The Guardian’s live Q&A on “The merging of IT and marketing: what does it mean for marketers?” sparked a great discussion between contributing experts and participating readers. Bluewolf’s CMO, Corinne Sklar, participated as part of the expert panel to shed light upon the relationship between IT and marketing departments: “How do the two departments collaborate to achieve their goals? What do these changes mean for the role of marketers?”

The panel of experts discussed the skills, strategies, and technologies that modern marketers need to thrive — in the present and future global marketplaces. Below are key points Corinne highlighted during the discussion.

Three factors are changing the role of marketers:

1. The rise of automation technology — there is so much data and technology to manage, automation has become essential.
2. The focus on knowing and predicting customer behavior.
3. Customers are demanding omni-channels for engagement, thus, marketers need to manage the experience across sales and service as well.

Marketing Automation is becoming an essential tool for marketers. How is its impact being felt?

In a B2B environment, the single biggest impact is the sales and marketing alignment, specifically visibility around how prospects and customers are actually engaging with your brand and content. Providing this insight to sales is a game changer; it changes the conversation. What I mean here is that traditionally, sales and marketing have acted as separated funnels. The reality is that customers are constantly popping around the lifecycle and leaving crumbs.

In the past, sales did not see how their prospects or customers were engaging with their brand. Now, however, with marketing automation tools and integration to CRM, sales has visibility into all these touchpoints. This helps educate sales around the importance of marketing in engaging the database and builds trust between the two departments. They can then also see ROI metrics down the line.

Even as marketers are becoming more analytically driven, creativity remains ever-crucial:

B2C marketers have been leveraging complex data models for sometime, but B2B marketers are still working on integrating CRM to understand how to leverage marketing automation tools. For instance, if you have the best data insight but can't leverage it to get smarter programs out the door in a efficient way, why do it?

No analytics will develop the creative idea for you. It might help drive the topic but marketers will always need to think big and think different.

Full executive insights can be found in the comments section here.

Want to contribute to the conversation? Tweet Corinne @csklar.