Marketers have seen the amount of technology at their disposal increase exponentially. Maxine-Laurie Marshall investigates what they need to do to ensure tech remains a friend and not a foe
Marketing has a new best friend, it’s pretty low maintenance on the emotional front, is very observant and good at getting to know you. Its name is technology. Marketers can no longer put off its relevance or hide behind the excuse that it’s too complicated. It can be complicated, but it’s now a necessity.
This need for marketers to become technology-minded was a talking point at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco at the end of last year. The company’s EVP marketing and product experience, Kendall Collins, says: “For a long time the only tech a CMO would really buy or be involved with would be the website. But I think now there is this tectonic shift.”
And you must have felt that shift, with tech companies like Saleforce announcing its first $1 billion quarter and Oracle acquiring Eloqua. There is more technology around and more money being spent on it. After all, Gartner predicted the CMO will be spending more money on technology than the CIO by 2017.
Why now?
And the reason for this shift? The customer. Your customers are speaking to you less, researching more and interacting with you in a multitude of different ways. In order to keep up with them, let alone ahead of them, technology is required. Paul Smith, VP of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, says: “At the heart of this shift is data identity and a single view of the customer, and that ultimately is enabled at scale through technology, and that’s what’s driving the Gartner piece.”
One marketer embarking on this tectonic shift is Javier Diez-Aguirre, director, corporate marketing, EMEA at Ricoh. He’s working with his CIO to implement a marketing automation platform and ecommerce. He also names the customer as the catalyst for this change: “Marketing automation is where data and technology come together and we intend to use it intelligently to improve customer experience and to help our people build stronger customer relationships.”
While Ricoh’s marketing department is working on becoming more tech-minded, in a recent study it sponsored, 43 per cent of respondents said the CIO or CTO are driving most of the digital transformation initiatives, compared to just four per cent of organisations that had a CMO in the driving seat.
Diez-Aguirre says: “It is essential that CMOs change this trend and ensure they are involved in marketing technology-led initiatives at the beginning of the process. Then by working closely with the CIO, each can use their areas of expertise to implement better business processes, and together forge the best plan of action that fits the company IT infrastructure and addresses future marketing needs.”
What’s the problem?
But the problem many marketers are facing is a skills gap. Many don’t have the technical knowledge that is increasingly becoming a necessity. Collins agrees: “You’ll see there’s definitely an education gap.”
Smith also identified current working practices as another potential problem holding marketers back with technology adoption. He says: “There are still a lot of marketers that delegate a lot of the decisions on customer engagement to their agency. Agencies still have a massively powerful role to play in all this, but ultimately my strong belief is that marketing organisations need to have direct access to the platforms that connect their customers at scale. Marketers need to own that technology themselves so they can own the data themselves. They might have agencies working on it on their behalf but ultimately they need to own the platform.”
The solution
It’s possible the argument as to why marketers are leaving tech in the hands of their agencies is because they don’t know how to use it. But filling the education gap will be key to the future success of the CMO. Sophie Relf, marketing director at Jobsite, found learning from case studies of others already using marketing technology and expert consultants was invaluable. She also notes structural changes that impact the marketing team as helping the technology adoption: “Our head of IT/tech procurement at the Daily Mail Group (the parent company of Jobsite) now also heads up marketing procurement.”
Due to customers’ actions driving the need for marketing technology, Relf also structured her team to focus more on the customer: “I transitioned marketing significantly, I separated out audience reach and attraction from loyalty. One is getting the customer to the door, the other looks at loyalty and retention.”
However, working with the technology function within the organisation is the most obvious way for marketers to get their head around technology. Hopefully by now you’ve perfected, or at least begun working on, your relationship with sales because it’s time to move round the office and make the CIO your new BFF.
Diez-Aguirre says the first step in doing this is: “To recognise the common goal of improving the customer experience and adding business value.”
However, he warns: “While the CMO must have an appreciation and understanding of the technology-led needs of the business, the CIO doesn’t want a technology shopping list. Instead marketers can add real value by highlighting the benefits and the KPIs that must be delivered to the business.”
Knowing how to work with your CIO and also making the effort to update your own technical skills are two ways of ensuring marketing is technology savvy. Along with these, Smith has identified one more way of achieving that goal, and that’s to have a commercially savvy CIO; technology experts who combine their role with the chief digital officer and have an eye on the bottom line. However, Smith adds: “Of those three groups I’d say it represents only 30 per cent of the market.” That estimated figure shouldn’t be a surprise, or even a cause for panic, yet. Now is the time for realisation, marketing has once again evolved and you must evolve with it. Leave it much longer, and you could see yourself overlooked for someone with the required technical knowledge, then you’ll panic.
Diez-Aguirre concludes: “The reality is that social media, digital marketing, marketing automation and lead management tools, to name a few, are consuming as much, if not more of a marketers time than the more perceived core functions such as creative campaigns and marketing intelligence. All in all, there are great opportunities for us to add more value to the business in the area of technology and data. Strategic thinking has always come naturally but the extent to which data drives strategy has increased and the relationship between strategy and technology is now critical if strategy is to work in the real world.”
