Aligning IT and Marketing: Why and How to Bring These Teams Together, explores the current state of the relationship between IT and marketing teams, why organizations should align them and best practices for alignment.
Presented by Ian Smith, President of SyncraTec Solutions and Joel Hinton, Senior Territory Channel Manager with ClickDimensions, our informative webinar, Aligning IT and Marketing: Why and How to Bring These Teams Together, covers:
- The state of the IT and marketing relationship today
- The benefits of bringing together IT and marketing
- Best practices for IT and marketing alignment
- Demo of ClickDimensions featuring a “Trade Show Process” for connecting, and following-up with trade show attendees.
78% of IT professionals think they work collaboratively with marketing, but only 58% of marketers agree that that’s the case.
— eConsultancy
It used to be that IT had a lot of control over the implementation of marketing systems, as software was deployed to servers on the local network (on-premises deployments). How has IT’s role changed with the proliferation of Software-as-a-Service (SasS)? Who now drives the evaluation, purchase, and implementation of new systems? How is data controlled and kept clean? Do the systems all talk to each other?
Joel and Ian discuss their experiences with past implementations of marketing technology systems, highlighting topics that illustrate the need for cooperation and collaboration between the departments. The implementation and ongoing risks and the benefits of collaboration are addressed. Most importantly, guidance on best practices for aligning IT and Marketing going forward is provided; as we’ve listed a few examples below.
Recorded Live
October 8th, 2019
We are pleased to present our special guest speaker, Joel Hinton, of ClickDimensions. Joel has an extensive sales background and in-depth knowledge of the challenges faced by organizations trying to align their IT and Marketing teams. Joel’s insights drive an enlightening conversation with SyncraTec’s Ian Smith on current issues and innovative solutions with regard to digital marketing in the modern workplace.
Only 8% of marketers feel that their marketing software technology has been implemented well.
— Oracle
Download the slide deck: Aligning IT & Marketing – Presentation
Best Practices for Aligning IT and Marketing
This was a conversational presentation, taking questions on best practices for aligning the information technology and marketing teams; a few examples are listed below.
The session concludes with a demo of a “Trade Show Process” showing how a modern digital marketing professional can import a trade show marketing list into CRM, and various aspects of how a process can be developed that can be made to work for marketing independently with some up-front collaboration help from information technology to streamline the process.
- Respect Differences as Marketing may be focused on driving revenue and customer retention
- IT prioritizing data security, risk avoidance, and systems functionality
- Acknowledge the expertise each side brings to the table, and formulate a plan for how to best utilize these strengths and knowledge.
- Define and document roles and responsibilities for the two teams and individual team members.
- Be rigid enough in your definitions that things don’t fall through the cracks.
- Be flexible enough that you can accommodate organizational growth or changes.
Session Wrap
We will wrap up the discussion by reviewing the survey results, taking Q&A, and providing a quick demo showing how to easily add leads and contacts to a Marketing List with the ClickDimensions Import Tool. The scenario will be a “Trade Show Process” where we’ll provide several tips on how to re-use the data from the marketing list to add follow-up information requests and conversation notes back to the CRM system. And along the lines of our topic, we’ll provide an explanation of when to use the ClickDimensions Import Tool vs. the out-of-the-box CRM Import Tool and when to seek assistance of IT for advanced data management skills and tools.
Our next event will be a live, in-person, hands-on Small Business I.T. Security Workshop:
October 22nd or 23rd
Montgomerville, PA