If you are wondering whether your marketing and tech teams should work together, you’ve come to the right place.

While these two teams often share the same vision to get and retain customers, they often work worlds apart. Marketers focus on their messaging, coders speak code, and they never get to meet in the middle.

But that’s a huge mistake.

Teams shouldn’t work in silos but should rather collaborate using team management software. When marketing and tech teams work side-by-side, they often complement each other in powerful ways.

Read on to discover seven reasons why client-side marketing and communication teams should actively collaborate with the CTO, CIO, and other tech counterparts from the start of development.

Reason #1: To find common ground

These two teams can often be at odds with their respective teams’ priorities. This is why the first and most crucial thing marketing and tech teams should do is find common ground.

The tech team is integral to your company. Their primary goal is to maximize efficiency and scale while minimizing cost. This is crucial, considering developer rates can get expensive. They also need to ensure that technology is optimized and easy to implement in the business. However, this doesn’t necessarily prioritize what end-users (in this case, marketers) hope to achieve.

The marketing team is core to your business’s success. This team aims to leverage the best technology to optimize customer experience and guide the customer journey.

Since these two teams have different roles, they often have very different assumptions on what moves the business needle. This is why you need to encourage teamwork between them.

By getting them to work together, your organization will see great results:

• Marketing will bring expertise to determine the type of technology that will produce the best experience for customers
• The tech team will bring expertise to implement and run the technology in a cost-effective and scalable manner

Both teams can find common ground to find perspectives for cutting-edge business development. To avoid misunderstandings during communication, make sure employees improve their communication skills.

Reason #2. To develop a stronger digital marketing strategy

One aspect that benefits from the cross-departmental collaboration are marketing.

The marketing and tech teams can establish a data-driven and better-targeted digital marketing strategy by working together.

These days, companies are looking for ways to deliver hyper-personalized products to customers. For example, they can implement tie data from their CRM software into an email marketing solution company-wide. Having both teams on board is crucial to tie the systems together. Marketing teams understand what the sales teams need, and the tech teams understand the required variables.

Neal Taparia, who runs the classic gaming platform Solitaired.com, provides a good example.

“Our marketing team worked with our engineering team to identify patterns of users who might not complete their first solitaire game. Together they created in-product messaging that targeted and guided these users to complete a game, which drove up overall games played and returning users.”

They can develop a cost-effective data strategy and modern data management technologies to meet customer expectations by working with tech teams.

Of course, this can prove challenging for the marketing team when the tech team has never heard of a digital marketing strategy.

However, you can still enjoy the benefits of collaboration between the two departments by communicating the strategy in a way that gets the tech team excited about it. At the same time, the tech team can help educate the marketing and communication teams on a more tech-centric marketing strategy.

This will result in better-targeted marketing campaigns with the correct messaging targeted at the right audience.

After all, it doesn’t matter how experienced your marketing team is. They can never know everything. By tapping into the tech team’s expertise, you can illuminate many things you may be missing.

Reason #3: To enhance product development

Letting the marketing staff work with their tech counterparts is necessary to ensure an agile product development process.

• For instance, the tech team might create cool products for your business. The marketing team can help them understand the target audience and determine product-market fit.
• Marketing can also help tech understand the customers’ pain points to build better products that customers need.
• The two teams could hold Scrumban meetings weekly to enhance speed and time-to-market.
• Team collaboration also helps to identify usability errors in the product quicker.

The brains behind the product know the pros and cons like no other.

Your teams will have expert product knowledge and feedback from customers. They will be able to suggest improvements and spot gaps within your offering.

One team alone cannot spot the entire range of potential problems with the product. But, working together, they will be able to benefit the product development process in advantageous ways.

Reason #4: To maximize efficiency

Working together, two teams can use effective mechanisms that assist marketing efforts.

For instance, you might implement product management workstreams through consultation with the tech team. This allows the marketing team to run more efficiently. Marketers can use the best technology to create valuable assets and manage multiple projects instead of relying on archaic methods of spreadsheets and emails.

Marketing teams must increasingly use big data, real-time analytics, and a wide range of technology platforms for cost reduction and faster decision-making. The tech team is the gatekeeper to this technology, which is why the feud between these rival teams must come to an end if you are to drive organizational ROI (return on investment). This is particularly important when you choose technology vendors and develop web and mobile applications for customers.

