Is Marketing becoming the new I.T.?

Marketers can learn a lot from IT when it comes to deploying the latest marketing automation technology.

As marketing automation software becomes increasingly integral to sales and marketing departments, marketers are faced with the challenge of navigating technology while keeping up with their core business goals. To deal with this technology growth challenge, Marketing can take a lesson from IT about outsourcing technical tasks to Managed Service Providers (MSP). For marketers, the right MSP will provide services to set-up and maintain the Marketing Automation platform you have chosen, establish and execute a plan, handle technical issues, and motivate everyone to be part of your MarTech shift.

What are Managed Service Providers?

In the context of IT, a managed service provider (MSP) is defined as “a company that remotely manages a customer’s IT infrastructure and/or end-user systems, typically on a proactive basis and under a subscription model”. An MSP supplements the IT team of a company by providing knowledge, skills, and expertise on a contractual basis.

Managed Service Providers offer several benefits for companies. Most enterprises need their IT team to focus on projects that support business operations, deal with requests, and enable an organization to run efficiently without a service outage. New platforms that lie outside the core operations of the IT department can drain its valuable time and energy. Outsourcing to an MSP enables the business to conveniently acquire specialists with the expertise needed to manage the day-to-day tasks associated with new technology, while freeing up the IT team to focus on the core operations of the business.

As any IT colleague might say, outsourcing specialized work to MSPs is not only convenient but a common solution. A 2016 study found that 64% of enterprises use some form of managed services, and another survey found that the managed-services market is expected to grow to $193 billion by 2019.

Managed Service Providers in Martech

A 2014 Gartner report (paywall), states that 81% of companies surveyed had the “equivalent of a chief marketing technologist”. Data like this demonstrates the growing presence of MarTech in business and, in turn, the added responsibility for marketing departments to deal with the challenge of managing the utilization, uptime, and maintenance of new technology.

In other words, marketers are now faced with the same problem IT teams have dealt with for years: keeping up with new software while performing the essential tasks they were hired to do. Like their IT counterparts, marketers need to find the expertise and experience that their business requires to thrive with the technology investments they have made.

Unlike IT departments, who are solely focused on the maintenance of a system, marketing teams need to focus on generating successful programs and campaigns in complex business environments. Marketing needs to go beyond the selection, integration, and operation of new systems and enable MarTech to reach its full potential. Jason Heller of McKinsey & Co. echoes these challenges: “Marketers are being asked to embrace an entirely new pace of operations, new processes, new approaches to decision making…The enterprise environment can be complex, with multiple business groups, stakeholders, and existing platforms, and that can make decision making challenging.”

In this context, acquiring the help of professionals with both technical expertise and the business savvy to support the vision and strategy developed by the marketing team becomes critical.

The Right MSP for Your Business

The right MSP enables Marketing to take the stress out of implementing new technology and motivates everyone to be part of the Martech shift. As renowned marketing technologist Scott Brinker points out, the most difficult part “is changing how marketing thinks and behaves, given the capabilities that these new tools enable. It requires a different cadence of marketing management, where agile sprints, iterative experiments, and adaptive feedback loops are more important than the traditional yearly marketing plan.” Sound complicated? This is where having a swift and ready team of marketing technologists can take a lot of worry and stress from the daunting task of digital transformation.

The right MSP will provide a solid set up and consistently service the system you have chosen, migrate information safely and accurately, train your stakeholders, manage technical issues, and motivate everyone involved to be part of your MarTech shift. They will lay the foundation for success with high-performing email templates, segmentation, and a refined marketing database. Finally, quality MSP support will minimize recruiting, manage risk, and save money for your business.

The right MSP for managing your MarTech brings the unique expertise and insights of an experienced marketing technologist and helps transform your marketing department into a revenue center that is agile and responsive to the trends in your target market.