How Marketers Can Steal Programming Concepts to Market Better
Addressing the Complexity of Enterprise Marketing
Addressing the Complexity of Enterprise Marketing
Enterprise marketing teams are in a tight spot.
They’re expected to deliver highly targeted, data-driven campaigns—without the exacting process that IT demands. (Ticketing)
Consider a Telecom company where stakeholders request campaigns for freeform segments, like "customers with home internet plans," "households with three or more members," or "customers without direct mail in the past year."
That doesn’t sound hard (if you’re not in marketing), but those actually need different data attributes to work:
Customers with home internet plans
Needs to sort by list of customers AND by what products they current use
Customer households with three or more members
Needs to sort by list of customers (grouped by address) AND by count at address
Customers without direct mail in the past year
Needs the channel for each campaign AND the customer list of who was targeted
Historically, fulfilling these requests involves stitching together disparate data sources and manual processes—an approach that is inefficient, prone to mistakes, and hard to scale.
This inefficiency translates into tangible costs: delayed campaign launches, inaccurate targeting, and suboptimal resource allocation.
Instead of coming up with a new approach to managing your data structure, steal!
Luckily, software developers already have a solution we can use!
Consider adopting Object-Oriented Programming (OOP) principles to streamline their marketing technology ecosystems.
When you formalize how your marketing is done, requests become a lot easier to manage (and track).
You can set up your department so that you never fail
Lets see how OOP can enhance operational efficiency, improve targeting speed, and deliver measurable business value.
The OOP Framework: A Technical Foundation for…Marketing?
Object-Oriented Programming organizes data and processes into reusable "objects," each encapsulating specific attributes (data points) and methods (functions).
Don’t worry if it sounds complicated—refer back to Pikachu above.
In a marketing context, this approach redefines key entities—such as customers, campaigns, and content—as modular components with clear properties and relationships.
And clear, cross-department definitions!
For example, think how you might describe any of these—those are the attributes:
Customer:
Attributes might include "Products Used," "Channels Preferred," and "Engagement History."
e.g. “Oh, this customer prefers to be emailed”
Campaign Object: Properties could be "Channel," "Target Audience," "Budget," and "Performance Metrics."
e.g. “This campaign had a ton of impressions over its course”
Content Object: Nested within campaigns, tracking "Format," "Impressions," and "Conversion Rate."
e.g. “This piece of content’s format was a static image”
By establishing a clear framework and relationships, OOP enables marketing teams to manage data systematically, accurately estimate how hard something is, and scale operations seamlessly.
Strategic Benefits: Quantifying the Impact
Adopting OOP principles yields several advantages, each with measurable implications for enterprise marketing:
Operational Efficiency: Standardized objects eliminate redundant processes, reducing campaign setup time.
If you know that you might reuse a ‘slice’, then you can save how it was captured and reuse quickly.
Targeting Accuracy: Structured data reduces segmentation errors, reducing extraneous spend.
Scalability: Reusable objects accelerate deployment of new campaigns, cutting development costs.
Analytics Maturity: Clear object relationships enhance performance tracking. You might actually get useful metrics!
These benefits collectively contribute to a stronger ROI, as reduced overhead and improved outcomes compound over time.
Implementation Roadmap: A Strategic Approach
For enterprise marketers seeking to replicate developers’ success, the following steps provide a scalable blueprint:
Object Identification: Map key marketing entities and their attributes, aligning with business priorities
Relationship Mapping: Define how objects interact (e.g., Campaigns target Customers, Content drives engagement).
Technology Integration: Leverage platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, or Snowflake to operationalize the framework.
Pilot Execution: Launch a proof-of-concept campaign to validate the approach and quantify benefits.
Track Requests Systematically: If you have a record of all requests, you can group them and start creating standard definitions for slices, reports, etc.
Enterprise Rollout: Scale the framework across teams, refining based on pilot learnings and recorded requests.
Addressing Challenges: Mitigating Risks
While the upside is compelling, implementation requires strategic foresight:
Resource Commitment: Initial setup demands time and expertise. Mitigate this by prioritizing high-impact use cases to demonstrate early value.
Change Resistance: Legacy teams may resist new processes.
New terminology is always very hard to get across, especially to stable, mature teams.
Overcome this through training and showcasing measurable improvements.
Collaboration Needs: Success hinges on alignment between marketing, IT, and data functions. Establish clear governance to ensure cohesion.
Advanced Applications: Elevating Campaign Insights
Beyond foundational benefits, OOP enables advanced analytics by incorporating nuanced attributes into objects.
Drawing from John Dewey’s reflective thinking model, an example for a campaign could be:
Promptness: Time to consume content (e.g., 30-second video vs. 5-minute article).
Breadth: Reach across segments or channels.
Depth: Persuasive impact of messaging.
Persistence: Duration of campaign influence.
With these, you can still get some of marketing’s ‘fluffy’ attributes, but also can record them for trend analysis and further analytics.
Conclusion
Consider adopting OOP for marketing—don’t reinvest the wheel.
Marketing and technology leaders should evaluate OOP as a tool for their marketing operations strategy.
Start with a pilot initiative, measure its impact on efficiency and performance, and build a business case for broader adoption.
The future of marketing lies in structured, scalable solutions—OOP provides the blueprint from a process we already know works.