Let IT Solve IT, Not Marketing
An epidemic plagues far too many companies in our technology-driven age. To put it simply, the IT department is affecting critical decisions in departments such as marketing/sales.
When a company’s CEOs, marketing VPs, sales managers, and other crucial organizational “power brokers” turn to their IT departments for advice, they may get more than they bargained for. Because directors of sales and marketing many times perceive their tech-heads as gurus of all things digital, they unwittingly authorize them to make critical decisions about how the company is marketed online.
The knowledge gap between those who make decisions about marketing or sales and the company’s tech-heads allows the IT department to directly influence customer behavior. This has more to do with marketing and return on investment (ROI) than you might imagine. Knowing software, codes, protocols, and the plethora of bells and whistles that go along with them doesn’t qualify the IT department to create persuasive websites that sell a product or service. This is not the IT department’s fault, however; the marketing department should see the company’s website as another marketing avenue and should treat it as such.
An example of a typical encounter goes something like this: the marketing department develops a plan for a new customer experience on the site, such as a new shopping cart process. A team storyboards the plan, and brings it to the IT department for implementation. The IT department, by nature or habit, then presents a list of reasons why the plan cannot go forward as is and puts together its own plan. For example, IT creates a Web page template that imposes limitations on page copy. Marketing defers to these limitations because it doesn’t know to insist upon something different, and the new customer experience evaporates. Poor navigation, limited content management systems, and cumbersome shopping cart processes are the result and sales inevitably are affected.
In these situations, we have a marketing department that has anxiety around the technological processes linked to its website. On top of this, our IT department wants to hold on to its power to affect the decision making process – or simply to stay within its comfort zone. The result can be at worst a turf battle, at best a poorly executed, outdated customer experience online.
When a Website is cumbersome and overly complicated, the public’s perception of the company weakens. If a Website is effective, easy to navigate and helps the customer get to what he is looking for, we know that the organization behind it has the same qualities.
Today much smaller firms are often perceived in a better light than their larger counterparts. This is because many small firms who can’t afford their own Marketing and/or IT Departments instead outsource these functions to cutting edge Web marketing companies. These smaller firms find themselves teamed up with experts in Web marketing technology who sleep, eat and breathe the user experience. They are experts able to take a company’s storyboard idea and implement a design that will show proven results. Web marketing companies don’t know how to fix a broken printer, or get your computer back up and running like your IT department does. They also don’t know your company’s target audience better than your sales team. However, they’re able use analytical tools to better understand your online audience and meet customer needs in an online environment. Larger firms many times miss the boat on this front. Instead of optimizing an online experience, these larger firms focus on keeping their IT staff busy.
As you can see, the problem is simple. The marketing team and the IT department have divergent goals and functions, creating a situation where the two are many times working at cross-purposes with one another when it comes to Web marketing. When a third party is called in to mediate, you get the best of both worlds: cutting edge technology married with first-rate marketing capabilities and customer metrics. This frees up the IT department to do what it does best: IT.