Six Ways How Dev And Marketing Teams Can Collaborate Effortlessly
There is no team without collaboration. As Steve Jobs once stated: “Great things in business are never done by one person”.
While different departments are responsible for their parts of the project, they all form a single company. And a company can exist only when there is room for discussion and idea exchange.
In reality, many employees take on most responsibilities to avoid putting further strain on their coworkers. However, that is a tremendous mistake.
What are the reasons for marketing and IT working together? Both of their efforts are aimed towards the same goal of attracting and retaining clients but function in entirely different ways. Marketers spread their messaging, while coders are concerned with their code. Do they meet in the middle?
Yes, they do and shouldn’t work in isolation. When marketing and technology teams collaborate and utilize team management software, they frequently complement one another in practical ways.
This article will provide you with six ideas how marketing teams can work closely with CTOs (chief technology officers), CIOs (chief information officers), and other tech partners from the outset of the development process.
Six Ideas for Marketing and IT Working Together
1. Establishing a Common Language
Dev and marketing teams’ priorities frequently mismatch one another. The first and most crucial step for them should be to create common ground. Why?
Your tech team is crucial to your business success.
Their main goal is to optimize efficiency and scale while keeping costs to a minimum. Remember how pricey developer fees can be, and you’ll understand how critical it is.
They ensure that technology is optimized and simple to integrate into the company. But it may be at odds with what end-users or marketers want to do.
But marketing is vital too.
On the same note, your company would struggle to succeed without the marketing department. They prioritize client experience and attempt to use cutting-edge technologies to improve it and assist prospects through their journey.
And that’s a conflict. As the roles are so dissimilar, the teams have a different vision of what moves the business forward. That is why you need to encourage mutual understanding.
The benefits of such a collaboration for an organization include:
- Marketing will provide insights into the technologies to refine your customer experience;
- The technical team will contribute their experience in implementing and operating the technology to be as cost-effective and scalable as possible;
- Both teams can discover common ground for business growth perspectives. For example, you own an online store. The marketing team notices the high bounce rate and attributes it to page load speed. So, they’ll need to communicate with developers and discuss the possibilities of speeding up their CMS, such as Shopify, BigCommerce, or Magento speed optimization.
Note that the staff should develop their communication skills to avoid misconceptions during dialogue.
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2. Developing a More Effective Digital Marketing Plan
How is cross-departmental collaboration beneficial to marketing? The outcome of such an alliance is a better-targeted strategy.
Case in point:
The digital marketing trend of the 2020s is hyper-personalized products and services. How can businesses provide them? One of the ways out is to integrate their CRM data with an email marketing solution across the company.
Here is where you need both teams on board to connect the systems. Marketers know the sales team’s needs and programmers understand how to implement these features.
With marketing and IT working together, they may build a cost-effective data strategy and use current data management tools to satisfy customer expectations.
Are there possible roadblocks?
Of course, the marketing team may face barriers if the tech team has no idea what a digital marketing plan is. However, cross-departmental collaboration can still uplift your company.
Communicate the procedure in a way to engage the IT team. The developers can assist the marketing and communication team in leveraging technology in their strategies. As a result, better-targeted marketing efforts will emerge. Marketing campaigns will transmit the right messaging to the right audience.
After all, it makes little difference how skilled your marketing team is as there will be something they don’t know. You can use the IT team’s knowledge to shed light on what you might be overlooking.
3. Improving Product Development
To achieve an agile product development process, the marketing team needs to collaborate with their tech colleagues. Suppose the IT staff comes up with innovative products for your company. The marketing staff can assist them in determining product-market fit and understanding the target consumer.
Marketing also provides insights to understand the customers’ pain points to develop better solutions that meet their needs.
What are the ways to improve speed and time-to-market?
For example, the two teams may attend Scrumban sessions throughout the week. Such cooperation also helps determine usability flaws in the product.
No one knows the product’s benefits and drawbacks better than the creators. Your teams will combine extensive product knowledge and clients’ feedback to provide suggestions for improvements.
One team is incapable of detecting all of the product’s potential flaws. You’ll need a product that is technologically viable, marketable, and user-friendly. That’s why you need marketing and IT working together.
