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In marketing, digital transformation means leveraging your digital channels to gain deeper insights for the purpose of improving the customer journey. DevOps plays an essential role in digital transformation, from integrating data into marketing tools to uncovering new revenue streams. This article explains how marketing and DevOps teams can work together to effectively improve business goals.

What is Digital Transformation?

The term digital transformation refers to the strategic adoption of digital technologies. Digital transformation represents a set of tools and processes that improve productivity, deliver better customer experience, manage business risk, and reduce costs. An effective transformation strategy is one that is customized for each organization.

The adoption of new technologies enables organizations to stay competitive in a constantly changing marketplace. Experts believe that spending on digital transformation technologies and services will reach almost two trillion dollars by 2022. Organizations that ignore the widespread reach of digital transformation are at risk of falling behind.

The Impact of Digital Transformation on Marketing

Digital transformation has a huge impact on interactivity, personalization, and automation, all of which are critical components in today’s marketing landscape.

Interactive Media

The interactive nature of digital media enables you to have control over the content you consume, how you consume it, and how you share it. For example, some websites enable you to choose the information you want to view and the order of consumption. Social media enables you to interact with company accounts, ask questions, and get responses back in return. You can even give feedback in the form of thumbs-up buttons or leave regular comments.

Interactive media, like live ads and video streams, enables consumers to take an active part in product discussions on social media. Consumers can make comments, give suggestions, and even receive feedback during that live stream. This level of interaction and engagement changes the way marketers target their audience.

Personalization

Personalized content is one of the most effective ways to change the way marketers work. Marketers can track the actions and behavior of consumers at an individual level and then create personalized content based on that data.

For example, you can track the purchases of a consumer and then suggest similar products. You can even analyze data from social media to track the interests of individuals. The analyzed data can be used to make product recommendations and send personalized emails based on that information.

Automation

Automation means that consumers automatically receive emails or personalized responses when the automation software recognizes certain actions or behaviors. An example of this type of automation is chatbots. Chatbots take on the role of human customer support for simple tasks, improving marketing productivity and response.

The Four Core Technologies of the Martech Stack

Martech is the baseline technology of digital transformation. The Martech stack is used across all industries and business areas.

Foundational Martech includes:

• Digital Asset Management (DAM): DAM systems enable companies to organize, find, and share digital files like images, videos, PDFs, and Microsoft documents. Companies can share these files internally or with external parties.
• Content Management System (CMS): enables companies to publish content on the web for different purposes.
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM): enables companies to interact with their existing and potential customers.
• Marketing Automation: enables companies to automatically distribute content and information to customers.

3 Ways DevOps and Marketing Can Work Better Together

DevOps and marketing have to work together, even if they have different priorities. Both teams share a common goal — building a better customer experience.

1. Work as a Unified Team

Software development and marketing teams often need to work together. For example, marketers need to promote new software releases via social media, emails, press releases, events, and the company website. Marketing is also responsible for gathering external feedback and insights from customers, partners, and prospects.

DevOps teams are responsible for connecting all that gathered data to Martech systems. For example, sales and marketing need to see user activity in their marketing automation systems and CRM. This connection enables marketers to create more relevant content based on user information.

Customer support managers also work with CRM systems to see open support tickets and customer usage. The integration of user data in CRM enables them to notice changes in user activity and address possible issues.

2. DevOps Need to Trust Marketing

Marketing is responsible for promoting products and services to non-technical decision-makers and users. The marketing messaging may sound wrong to software developers and DevOps people. However, this kind of messaging can be exactly what the non-technical people need to hear to make a decision.

In addition, marketing teams are constantly performing tests. These tests are different from DevOps tests. Marketing tests try different versions of messaging and imagery to see what works the best. DevOps team members often claim that these tests are a waste of time because they are left out of the loop. DevOps need to trust marketer’s ideas even if they can’t immediately see the benefit.

For example, if marketing wants to promote the mobile version of a software while it’s not ready yet, DevOps need to inform marketing about the completed features they can promote instead of just ignoring the idea.

3. Marketing Needs to Trust DevOps

Marketers need to communicate with DevOps to better understand the details of the software they are promoting. Communication can help marketers to customize messaging for specific audiences. Marketing needs to also understand what the software does not do. After all, you do not want to get into a situation where you promise a certain feature that does not exist.

This useful information from DevOps can help marketers improve their content plan, including white papers, paid advertising, sales cadences, and more. Marketing can highlight the right features and use cases for different industries using the information from DevOps. Both DevOps and marketing teams are responsible for clear communication that can drive business goals more effectively.

Conclusion

Digital transformation affects a huge spectrum of marketing, business, and DevOps activities. The key is to understand what is involved in the transformation, work as a unified team, and ensure your company has the technology, processes, and talent to progress and thrive.