What are the most important roles for IT to play in day-to-day marketing?

Market

Sep 27, 2022

by Guest contributor

MarketingCharts staff

Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is a summary of articles from MarketingCharts, which provides up-to-the-minute data and research to marketers.

A new survey of more than 200 information technology and marketing decision-makers from the U.S. and Canada finds agreement that the IT team will become more intimately involved in day-to-day marketing, although each department appears to have different notions about how IT can help.

The survey from Lytics found 88 percent of IT respondents and 81 percent of marketing respondents believe that their organization’s IT team will become more involved in day-to-day marketing over the next five years.

Marketers were more likely than IT respondents to see the most common role that IT teams have in day-to-day marketing as giving marketing access to data (75 percent to 56 percent, respectively), and providing model data for marketing/ad campaigns and targeting (75 percent to 56 percent, respectively). IT more so than marketing respondents expect IT teams to play a bigger day-to-day marketing role in helping choose technology/SaaS vendors (76 percent to 54 percent, respectively).

Asked which technologies their marketing teams plan to adopt over the next five years, marketing respondents were more enthused about investing in customer data platforms while IT respondents favored investments in blockchain/smart contracts and data warehouses.

As for artificial intelligence (AI), though about two-thirds of both groups envision the integration of AI into the tech stack, marketing respondents more so than IT saw bigger benefits in automation of marketing tasks (50 percent to 39 percent, respectively), eliminating mistakes made in segmentation (41 percent to 30 percent, respectively), and informing the messaging in ads (35 percent to 24 percent, respectively).

IT respondents saw bigger AI benefits than marketing respondents from delivering personalized ads to customers (43 percent to 28 percent, respectively). About one-quarter (26 percent) of IT respondents believe AI will inform all of their targeting/segmentation, with no human input, while only 17 percent of marketers agree.

Marketers were also found to be more frustrated with the IT/marketing relationship. While 37 percent of IT leaders describe the dynamic as a “well-oiled machine,” only 16 percent of marketers agreed.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS: What role should IT play in day-to-day marketing? Where do you see IT and marketing mindsets clashing over priorities and strategies?

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