Can marketing experts learn something new or even ground-breaking from colleagues over at software development or operations? Almost definitely, and the answer might just lie in adopting the best features and biggest benefits that the DevOps solution brings to the table. In 2020 and beyond, digital marketers will have to become even more agile and flexible if they are to meet the ever-changing demands of the consumer market, and stay one step ahead of the trends in the industry, which is something that established DevOps practices can help them achieve without wasting time or money.
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In essence, the key goals of DevOps are to elevate the efficiency, agility, and productivity of a software development project, and to achieve all of that, the solution focuses heavily on creating the right infrastructure using company culture, automation, various tools, workflow management, and more. With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the most important things your marketing team can learn from DevOps in order to reach its goals.
Create a positive culture in the team
One of the foundational pillars and why the DevOps solution works so well in companies across the IT industry nowadays is because it creates a positive team culture. Company culture is extremely important in the modern business world, and team culture is quickly becoming the most important element of a thriving workplace, simply because a team can only achieve its true potential if they are working together in harmony, and towards a common goal.
The DevOps approach uses numerous tools to create, develop, and nurture a positive culture in a development team, which your marketing experts can mirror to nurture this culture in their ranks as well. By focusing on codependency, continuous communication, transparency, accountability, trust, and honesty, your marketing team can set a healthy foundation that will allow every project and campaign to run smoothly and efficiently.
Boost communication across the board
An important pillar that DevOps relies on heavily is constant and continuous feedback. Instead of everyone doing their thing within a marketing team and communicating with other team members only when the need arises, your focus should be to inspire and incentivize team members to communicate with each other, but also to communicate with other teams, top-level managers and brand leaders, and all key stakeholders that can influence the development of a marketing campaign and its outcome.
After all, the best way to create successful marketing strategies is to know exactly where the company is going, what different departments are doing and innovating, and how certain changes are going to affect business goals in the near and far future. The flow of information has to be constant if your marketing team is to stay on top of the latest developments and become agile enough to adapt at a moment’s notice.
Prioritize goals with smart workflow management
One of the most important changes your marketing team can make is to focus on concrete goals. This might not sound like anything new or innovative, but what your marketers can learn from leading DevOps specialists is how to prioritize goals and set pathways to achieve them in the most efficient way possible. This is one of the key things that DevOps solutions focus on nowadays, because the only way to roll out a product in time while minimizing errors, risks, and downtime is to always have a goal to work towards.
To achieve this, your marketing team should assume a more binary approach to goal setting. You could try to attach numerous goals to a marketing product or campaign, but that would only skew the results and make a mess of your metrics, and you won’t be able to tell if your tactics were successful or not, at least not accurately. Instead, be sure to attach a single top-level goal to every marketing push in order to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve, and how you’re going to achieve it.
Employ technology to automate almost everything
Technology has become an inextricable part of the modern workplace, and it is transforming every process and every department in a modern company. And marketing is no different. Now, DevOps solutions rely heavily on the implementation of technology in order to automate numerous processes. The key here is to automate as many repetitive and menial tasks in order to drive productivity and efficiency forward, and to allow your employees to focus on marketing strategies and goals that will drive the brand forward.
Focus on cross-department collaboration
And finally, DevOps also relies on cross-department collaboration. However, it’s not just about telling your marketing experts that they have to communicate and collaborate with analytics, sales, and product development teams – it’s also about integrating the systems necessary to make this collaboration a viable and sustainable option. To achieve this, you can use cloud technology to manage and run all marketing processes on a centralized platform that will allow teams from different departments to communicate and work together on projects in real time.
Wrapping up
In the modern business world, there’s always something you can learn from your colleagues or industry professionals that occupy different fields. In this case, be sure to use the processes that DevOps regularly employ to boost the productivity and success rate of your marketing team as a whole.