4. Getting the Most out of Your Time
How can dev and marketing teams make effective plans for being productive at work? Encourage two teams to employ successful strategies such as product management work streams together.
After consulting with the tech team, the marketers may take advantage of the most advanced technologies to create valuable assets and manage various projects.
It makes them less dependent on archaic methods like spreadsheets and emails. Instead, marketing teams increasingly rely on big data, real-time analytics, and various digital platforms to save money and time.
As the dev team is an intermediary between marketers and this technology, your task is to put an end to their misunderstanding. The relationship between marketing and development teams should be constructive to nurture organizational ROI (return on investment).
When is this applicable?
It’s especially true when selecting technology vendors and creating web and mobile applications for clients. CIOs will understand what to prioritize for customers, and CMOs will be technological gurus. As a bonus, they’ll negotiate and guide your firm into the rapidly growing digital future faster.
Pro tip: look for ways to reward marketing and IT for working together.
It fosters mutual respect among all employees. It also signals teams that you value their effort and shows where they influence other parts of the company. All of these factors have a significant impact on productivity.
5. Focusing on the Customer
What’s the point of having a company if it doesn’t win customers? You can convert more clients if you create customer-centric solutions and unite marketing and technology teams to ensure it.
Here is what you can achieve:
- Technology becomes more aligned with the business strategy.
- Marketing teams give deep customer insights and harness tech expertise to meet customer needs.
- Collaboration between marketing and technology teams will enable marketers to fine-tune the customer experience using expert product knowledge. It will boost content creation and customer support.
Case in point:
Let’s take writing blog posts as an example. You may hire the best copywriter who understands the ins and outs of the product, but they may lack coding skills to illustrate some points in the article. Here is where the dev and marketing collaboration comes in handy.
Developers can share their tips and tricks, screenshots, and how-tos to take your content to the next level. It will inspire marketers to come up with innovative concepts to reach new audiences. They can generate content that educates, informs, and excites their target readers.
Anything else to keep in mind?
Be exceptional. You may launch videos or live conferences where all teams will become corporate ambassadors.
Marketers leverage social media measurement, customer feedback, outreach initiatives, and other methods to find new opportunities. IT personnel can use this information to see what resonates with the audience and what they want from the product or service.
It doesn’t matter if the marketing and IT departments have had a rocky relationship for years. If they want to please the customer, they need to be on the same page.
6. Making Informed Data-Driven Decisions
Marketers rely on numbers and analytics to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Your company’s marketing and tech teams can work together to realize the full potential of data analytics tools to make data-driven decisions and achieve greater results.
Marketing teams need to know how to monitor performance and evaluate any outcomes. On the other hand, business units sometimes don’t have a clear view of what they should measure to pivot the marketing strategy as necessary.
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How can you avoid these problems?
The company should have marketing and IT working together and bring a scientific approach to the table.
Include minimum viable analytics (MVA) in all of your activities. It means all the needed information to make informed decisions.
The tech team should ensure data security and transparency and provide marketing automation solutions and collaboration tools. For example, they can educate the marketing team on cybersecurity. The customers will see that the organization protects their data and will be more eager to do business.
What about the MarTech stack?
Another aspect worth discussing is the MarTech stack. The IT staff can help revamp the tech infrastructure to ensure your organization has a comprehensive and well-integrated system.
This collaboration provides your organization with the best technologies to guarantee the following:
- tailoring the customer experience;
- upskilling personnel;
- helping marketers to come up with compelling concepts to retain customers.
To Sum Up
The reasons above demonstrate that cross-team collaboration is an excellent idea for all firms. Marketing and IT teams can work together effectively to boost efficiency, produce better products, strengthen customer relationships, and ultimately increase revenue.
Both teams will profit from a successful digital strategy that boosts customer happiness and leads to explosive business growth.
About the Author
Kate Parish is the chief marketing officer at Onilab with over 8 years of experience in Digital Marketing in the sphere of eCommerce web development. Kate always aspires to broaden her competency in line with cutting-edge global trends. Her primary areas of professional interest include SEO, branding, PPC, SMM, Magento PWA development, and online retail in general.
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