How Complexity In the Digital Space Can Work For You

Today every company is a technology company, no matter the field. No longer can spreadsheets and loose leaf paper be the main tools that keep your company afloat. You likely have multiple tools within your organization that help different departments prosper. But, shouldn’t your entire company be prospering together? Would you not be better off with an integrated tool, at least one for departments that can work together, such as your marketing and product teams?

By secluding different departments with different software you are hindering progress that you might not realize is even possible. I’ve written in the past about how different departments silo themselves and that a company needs to be a cohesive unit not a bunch of different departments. It all starts with the right technology. Without a tool in place to ensure cohesion then it can simply never happen.

Marketing itself uses an inordinate number of tools that should be bundled for efficiency’s sake, let alone a cohesive workplace. What does a company need their marketing department to have and can it even be managed by one tool? Let’s take a look at the core technologies that marketing cannot compromise on…

• Digital asset management (DAM) systems to collate your brand’s digital content.
• Product information management (PIM) systems to centralize the product-related technical and marketing information.
• Web content management systems (CMS) systems to streamline your content creation.
• Marketing resource management (MRM) systems to plan, budget and manage your marketing campaigns.
• Customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to record and manage your customer details, sales interactions and relationships and manage the financial and production side of the business.
• Marketing automation systems to embed automatic scheduling of content publication and follow-up processes for marketing activity.

As you can see, technology is behind the success of a great marketing team. But, is it lots of technology or one robust platform that is behind marketing success? The fewer the platforms that someone has to use the more efficient one can be. Efficiency correlates directly to better productivity, so it could be said that one system that can do all of the above is better than six separate systems.

The complexity of the technology that must be mastered today has coined a new term, the ‘marketing technologist’. Most marketers, especially digital marketers, will be somewhat technologically minded due to the tools they use in their day-to-day, but it’s not only unfair to expect them to be at the level of an IT professional, it’s impractical. A marketer’s job is to market not to know a bunch of complex software platforms. Quite simply, while marketers are learning a new system they are not creating marketing content.

The key to being a technology company is to be savvy about it. If your teams can’t efficiently use the software meant to help your company run, then your company will not move in the right direction. Part of being technologically savvy is having mastered the right technology, not the most technology and certainly not the most complex. It’s about usability. It’s about the edge you need to push yourself above the competition. It’s about mastering your data, your rights, your products and setting your technological infrastructure to be solid rather than being pieced together with tape and glue.

The right system is out there to help you evolve into the technology company you had no choice but to become. Integrate your technology, unsilo your teams, and set your company up to become what it’s supposed to be, the best!