How Digital Marketing Turns CMOs Into CTOs
For today’s CMOs, there have never been more ways to reach customers and meet your goals. Along with your brand’s website, social media, SEO, and other digital tools extend your reach to once unimaginable distances. Today’s technology also offers a wealth of essential data about user habits, which provides vital insights about campaign performance.
While these powerful tools are helpful, they also contribute to marketing chiefs feeling overwhelmed by the demands of technology. Customizing and combining digital tools to suit your business needs is a complex and time-consuming undertaking. Along with the difficulties that come with managing these technologies, your website must also be optimized to accommodate recruitment, operations, and internal communications.
Before long, with so many stakeholders and systems in play, it feels like moving a battleship to reduce the technical debt your team has acquired. In today’s digital environment, your role feels more like a CTO than a CMO.
Unfortunately, the technical demands of digital marketing aren’t going away. If anything, the current social and economic climate has only further underscored the critical role a website plays in every part of your business. CMOs may feel unable to fully escape the needs of today’s technology. But there is an effective strategy to managing these technical complications that doesn’t involve time travel.
Modernizing Your Digital Marketing Requires Technical Expertise
Managers who have kept up-to-date with the latest technologies already know the challenges of managing the workload that digital marketing requires. But if you still need to modernize your company’s approach, your journey toward implementing the many tools and platforms you need is a frustrating one.
In rare cases, marketers will have a digital team in place to work through their list of planned updates and upgrades. But most of the time, CMOs lack the required resources to explore the many opportunities available from digital marketing. Generating reports from website traffic and user statistics is difficult without the right expertise, and it’s hard to deliver results that are easy and make sense.
In complex organizations with websites that involve multiple platforms, connecting the application interfaces (APIs) is difficult. If your company juggles separate vendors for web development, SEO, email marketing, or Pay-Per-Click advertising, you face the challenge of establishing a shared design language so details display properly. And these only cover your needs that are specific to lead generation and effective marketing. But if the marketing team is managing your company’s website, your concerns don’t end there.
Effectively Managing Your Website Spans Multiple Department Needs
Given the prominent role your website plays in digital marketing, your team is typically charged with maintaining its design and performance. From your perspective, the website must deliver a satisfying experience for both existing customers and new prospects looking to learn more about your offerings.
However, managing a website requires an awareness of user journeys that don’t so easily mesh with your marketing goals. Your site must also offer insights about your company’s culture and create a satisfying experience for prospective hires. In addition, to meet your sales needs, the site must include compelling list of offerings and contact pages. And finally, whether your audience arrives from a social media ad or your landing page, they must find a cohesive journey toward a CTA or your Workday HR system.
Combining these tools so they work together is hard. And, worse yet, your team too often ends up mired in updates, maintenance, and bug fixes instead of spending time with the marketing tools they need most. As these technical projects add up, marketing teams need resources and expertise from your IT department. But they’re not always receptive to spending time with your department’s needs.
Technical Partners Who ‘Get’ Marketing Are Difficult to Find
As marketing teams must navigate a maze of systems, your IT team should be able to provide much-needed support. Unfortunately, their help isn’t always forthcoming. In addition to not always appreciating the importance of your needs, IT teams aren’t the best choice to assist with your marketing technology needs.
No doubt, IT teams are working hard and are as dedicated to the company as you are. But they are also in charge of satisfying the technological demands of your office infrastructure. From managing network security, email servers, and hardware support, these teams already have their hands full.
Plus, your marketing team has a more specialized perspective about your website priorities. A successful and robust digital experience requires placing an equal priority on your site’s strategy, design, and technology. A perspective that keeps all three in mind is hard to find within an IT staff.
The Right Agency Partner Frees Marketing Teams of Their Technical Burden
Running a marketing team in a competitive, digital-driven economic climate requires CMOs to wear multiple hats. On one hand, you need to deliver a strategy that satisfies the needs of your audience across multiple channels. On the other, you need to know how to incorporate tools such as Sitecore, Hubspot, and Google Analytics into that strategy in a way that suits your needs and remains open to analysis.
Working as a CMO who also functions as a CTO is a massive, even unsustainable undertaking. But it’s not one you have to tackle on your own. The right digital team will optimize your website so it functions at its peak while allowing you to focus on strategy and new initiatives.
With an agency as your delivery partner, you’re freed from demanding projects like platform upgrades and software development processes. And, better still, your outside team understands how these technical projects integrate with your digital marketing and business goals. As a result, you can make better choices from your available tools and know how to sell these decisions within the company.
Just imagine: Digital marketing with all the power but none of the technical complexity. Contact us to find out more.
