What is your company's approach to Marketing Technology (MarTech?). Is it embedded within IT? Separate organization? If separate organizations, what are the roles and responsibilities between IT and your MarTech team?
Sort by:
Hello,
You will see quite a mixed situation with several enterprises keeping the Marketing IT separate that the corporate IT whilst in many cases you will see it embedded within the corporate IT. Statistics are even between the 2 models I would say.
The value of keeping Marketing IT within the Corporate IT are manifold
1) Marketing is not a standalone function and MarTech platforms need data from enterprise IT systems. Theer are process and data integration flows across Martech platforms with enterprise IT platforms - so you need a common organization to ensure integration robustness
2) Synergies in one organization are better feasible in contrast to separate organizations
3) Alignment to Corporate IT standards secures the overall IT Landscape and is more economical
4) Better pooling and resource management within one organization
There are hordes of other benefits but can be stated but just sharing few.
If you haven't decided yet, go for Martech embedded with Corporate IT is my recommendation.
Very helpful; thank you!
We are a 450 employee manufacturing org and our Marketing team handles all website content and lead capture processes. Our IT team provides the APIs for lead capture and we provide cybersecurity monitoring of the websites, though our Marketing team provisions and manages the websites themselves.
Got it - appreciate the response!
Most of MarTech is handled directly by our Marketing team and their agency partners. As the silos come down and there are needs to integrate with processes and data beyond Marketing, IT usually steps in. At the very least the enterprise architecture team provides guidance, cyber security reviews systems before investments are made, and basic productivity/collaboration tools are provided by the IT Digital Workplace team.
Thanks, Erin. Does MarTech select solutions and negotiation w/ tech vendors? Or perhaps done in consultation with IT?
It's been with spotty consultation with IT. It doesn't always happen. We've had some situations where we've been engaged late by legal or procurement when they are reviewing agreements/contracts. This isn't necessarily different than other departments here though. While we have a policy that our VP of IT is supposed to have reviewed and approved every technology purchase that can be hard to enforce.
Similar to Joel's comment, IT provides capabilities and services for MarTech. For example, we manage the enterprise contracts for CRM, we provide a standard managed web provider, video service, analytics platform, etc.. We also manage data integration from MarTech to other systems. Our business units have the latitude to select marketing/web agencies for site design and services.
Very helpful, Scott. Appreciate the response!
Holly, in response to "Thanks, Joel. When you say technical infrastructure, do you mean IT helps select the right solutions, negotiates w/ vendors, deploys and does ongoing support? Appreciate your response!" That's correct. Good luck!