Marketing teams have undergone a significant evolution in recent years, as advancements in technology have transformed departments in organizations into more holistic, flexible facets.

With the pace of the business world, it is increasingly important for marketers to embrace new technological breakthroughs to stay ahead of the curve. This not only means keeping up with the latest tools and platforms but also having a deep understanding of how these technologies can be used to achieve specific marketing goals.

Marketing teams that are able to successfully integrate technology into their strategy will see increased efficiency, better customer engagement, and higher ROI, while those who resist change or are slow to modernize will fall behind.

Marketing and IT as Equal Yet Separate Units

Traditionally, IT teams have often been called upon to help marketing teams execute digital marketing strategies and implement cutting-edge marketing tools. Marketing departments bring in more data than arguably any other department, but have until now been under-equipped to  harness that data, needing engineering to help sort it out.

This reliance marketing teams can have on IT causes a natural struggle that turns collaboration into a distraction, slowing down both departments.

And yet marketers have perhaps the deepest understanding of customer behavior and preferences, which is why they would be well positioned to utilize and leverage more SaaS tools. Marketing teams proficient in SaaS can assist IT in making informed tech decisions and improving the customer experience not just as a middle man passing along data, but as a facilitator.

Tech-savviness isn’t just for efficiency; it’s for survival. The recent trend of tech layoffs has seen a disproportionate number of workers from non-technical departments, such as marketing, HR, and product, lose their jobs. Teams are now expected to do more with less, and they must find ways to work effectively to achieve their goals. Marketing professionals can achieve that by acquiring more technical skills and contributing to more areas throughout the organization.

As I’ve come across and been on business calls with hundreds of companies, the ones that are more flexible in their departmental tasks, where an employee from any department can sit in on a SaaS demo and not be lost, are the ones leading the way in their industries.

Empowering Marketers with Next-Gen Tools

Although a large share of responsibility for how marketing will evolve alongside technological development sits on the shoulders of marketing departments themselves, product and engineering departments can help them along significantly.

The key to that is building next-gen tools that are more universally user-friendly and with lower barriers to entry. Many traditional SaaS solutions are monolithic and convoluted, systems that are so large and complicated that expecting people who don’t interact with them daily to understand the ins and outs of how they work is unreasonable.

The best next-gen tools will empower all workers to own their destiny. With more SaaS available than ever, these traits will separate the good tools from the average ones.

Marketers and other non-technical employees have enough on their plate as is, and cannot afford to spend months learning or waiting for a single software product to prove its value.

SaaS systems that emphasize ease-of-use and deliver on promises quickly will allow marketers to work more independently of IT and relieve some of the pressure on engineering teams. With enough time and experience, that increase in tech-savviness will even help to improve collaboration between marketing and IT teams.

Beyond the fact that more independent marketing teams save both themselves and IT departments time and resources to focus more on key departmental tasks, marketing will know more specifically what to ask of IT and what data to feed IT teams, increasing synchronization.

By investing in the best tools available, companies across any industry can stack the odds for their marketing teams to succeed. Better marketers drive growth and make for a healthier brand, something every company could use, but first we collectively as product developers need to arm them with those tools.