How vide oconferencing can help redefine your marketing strategy

Laura McLellan, research vice president at Gartner Inc., has predicted that by 2017, a company’s chief marketing officer will spend more on IT than the chief information officer.

Indeed, marketers are starting to take the lead in technology purchases. One of the transformative technologies marketers are pursuing is cloud-based video conferencing. Video touches almost every part of business communications, helping to make marketers more important than ever in the hierarchy of a corporate management team.

Marketers are now viewed as versatile corporate management executives, whose abilities are valuable for other corporate functions, including human resources and general business communications.

The marketing department already purchases almost half of all marketing-related technologies and services, according to the 2012 Gartner study. Marketers also influence decisions to purchase almost half of all technology, with video meeting software often being one of those purchases.

Along the way, the growth of marketing applications and systems has created an alliance between the marketing and IT departments. Because marketing technology applications and services must work flawlessly with back-end systems, the connection between a company’s IT and marketing departments is growing tighter than in any other aspect of an organization’s operations.

The increased role of technology in marketing also has given rise to greater IT capability within the marketing department itself. In many businesses, the marketing department may now be staffed with its own teams responsible for the reliable operation and maintenance of the company’s Web presence, as well as practically every other part of its technical operations. The IT department’s responsibility is to ensure that servers and backend systems are running optimally.

In the arsenal of marketing technologies, lan video conferencing provides new communications channels for everything from product introductions and corporate news events to customer training. Consequently, today’s marketing professional is evolving to more than the keeper of the brand and the developer of sales leads.

How, specifically, is web conferencing software technology elevating the work of marketers? One notable example is press briefings. Even in my own organization, we prefer video calls to teleconferences if the reporter has broadband Internet access. It’s an extremely useful option when reaching out to national or international media all at once.

Using video, both sides know they have each party’s complete attention, and are not distracted by the temptation to multitask. Visual cues such as body language enable you to understand how your message is being accepted. That’s especially important when dealing with clients for whom English may be a second language.
As the Gartner study showed, the marketing department is buying a wide range of technologies and services from many different vendors. Integrating these various applications and services must be seamless and failsafe.

As marketers, we are constantly bringing new technology such as Internet video conferencing to bear in support of our company’s brand and sales goals. By becoming better stewards of technology, we become more trusted members of the organization’s leadership, with a greater voice in the long-term direction of our business.

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