CIOs will have a much better understanding of the customer, and CMOs will be masters of technology. This once-unlikely duo will be better positioned to lead your company into the rapidly evolving digital future through their collaboration.

Also, learn how your company’s different areas give your marketing and tech teams an appreciation for all the things the others bring to the table.

This helps to create mutual respect among all employees. It also shows teams that their work is appreciated. When they can see the impact of what they do on various other parts of the business, it helps them understand the bigger picture. All of these things have a great impact on efficiency.

Reason #5: To maintain a stronger focus on the consumer

When the marketing and tech teams work together, they can develop products with a stronger focus on the customer and improve the company channel management strategy.

Communication across departments is essential. As tech becomes more aligned with business strategy, marketing teams can provide deep customer insights and leverage tech skills to ensure that customers’ needs are met in all new products or services.

In addition to that, marketing and tech team collaboration will allow marketers to further fine-tune the customer experience by arming themselves with expert product knowledge to create more engaging content and respond more effectively to customer queries.

Furthermore, collaborating with tech teams can help marketers develop new and exciting ideas to attract brand-new audiences.

Knowing the ins and outs of the product they sell allows marketers to create content that educates, informs, and excites the audience. From blog posts to website copy, videos, and social media posts, all marketing messages will come from knowledge, and all teams will become better company ambassadors.

On the flip side, the marketing team can be the tech team’s eyes and ears and provide valuable insights into areas of opportunity through social media listening, customer feedback, outreach efforts, etc. As long as the tech staff is in the loop, it will be easy for them to use this information to work on useful improvements to your product or service.

The bottom line is that for years, the marketing and tech departments have had an unsteady relationship, but to maintain a strong focus on the customer, both parties must be on the same page.

Reason #6: To make data-driven decisions

A major part of marketing involves numbers and analytics to know what works and doesn’t to move your company forward.

Working together, your company’s marketing and tech teams can optimize the use of data analytics tools so they can make data-informed decisions and achieve better outcomes. Marketing teams must be specific about their objectives, how they want to measure and assess any outcomes, and how they set up their workflow.

But, business units often aren’t aware of the different analytics that can (and should) be captured and shared to validate hypotheses, fail fast, and pivot as needed.

Many of these issues can be mitigated by having a solid technology team to work with marketers and bring scientific methodology and rigor to the organization.

As part of all your initiatives, you can institute minimum viable analytics (MVA), allowing stakeholders to make data-driven decisions. The tech team’s challenge will be to assure the data’s security and transparency. At the same time, they will need to provide collaboration tools and marketing automation solutions.

Reason #7: To redesign marketing tech infrastructure

This is closely related to the reason above. Tech teams can identify areas where technology can remove mundane tasks in your current tech stack and build a more effective information flow/model.

This will allow both teams to connect to all systems and correlate with all the other data so they can provide more in-depth analysis, and ultimately a stronger data-driven strategy that will show your value to your customers.

Some marketers still choose technology without input from the tech team. However, bringing in tech early on is crucial to ensure effective vetting and proper adoption of new marketing technologies.

Furthermore, there may be legal reasons to ensure tech teams are involved from the outset if the technology includes consumer data.

Marketers will inevitably need to add more and more tools to their MarTech stack as the digital landscape continues to evolve.

Now is the time to re-evaluate and redesign all tech infrastructure with the tech team’s help to ensure your company has a comprehensive and well-integrated system.

This partnership between your marketing and tech teams will ensure that the company has the best systems to personalize the customer experience and upscale employees. It also empowers marketers to create exciting ideas for attracting, delighting, and retaining customers.

Conclusion

As you can see from the reasons above, cross-team collaboration is a great idea for all businesses.

Marketing can effectively collaborate with tech teams to maximize efficiency, develop better products, strengthen customer relationships, and ultimately increase sales.

In short, by working together, both teams stand to benefit from a good digital strategy that increases customer satisfaction, which translates to phenomenal business growth – everyone wins!

About the author
Ron Stefanski is a website entrepreneur and marketing professor passionate about helping people create and market their online businesses. You can learn more from him by visiting OneHourProfessor.com. You can also connect with him on YouTube or Linkedin.