Over the years, there’s been a continual shift to customer data becoming increasingly accessible to marketers. And with the growth of business intelligence (BI) tools and user-friendly CRM systems, no longer do those marketers need to rely on the IT department to run complex queries out of multiple systems to identify unique trends and insights from that data. They now have the direct means to get to the data instantly.

But - as Spiderman’s Uncle Ben says, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

In today’s data-centric world, Marketing and IT are no longer “church and state.” Data management responsibilities continue to expand beyond the realm of Information Technology, as marketing teams are now held accountable to both know and understand the data provided to them. They’re finding that topics like data security and governance continue to rise in visibility and importance, and need to be addressed to ensure customer trust and confidence. They’re also expected to have a solid understanding of data to help them capture insights into a customer’s journey across all touchpoints.

Speaking of customer journey, today’s customers are increasingly requiring more personalized experiences. Those demands put marketers in a unique position of being able to identify potential anomalies in the data or trends that don’t line up to what is expected when pulling their insights together.

In working with large amounts of data to compile data-driven insights, marketers actually become an extension of IT. How? Through continued data validation and quality efforts, identifying additional data sourcing needs, or pushing development by defining how different data elements need to work together to best target customers and drive revenue, acquisition or personalization efforts.

From marketing specialists all the way up to the CMO, various components of data management are threads now woven throughout a marketer’s role. Those new responsibilities include working directly with IT to ensure data feeds are providing the correct information, identifying data inaccuracies, providing data governance to protect sensitive information, optimizing data strategies, and using analytics to build the foundation for their marketing plans.

While it may not be the most exciting addition for marketing teams in terms of departmental duties, that great power of being able to access and use so much information to drive insights means having the great responsibility of becoming a key player in data management.