IT vs. Marketing: Stop the Bloodshed

Marketing and IT departments are always perfectly aligned, with systems in place that guarantee every goal of the organization is effortlessly met.

Does this sound like your company? If it does, you can stop reading here and return to your utopian existence. For those of us who live in the real world, let’s talk about the different pressures marketing and IT face and how a CMS bridges organizational gaps.

Let’s start with marketing. In most companies, marketing is tasked with: lead generation, product positioning, thought leadership and general communication. Of course, this is an oversimplification but, for the sake of this article, it suffices to illustrate that content creation and distribution comprise the root of marketing’s day to day activities. Without content being constantly pushed to market, it is impossible to accomplish any important marketing goals. Common tasks like updating the company website to announce new products, services, projects, news items, fundraising initiatives, and events need to be done regularly. Doing this work needs to be fast, easy, and controlled by the marketing department.

A CMS empowers communication by putting control back into the marketers’ hands; giving them the tools they need to create and publish content instantly. A good CMS contains features specifically designed to help marketers manage company webpages, schedule webpage publication, and have content removed automatically when it’s no longer relevant. A CMS should also give the marketer complete control over workflow of projects, not merely acting as a publication tool. With this in mind, it makes sense for the marketing team to choose the right CMS for their needs and to utilize its functionality to accomplish more sophisticated marketing projects.

At this point, if you are your companies IT professional, I bet you’ve broken out in a cold sweat. With the responsibilities of keeping the company infrastructure running smoothly, your concerns surely include system security and ensuring that the website (along with all the other pieces of IT infrastructure) continues to work properly. Maintaining control over tools and keeping non-technical users (like the marketing team) out of your systems is the safest course of action. With this strategy there is no risk that a bumbling marketing team will make a mistake that you’ll have to clean up.

As every IT professional knows, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Unfortunately, with control comes the burden of responsibility. If you don’t grant the marketers’ access to the CMS, they’ll be forced to rely on you to publish content. With marketing constantly creating and revising content, it means you have to have more resources to accommodate them or restrict how often content can be updated. This is place where the conflict lies, arguments rage, work doesn’t get done and everyone gets ulcers.

So here’s how the CMS rides in on a white horse and saves the day:

A modern CMS enables the marketing team to create and publish content as well as launch campaigns. This means that the people tasked with marketing are not in the IT office complaining or loading your ticketing system with requests for website updates. The CMS vendor should provide technical support for the tool so that the IT department does not need software experts on staff to troubleshoot if something goes wrong. As a stakeholder in the selection of a CMS vendor, you’ll want to know that they provide the service and technical support your organization needs.

If you want to learn more about the value a service-enriched CMS, check out this article. There are significant advantages to seeking out a SaaS based CMS. With a good cloud-based CMS, IT is no longer responsible for maintaining and patching the software or worrying if it will run your local hardware.

Imagine a world where there is no conflict between marketing and IT because they don’t rely on each other to be successful in their respective jobs. What a wonderful world it would be…