How to Enable Digital Marketing Agility

May 11, 2016 Digital Experience

In a previous blog post, we discussed the importance of digital agility and how marketing’s ability to quickly create and deliver personalized customer experiences is hampered when they are dependent on technical resources to implement required functionality. There are several ways to increase agility beginning with technology that helps automate digital marketing functions.

While there are certainly no shortages of technologies available to help, it is important that marketing choose a solution that is simple for the business person to use, minimizing the need for technical support to get programs implemented. For example, the chart below shows how utilizing a Content Management System (CMS) can shift responsibility of important tasks back to marketing while allowing IT and development to concentrate on their own strategic initiatives.

 Task  Responsibility: Without CMS Responsibility: With CMS
 Content Authoring  Marketing  Marketing
 SEO  Marketing  Marketing
 Personalization  Marketing  Marketing
 Personas  Marketing  Marketing
 Multi-site Publishing  Development  Marketing
 Digital Asset Management  Development  Marketing
 Form Management  Development  Marketing
 Internationalization  Development  Marketing
 Analytics  IT/Development  Marketing
 A/B Testing  Development  Marketing
 Central Administration  IT  IT
 Site Development  Development  Development
 Security and Governance  IT IT
 Multi-device Optimization  Development   Development
 Platform Support & Integration  IT/Development  IT/Development
 API Development  Development  Development

With a CMS or any other enabling digital technology, marketing can quickly implement the programs needed to react to changing business requirements or market events without being dependent on another group’s delivery schedule. The proper technology can also enable marketing to better manage the overall customer experience to drive results. Managing the customer experience is especially important as marketing is increasingly being held accountable for developing and implementing programs that directly contribute to the financial success of the company. Without the proper systems in place, marketing will continue to be reliant on other groups to deliver results and not be able to offer the cross channel, personalized experiences that customers demand.



Barrett Coakley

Barrett Coakley is the Senior Manager, Products Marketing for the Progress Sitefinity Content Management System (CMS) and the Sitefinity DEC, a digital marketing analytics platform.  Mr. Coakley has worked in various marketing positions for both startup and large technology organizations for over 20 years.