Marketing and IT: Understanding the importance of the cooperation between them

Have you ever heard about marketing automation? No? So, you should know that this an essential tool in order to join marketing and IT departments in a company.

When appropriately aided by software, marketing can bring countless advantages such as higher agility in clients dealing and maintenance of a reduced team.

Get to know the advantages of marketing and IT co-working

The most remarkable outcome from the joining of these two areas is the optimization in quality perception of leads in business. Nevertheless, there are many other benefits. Check them out:

1. Agility in campaigns

Several IT software manage to reproduce whole campaigns, besides generating ready-to-use templates, and several other functions which speed up the marketing team work.
Do not think that this is self-indulgence! Making smaller campaigns can be easy, however the big ones demand hard work. A technological tool may be of great use in order to make leads conversion faster.

2. Creation of stopgap tools

For a long time, marketing has not had enough support from technology, being it necessary to make its own way out with spreadsheets, emails, and a great participation in documents exchange with no technological aid.

On the other hand, technology has become interested in Marketing and has created numerous tools, known as EMM (Enterprise Marketing Management). They work as a single platform which helps creation, management, follow-up, and decision making in marketing strategies.

Besides that, managing clients can be done by using innovative tools (developed by IT), such as applications available for mobile devices, which are able to share assets ranging from relevant information to the company, to providing additional services to the clients

3. Social Network Campaigns

Social networks are an important bridge between marketing and IT. Many softwares are able to improve the relationship between a company and its target public in this type of environment, be it through automated contests – with prizes – or improving pools aiming to know their actual and future clients better.

One of the most beneficial side effects of automated marketing in social networks is the stronger engagement of its target public, once IT increases the possibilities of interaction with the brand.

4. Management of leads

Within all strategies of inbound marketing, automation can help the follow-up of leads generation a lot. By using appropriate emails to the public, automatization of marketing processes guarantees that the aimed client will receive the content that fits its interests, preventing the feeling of being “just one more” or being treated as an ordinary company’s asset.

Automatizing what the client saw on your website and its interests is also possible due to IT and marketing co-working. Through some programs, it is possible to lead a prospective consumer to a customized content, according to what he had searched on your website or blog. Besides that, it gets easier to partition it considering demographic and geographic data, or personal interests.

5. Data syncing

CRM softwares organize leads and speed up sales processes, making it faster the conversion to effective clients. By organizing these important data, CRM’s not only warn them about promising business opportunities, but also let them know if the consumer has quit the sale or not. If integrated to the sales department, it is even better, as the marketing department will have direct access to its potential clients.

Encourage marketing and IT co-working

Have you gotten how important this integration is? Marketing automation powers up online sales, making the processes easier, and by that, saving time. Even if it seems highly innovative, it has been being used for a long time, since when companies began to partition their databases in order to have higher access to the clients’ information.

In smaller companies without a voluminous IT team, it is advisable to use some online tools to speed up sales processes, making them more dynamic with technology. However, if your brand has two areas, with the purpose of making them working together in a harmonious way, it is imperative to have strategies and plans, such as:

1. Lining up the goals for marketing and IT

Most times, it can be more worth totally reviewing the goals, so that marketing and IT can work together, because the result of this partnership has great chances to be excellent.

To make them follow the same pace, it is essential to line up and review all plans from both areas, setting a common language – without slangs and idioms – and taking the time to correct mistakes that will disturb any of them. Even if it is hardworking, the outcomes will be worth their dedication.

2. Communication and commitment

It is fundamental the presence of a good communication so both areas can be developed. For instance, several times marketing simply forgets to warn about data generation of the leads to the IT segment. As a consequence, IT may not remember to inform technical details to marketing.

It is necessary that both of them be lined up and committed to the goal of helping each other. Decontextualized tasks or lack of clear objectives may disturb the motivation and the success of the strategy. In conclusion, avoid lack of communication in between areas.

3. Setting realistic deadlines

It is no use having one department rushing the other without well set information. To walk along, information from both sides must be shared and the deadlines well defined since the very beginning. Well, turning possible buyers in real consumers is a common task for them.

Without deeply understanding what the other area does, the company can propose short duration workshops to inform them about each other, and so increase the knowledge exchange.

Besides that, it is of utmost importance that the tools produced by IT not only satisfy the requirements which translate the marketing strategy while offering a solid product that meets the expectations from the department, but also guarantees that the requirements are implemented in a proper way. So, it is essential a special attention regarding software testing, which can be performed by IT, as well as marketing, mainly during approval stage.

4. Joined actions systemization

By splitting the IT-marketing integration in three steps, the whole process will be much more organized – and also more dynamic.

To start it, get to know all possible bridges between company and leads. After that, automatize all tasks, and finally emit reports checking the outcomes from this strategy so you can correct mistakes and improve correctness later.
Did you like this post? Would you like to add anything about marketing and IT in a company? So, leave your comment sharing your experience!



Marcos Chiodi
Engenheiro de Computação e mestre em engenharia de software pela UFSCar, Chiodi também possui especialização em Administração de Empresas MBA pela USP/Fundace e especialização em EAD pela Uniseb. Além disto também possui diversas certificações nas áreas de gerenciamento de projetos (SCRUM e PMP), TI (ITIL, JAVA) e línguas (ECCP).