Maria Wasing

About Maria Wasing

How marketing and IT are working together

Businesses are becoming increasingly customer centric, which is moving the focus of marketing efforts firmly onto improving the customer experience.

To help with meeting that core objective, marketers are looking every which way for technology that can help them deliver a better customer experience. They want to do it all, and they want to do it now! 

IT teams, on the other hand, have been in the game of buying and implementing technology a little longer. They know there are considerations that have to be made before diving in headfirst, and they’ve dealt with the repercussions of security and integration issues. 

With the lines blurring between technology ownership, I’ve been looking into how the relationship between the two teams is – or isn’t – working. 

Seven ways for marketers to collaborate with IT for better customer experience

Customer experience management is fast becoming the core pillar of effective digital marketing and data has a critical role to play.  

However, it seems that many marketers do not have access to the data they need to improve customer experience. In our recent research, only 29% of marketers told us that they have access to any kind of data in real-time, which is essential for effective customer experience management. 

This move to data-focused strategies is changing the relationship that marketing professionals have with IT and, with IT professionals traditionally the owners of data, a much closer relationship betweenthe two looks to be essential. 

Four essential steps to creating a B2B marketing dashboard

If you follow marketing and digital related blogs and news sites, then it won’t come as a surprise to you that marketing professionals and CMOs are expected to show how activity achieves business results.

As marketing professionals, we need to have an in-depth and real time understanding of how we contribute to our organizations’ or clients’ revenue. In addition, we must also be able to have an ongoing conversation with our sales teams that is revenue focused, far away from “the feeling” that our campaigns are generating good results and increasing brand awareness.  

As spending on digital takes a greater share of the overall marketing budget, greater scrutiny is being brought to bear upon the CMO to justify these investments. Attributing revenue to a specific channel or combination of channels, rather than just attaching it to the “last click” is a challenge that is beyond the capabilities of most.

A good approach to doing this is to create your own marketing dashboard.

Four tips for using data-driven marketing on the path to conversion

Do you make your decisions based on data or are you among the 89% of marketers that make their customer related decisions based on factors other than analytics?

A recent CEB study of nearly 800 marketers at Fortune 1000 companies found the vast majority of marketers still rely too much on intuition, while the few who do use data aggressively for the most part do it badly. 

According to a another recent study, 77% of CEOs have trouble linking marketing efforts to tangible results, such as revenue, shares and conversions.