8 in 10 Marketers Foresee Growing Involvement for the IT Team in Day-to-Day Marketing

September 21, 2022

This article is included in these additional categories:

Business of Marketing | Internal Collaboration

Research has found in the past that CMOs believe IT has become one of the top supporters of their marketing strategy. More recently, most marketers surveyed rated the CMO-CIO relationship as effective, and now, a new study [download page] from Lytics indicates that both IT and Marketing professionals believe that the IT team will become more intimately involved in day-to-day marketing over the next 5 years.

According to the survey of more than 200 IT and Marketing decision-makers from the US and Canada, 88% of IT professionals and 81% of Marketing respondents believe that their organization’s IT team will become more involved in day-to-day marketing over the next 5 years.

For the time being, marketers and IT teams have different views on how this involvement takes place. For marketers, the most common role that IT teams have in day-to-day marketing is in giving marketing access to data for marketing (75%), yet only 56% of IT respondents agree that they do so.

Close behind, almost 7 in 10 marketers said that IT teams model data for marketing/ad campaigns and targeting (compared to 56% of IT respondents), while more than 6 in 10 pointed to IT’s role in maintaining the website and other digital products.

IT teams, though, had the most consensus about a different role: more than three-quarters (76%) of IT respondents said that they help to choose technology/SaaS vendors, something that only about half (54%) of marketers concurred with.

Separate research has found that the top opportunities for marketing-IT digital collaboration include the human experience and digital transformation.

Meanwhile, the Marketer and IT groups surveyed by Lytics also had some different opinions about the technologies that marketing teams plan to adopt over the next 5 years. While marketers were most likely to cite Customer Data Platforms (73%), IT respondents were most apt to cite Artificial Intelligence (67%). And while IT respondents were more likely than marketers to point to Blockchain/SmartContracts and Data Warehouses, the opposite was true for Unified ID, which was cited as a future adoption plan by a considerably larger share of marketers.

As for AI, though about two-thirds of both groups envision the integration of AI into the tech stack, the extent to which AI will inform marketing segments and ad targeting in the next 5 years is up for debate. About one-quarter (26%) of IT respondents believe it will inform all of their targeting/segmentation, with no human input, while only 17% of marketers agree. By contrast, marketers are more than twice as likely as IT respondents (17% and 7%, respectively), to believe that humans will use AI to help with targeting and segmentation but will remain in control.

Marketers and IT professionals also disagree on the main benefits of AI in marketing. For marketers the automation of marketing tasks is the top benefit, followed by the elimination of mistakes made in segmentation. For IT professionals, though, the top benefit is delivering personalized ads to customers, followed by increasing the efficiency of advertising spend.

Finally, there is one area in which both groups agree: more than three-quarters of IT professionals (76%) and marketers (83%) surveyed believe that the tech team should have more accountability for marketing ROI.

For more, download the study here.

About the Data: The results are based on a survey of more than 200 IT and Marketing decision-makers from the US and Canada, all working at companies with a least 200 employees.

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