With a background of 20 years of marketing experience, Sylvan Learning CMO Julia Fitzgerald is responsible for marketing strategy, lead generation, digital consumer-facing strategies and all local marketing that supports Sylvan’s franchisee system. She has also learned that as the role of marketing technology becomes more prominent, it’s become more important for her team to develop a great working relationship with Sylvan’s IT team.
We sat down with Fitzgerald to talk about how tech has changed the marketing world, why CMOs and CTOs should be best friends and how she keeps on top of tech solutions in a rapidly changing marketplace.
Chief Marketer: How has technology changed the way you do your job over the past few years?
Julia Fitzgerald: When you look at what’s been happening with consumers the past couple of years, I can’t recall a period of such rapid change in how consumers behave, and it’s all been because of 
digital. It has to do with consumers’ willingness to interact so freely online. Most of the population was reticent to even put a credit card number into the computer in the past—it was way too risky—and now you don’t even think twice about doing it. More recently, it’s been a massive move to mobile. It has changed the way our consumers behave and to keep up with them we have to meld what we do as marketers with technology.
CM: How has the relationship between CMOs and CTOs and IT departments evolved?
JF: There used to be a pretty solid wall between marketing and technology, and there would be very clear responsibilities. The tech teams would want a full spec and a document of requirements when marketing needed something. That’s not how marketing people work, so what had happened in the past was marketing people would find ways around that, like using outside vendors. There is a core technological infrastructure and IT has to defend that and make sure it works perfectly. Marketers want to move at the speed of consumers, so there’s an inherent conflict there. You can end up with unconnected pools of data that can sap the enterprise’s power.
As we restructure our teams and come up with a different type of relationship with IT, it really enables us to put everything in alignment so that all data that comes in from our different consumer outreaches is collected in the same databases, so we can use it to market later on.
For example, when I started here at Sylvan a little over a year ago, our website was outdated and not optimized for mobile, and it wasn’t built for optimal SEO or data retrieval. We had two choices: put more digital duct tape on it, or dig in and really invest to build a new asset that would take us into the future.
Marketing and IT made the decision to work hand-in-hand to take on this project, but through that we could see how our old way of working was not very productive. We used that as a structure to figure out how to integrate ourselves so that we were collaborating and not colliding. First, we moved. We used to be on separate floors, so we moved to the same floor and it’s crazy how much that helps communication.
I also had to change up some of the capabilities inside our marketing team. I had to add more people that were comfortable with digital media, social media and user experiences. I ended up adding different skillsets to the marketing team to compliment the IT team. My CTO did the same, and added new personnel that were more in tune to user experience and UX and front-end design, and they speak marketing.
We were able to accelerate our production. You have to be willing to respect the professionalism that the other side can bring. Marketing wants it faster and IT wants it reliable, so when you start at those two points, we ended up making a lot of progress.
The great thing about working in a digital world is that you know pretty quickly whether you made the right decision or not. We can see through web forms that our conversion rate has more than doubled. The SEO organic traffic is up 15 percent year over year. And the site is mobile optimized, so we can see that our mobile site usage has gone from 23 percent to 41 percent.
Once you create one good tech opportunity, your corporation starts to change and there’s an appetite for more. Marketers have to become technologically savvy and in order to do that you have to have the right mix of people on your team. You have to have the support of your CIO or CTO and you have to be open to going out and finding external sources that are really expert in areas where you may not be.
CM: What are the big challenges in keeping on top of tech landscape?
JF: It’s trying to figure out what’s going to be really important to your company and what’s just the technological flavor of the day. That’s where I think being able to blend classic marketing experience with digital opportunities is the key. My job is to keep us focused on what our customers need, so staying really grounded in basic marketing tenets. Then, with that eye, we look at each of the newest digital innovations to see if it will get us where we need to go, or of it’s just really cool and we want to try it.
CM: How do you decide how long to test solutions before introducing them into the mix?
JF: We agree upon what we’re trying to do first, and marketing will frequently go ahead and do the research because we are more in touch with what we want to do with the consumer and what is state of the art. We generally go out and scout the market and narrow it down. We then ask IT to weigh in, because there are critical integration points with our core systems and databases and CMS systems. We want to make sure that what we’re doing can be integrated. Ultimately, if it’s consumer-facing we make the final call, but I would never do it without the IT team’s buy-in.
CM: Where do you see marketing technology heading in the future?
JF: It will get more and more important. Changes are only going to increase, so the tighter that we can be integrated, the more successful we will be and the faster we will be than the competition.
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