The Case for Why Marketing Should Have Its Own Engineers

Today, he runs the marketing team like an independent agency within the organization complete with its own engineers — a strategy he highly recommends for small teams that need to get a lot done fast.

An interesting article to set up an in-house agency to support all of marketing.  As a database marketer, I truly believe the team needs its own database and its own engineers to maintain this database.  It has to be separate from the IT processes that slow down progress.

Why?

Why shouldn't marketing data be included in the rest of the organizations data?

The simple answer is time.  Most data put into data warehouses are used for analytics.  Sounds just as important right?  Analytics is the driver of making money in the organization correct? 

Sort of.  This data can also include financial data that has different processes based on financial rules, especially for public companies.  Some data might include credit card information, which need to be PII compliant.  This data needs strict data governance and encryption of sensitive data.  All of this takes time.

Time is the enemy of marketing.  The amount of time it takes to get data into a marketing database relates to an amount of revenue that is being lost.  Most data requested into a marketing database is used right away in segmentation for campaigns.  These campaign changes either drive revenue or save on expense.  Having engineers able to get data into the marketing database in an expedited process gives an organization a competitive advantage. The quicker new data equals the more efficient database marketers.  All this leads to more money to the bottomline.