Combining Marketing and Technology Skills is Vital

Marketing used to be a job that was at least somewhat separate from technology, but now many marketing efforts are completely dependent on technology. This has created the need for a new position at many companies: Chief Marketing Technologist (CMT). If you’re a marketing manager at a retail store or restaurant, here is what you need to know about the marriage between marketing and technology.

Hiring a chief marketing technologist

The most effective way to reach new and existing clients in today’s world is through a digital platform. And one of the most important technology investment for companies is digital marketing. Furthermore, digital marketing budgets are continually growing. A 2017 study by Gartner indicated that 23% of marketers are allocating a significant increase towards ad spend this year. So in order to drive an effective digital marketing strategy, leveraging the power of technology, marketers need tech experience to marry the two.

Many businesses split tech-driven marketing strategies between the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Chief Information Officer (CIO). However, this approach creates gaps and inefficiencies. Instead, a CMT uses both marketing and technology skills in a holistic approach to create new opportunities and works with the CMO and the IT department to bridge the divide between the tech and marketing sectors. Let’s look at some examples of how this person works with other departments.

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Marketing Executives

Senior marketing executives have strategic priorities that the CMT can help with. At Aetna, these executives wanted to improve digital interactions between the company and customers. The CMT suggested using “voice of the customer” software to achieve this. This software collects feedback on web and mobile interfaces.

IT Department

The CMT handles marketer’s technology requests to streamline the planning and execution of marketing systems. This ensures software fits both tech and marketing requirements and adheres to IT policies.

Marketing Team

When working with the marketing team, the CMT helps gives them the right training and software. When support staff and field sales reps used Excel spreadsheets that resulted in poor coordination, the CMT at ThomasNet switched to a real-time model that was part of the company’s CRM system.

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Using Technology For Marketing

This post isn’t advocating for the creation of a CMT at your organization but illustrates how some staff members must have a knowledge of both fields and can work with others. When unifying marketing functions with your tech capabilities, the Analytics Dashboard from Bloom Intelligence can help you.

The metrics collected by the dashboard are gained in a nonintrusive fashion. Data is collected from customers through Wi-Fi access points. These access points identify electronic devices and are used to track how many visitors your location has and much more. More data is also collected when customers use the Wi-Fi.

Let’s consider a coffee shop called Java. This store does a lot of business in the morning and has a good crowd in the evening too as they have open-mic nights. They don’t get much traffic in the afternoons and want to change this.

The marketing team creates content for a campaign aimed at getting more customers for their slow time in the afternoon. This might involve many methods like blogs, emails, advertisements, coupons and more. It’s a good thing they have someone familiar with both marketing and technology because this person helps ensure that all their efforts have tracking methods associated with them. This ensures they know which methods worked best with their customers.

When analyzing how successful their promotions were, they can also use the Analytics Dashboard. This can tell them how long each customer spent at the store and how much they spent on average.

For years, there’s been a distinct divide between IT and marketing departments. As marketers seek to understand customers better, they rely on the technology to help them collect key data and use it to create revenue-driving campaigns.

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