In their expanding role, digital marketers need to collaborate with a wide range of stakeholders from various departments. When digital marketing faced a series of disruptive events in 2020, IT organizations and CEOs provided the most support.
The Gartner survey shows that IT played a strong role in elevating digital marketing technologies and data analytics as well as managing those technologies to maximum effect, whereas the CEO was the digital marketing leader’s strongest proponent within the organization. This put the CEO at the center of the digital marketing leader’s “collaboration zone,” along with IT.
Maintaining strong partnerships with IT is critical, especially as many companies make hybrid or remote work permanent for a large portion of employees and as they accelerate their digital transformation projects.
As organizations shift their brand positioning to accommodate changing customer needs, the experience and communications teams can be valuable allies to cultivate. It also makes sense for digital marketing leaders to collaborate more closely with loyalty management peers on revitalization of loyalty programs and related initiatives that drive customer retention.
On the flip side, as digital marketing continues on the path of increased collaboration, marketing leaders need to watch out for potential roadblocks with product development, sales, operations and supply chain functions. These functions were reported to hinder marketing efforts in 2020. This lack of collaboration tends, predictably, to be more acute in B2B organizations.