CIO Magazine recently ran a piece entitled Why IT and Marketing Need to work together, by Katrin Rabint. According to the article, “Technology is now a cornerstone for the marketing department because chief marketing officers are being pressed to intimately understand their customers, and their respective behaviors, to improve the relationship between the brand and consumer. As you may expect, this means that the marketing technology stack is quite complex.” In fact, says Rabint, “It’s not uncommon to have an enterprise-grade marketing organization leveraging more than 20 systems to carry out their daily tasks.”

Scott Brinker example of a marketing technology stack from his Stackies Awards

This technology “stack” can include any number of tools, from CRM systems like Salesforce.com, to marketing automation platforms like Marketo, and web analysis tools like Google Analytics, etc. And the stack is chock full of data that can help marketers get inside the heads of their customers. The ability to access and combine all this disparate data gives marketers a much deeper understanding of their customers and their behaviors.

But to “attack the stack” – essentially access the data in these disparate sources, merge it and make sense of it – marketers and CMOs have traditionally relied on IT, which has only added fuel to their fire-y relationship.
What Rabint didn’t mention is that there’s another way to leverage this data. A better way.

Rather than hire a liaison like a chief marketing technologist to bridge the marketing/IT divide, you can put the power and control directly into the hands of your CMO and their marketers. That means they will no longer have to rely on IT to extract the customer insights they need to quickly uncover what’s working, what’s not, and where their best sales leads are coming from.

How? Easy to use self-service data prep solutions enable marketing people to do the work themselves. They can pull all the data they need into once source, manipulate it, and leverage the insights to become more effective marketers. With self-service data prep they still maintain trust and compliance with IT processes while providing comprehensive insight into marketing programs and ROI.

Not only is self-service data prep easy, it makes for a much more pleasant work environment.