and you can't keep up with clicking all those Unsubscribe links for every new marketer that wants to reach you.

The Growing Challenge in Digital Marketing


Every company requires some investment in marketing to reach customers and digital marketers are facing increased competition and technological challenges for your attention. They will experiment with segmentation, message timing, subject header authoring, design and other mechanics to improve their odds that you will open, click, and action.

And how do you improve your odds? How does a marketer increase their chances that their marketing efforts will beat out competition and yield results?

Become more data driven. That's table stakes for marketers playing the game of reaching customers digitally.

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About Isaac Sacolick

Isaac Sacolick is President of StarCIO, a technology leadership company that guides organizations on building digital transformation core competencies. He is the author of Digital Trailblazer and the Amazon bestseller Driving Digital and speaks about agile planning, devops, data science, product management, and other digital transformation best practices. Sacolick is a recognized top social CIO, a digital transformation influencer, and has over 900 articles published at InfoWorld, CIO.com, his blog Social, Agile, and Transformation, and other sites. You can find him sharing new insights @NYIke on Twitter, his Driving Digital Standup YouTube channel, or during the Coffee with Digital Trailblazers.