IT vs. Marketing – The Complex World of Digital Marketing

In the past few years, we’ve seen an explosion of web platforms. In such a limited amount of time, new tools have sprung up, stable platforms have greatly expanded their offerings, and large software companies have gobbled up innovative startups. Trying to keep track of marketing software and tools is enough to make your head spin.

To add to this challenging landscape, businesses buying these tools have two different departments vying to take the lead: Marketing and IT. To make matters more complicated, these two departments have different goals. Marketing teams have specific objectives involving traffic, leads, and sales they’re looking to meet, while IT teams need to assure that the solutions are stable, secure, and scalable.

Both of these teams are necessary and their goals are essential to the company’s success. But oftentimes they haven’t perfected their relationship to allow the Marketing and IT partnership to work in concert to deliver real results.

At Cimarron Winter, we believe both teams are necessary and vital at every step of these projects. Whether it’s focused on integration of a new CMS or simply streamlining existing processes, we’ve found three vital elements for any digital marketing project:

Clear business goals – knowing what the project is meant to deliver for the organization. This may seem obvious, but teams often fail to define these objectives. It's quite simply the first key to success in any project.

Project governance and role definition – assuring that each team member understands the goal and contributes their valuable skills, without stepping on each other’s toes. This includes who each team member is reporting to and their specific requirements for the project.

Cross-functional leadership – It’s a constant challenge keeping everyone engaged, aligned, and focused from beginning to end. Inspiring leadership ensures goals are met, but also keeps the team inspired.  

With these three elements in place, we’ve found that the turf wars and dysfunction between Marketing and IT can evolve into a partnership that allows successful digital marketing and web projects. Projects where both teams recognize each other’s value and share in the combined victory.

Cimarron Winter has close to a decade of experience streamlining processes and getting teams to work together towards common goals. If you’re planning to integrate new digital marketing technology and/or are looking to get your Marketing and IT departments to collaborate better, let’s talk.