For digital marketers, it’s common to see developers as a hindrance. Marketing is often fast-paced and requires agility to which slow and cumbersome IT processes are seen as antithetical. But these are stereotypes, and modern organizations can and should be able to support both processes without conflict. As a technical marketer, your job is to often mediate between different parts of the organization, and working with software developers is not an exception to this.
When Google Tag Manager was first released, its product page claimed that with a tag management system, you no longer have to “bother IT” when releasing marketing code.
While the statement is both honest and innocent in its approach, it does allude to the friction between the fast-paced world of digital marketing and the process-driven paradigm of software, product, and service development.
From a tagging perspective, it seems to make sense. Why would you have to wait days, weeks, or even months to get a new release of the site or app out just to add some tags to the service, when you could achieve the same with a tag management system?
In fact, if you peel the onion of any technical marketing discipline, you’ll find seeds of conflict between the stereotypical IT and marketing processes.
Whether that stereotype is true for any given organization, as a technical marketer it will most likely be your initiative to take to help bridge the gap between these different parts of the digital organization.
Consider this…
Your online store has an upcoming holiday campaign that requires quite a bit of work on your company’s website.
You need to deploy additional tags to support the new marketing technologies and advertising partners you’ve decided to work with on this campaign. Furthermore, you want to set up some new redirect tests and server-side flows for the A/B tests that will run before, during, and after the campaign itself.
You’re worried that you won’t get your developers to sign off on these changes. Many of them require updates to critical parts of the site, such as the checkout flow, and you don’t want to get embroiled in arguments with IT regarding the importance of your marketing tasks.
Your options are:
- Do everything through a tag management system. Add the tags, triggers, and variables through the TMS, scrape the pages for all the values you need, and make sure that your new marketing tags are prioritized in the page render flow.
- Delegate some of the work to IT. You’ll use the TMS to do TMS stuff, such as running tags, triggers, and variables. However, you’ll write a specification for IT to implement a proper Data Layer to support the new tags. You’ll also ask them to do their best to prioritize marketing tags, as long as it doesn’t conflict with other processes on the site.
- Cooperate fully with IT. Again, the TMS can do what a TMS does best. But instead of writing specifications, you’ll join IT in their sprints and daily meetings to make sure that marketing efforts are prioritized properly and that the developers understand your requirements. You might even pair program with the developers to make sure that the code that’s generated for your TMS has the best chances of working without a hitch.
The list above is also a maturity scale, with the first step being the most isolated, most silo’d, and least mature approach to cooperation in a digital organization.
The more you can demystify the technical marketing processes to your developers, the easier it will be for you to develop processes that can be mutually beneficial. After all, even though digital marketing is often “invisible” work on a technical level, as much of it has to do with semantics rather than site functionality, you are all working towards growth. If you dig deep enough, you’ll find that digital marketing and software development actually overlap a great deal.
Understanding this overlap and developing it across silos is one of the best things you can do for your organization.