In Part 1 of this 3-part series on how to get marketing to work with IT I discussed how different the marketing and IT perspectives can be, and I gave a few suggestions on how to bridge the gap. The most important, in my opinion, is that a marketing department needs a “marketing technologist” — somebody who understands marketing and technology, who can bridge the gap between the two departments.
The more marketing learns about IT, the more forthcoming IT will be with ideas and solutions.
When marketing understands technology, the two departments can have meaningful conversations about strategies and tactics.
The marketing technologist can’t wait for IT to come up with solutions. He needs to take the lead.
First, he should understand how the systems work. He doesn’t need to be able to code, but he needs to know which systems do what and how.
He also needs to understand the business objectives of the website. IT can get caught up in cool geeky projects that don’t push the business forward.
For every type of technology the company uses, the marketing technologist needs to grasp the basic technical requirements, and the costs and time investment for various technologies and projects.
It’s only after he has a firm grasp on those things that he can find creative solutions to new problems, and figure out if it’s worth all the effort.
It’s hard to make a comprehensive list of the things the marketing technologist needs to know (I’m sure I’ll miss a few obvious ones), but here’s a quick list to get started.
- How servers work (request and response, ports, DNS)
- Client side vs. server side
- Why templates are helpful
- What a cache does
- Why databases are useful
- The trade-off between fancy features and performance
- Basics of html and style sheets, including responsive design and desktop / tablet / mobile differences.
- Why html code yields different results in different browsers, including email browsers.
- Database basics (esp. why you can’t always change the structure later on)
- Why it can be difficult to move data from one system into another.
- How cookies work
- How web-based analytics tools work
- Basic email terms, like MX, SPF, Sender ID, Domain keys
The marketing technologist should make a habit of reading things that stretch his knowledge of the tech world. And when he finds something he doesn’t understand, there’s always wikipedia.
If you’d rather listen to me talk through this topic, here are some links to a fairly low-quality video I did of this presentation. The videos were limited to 10 minutes each.
Marketing and IT, part 1
Marketing and IT, part 2
Marketing and IT, part 3
Marketing and IT, part 4
