Home improvement rarely starts with casual online browsing, Battin quips. More often, it begins with a broken faucet, a paint job already underway, or a project that has suddenly become urgent. Each task brings its own questions, creating a narrow window for Home Depot to surface the right information, recommend the right products, and capture the sale. The company’s structure, she says, brings marketing closer to the digital tools that interpret those signals and respond in real time, placing her team nearer to the moment a home project becomes a purchase.

In many companies, product teams build the digital experience while marketers work to attract customers to it. At Home Depot, those functions operate side by side. Features such as Store Mode show shoppers the exact aisle and shelf section where an item is located, making the retailer’s vast warehouses easier to navigate, especially for less experienced homeowners who arrive with a project in mind but only a rough sense of what they need. In a business where customers often walk in with a repair, a renovation, or a half-formed idea, that kind of digital guidance can shape both the speed of the trip and the likelihood of a sale. “The merger of marketing and tech has never been greater,” Battin tells Fortune.

Home Depot’s first-party data gives it unusual precision, she adds. The company uses weather and regional signals to determine which products to surface, which projects to emphasize, and how ads should look and read in different markets. That targeting is effective, Battin explains, because home improvement demand is highly situational. When spring arrives early in Atlanta, outdoor work, garden projects, and backyard upgrades become more relevant. A cold or rainy stretch in New York can shift attention toward indoor repairs and maintenance. AI helps the company move faster, adjusting imagery, seasonal details, and copy across markets without rebuilding campaigns from scratch. The result is marketing that more closely reflects the conditions shaping customer demand.

The Home Depot app sits at the center of that strategy. Customers who use it spend three to four times more than those who do not, Battin says, which helps explain why mobile carries so much weight inside the company. The app is especially valuable for younger customers, who often come to Home Depot with less confidence than earlier generations and prefer guidance at their fingertips rather than across a counter from a sales associate.

The creator economy gives Home Depot another way to reach customers through the social media channels that increasingly influence how they browse and buy. The company launched its creator portal in December as a more formal vehicle for cultivating those partnerships, though Battin says Home Depot resists the industry’s reflexive chase for scale. It treats creators less as rented reach than as extensions of the brand, with the emphasis on fit. The retailer prioritizes creators who understand the category, feel native to the brand, and can speak credibly to both DIY shoppers and, at times, pros. “That trust is so important to us,” Battin says, adding that Home Depot wants creators who can “tell the story authentically.” The company’s partnership portal now includes nearly 3,000 creators.

That strategy becomes more powerful when it does more than lift demand for a single breakout product. Battin points to the Grand Duchess, an artificial Christmas tree that already had viral appeal before a creator helped build additional momentum around it. The campaign turned a popular item into an entry point for Home Depot’s broader home decor business, drawing in shoppers who had not previously bought decor from the retailer. Home Depot declined to share full category-specific sales data, but said that 25% of customers who bought the Grand Duchess tree through creator links during the 2025 holiday season were new to the retailer, while 34% had shopped at Home Depot before but were new to its holiday category.

Taken together, Home Depot’s app, digital targeting, and creator strategy point to a broader definition of marketing than commercials and advertisements alone can capture. Marketing today, Battin says, extends into the customer touchpoints that shape how a shopper moves from intent to purchase. Moreover, it reflects the evolution of the CMO into a more technologically fluent and financially accountable operator than in years past.