Why Your IT Department Should Focus On IT (And Not Marketing)
Jessica is an integrated marketing leader specializing in strategic B2B and B2C enterprise solutions.
As marketing experts become more tech-savvy and IT experts become more business savvy, the roles of these two groups come closer and closer to intersecting or even blending. However, what is often overlooked is how different their goals, priorities, and expertise really are, especially in retail organizations. Marketing typically owns telling the brand's story and creating rich, omni-channel content whereas IT owns the technical process of publishing that same content and the management to web assets. Historically, this is because the web has been considered a technical asset, now an outdated notion. It’s time to take content publication off IT’s plate and leave it to marketers.
The Current Roles Of IT And Marketing Marketing and IT clearly have different goals which can be traced back to the structural differences in their organizational missions. Consider what the IT team does when it’s not supporting marketers. An IT team’s top
priorities are the technical health of the organization. In the retail environment, this includes the security of business and consumer data, the organization’s technical infrastructure including both in-store and online, the technology to deliver customer experiences in line with the brand, and much more — most of these likely take priority over any marketing “to dos” such as publishing content for a weekly promotion. Marketing has a very different agenda and with it, a different set of goals and success metrics. Retail marketers are
typically in charge of:
- growing the customer base quickly and cost-effectively
- managing the brand and brand experience
- differentiating the brand and its products for consumers
- getting new products to market quickly
- delivering a unified experience to customers
- implementing innovations that improve customer experiences, both online and in the store