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Insights

The Changing Role of Marketers

The CDO has the unique ability to unite the rest of the C-Suite team. Its role has become very common, and the number of CDOs has increased insignificantly over the years. Furthermore, the digital strategy is becoming a corporate strategy for many organizations, so Deloitte sees the role of the CDO as temporary.

Since its role overlaps with those of the rest of the C-Suite, the author believes the CDO is not necessary. Digital is a new way of doing things, and companies should integrate it into all aspects of their business. The number of CDOs stays small, and the CEOs should not invest in recruiting them. Rather they should focus on creating a cohesive leadership unit with the rest of the team.

All successful organizations operate according to three cardinal rules when choosing the right metrics for measuring marketing success. Organizations should be looking at the bigger picture by uniting marketing campaigns and activities with key organizational goals. So, when it comes to identifying important metrics, there should be a focus on value-based data.

McKinsey has identified seven imperatives for CPG companies focused on building digital capabilities based on independent research, in-depth interviews, and extensive experience. It is important to integrate digital activities into the overall strategy, create new roles, develop new skills, rethink organization, and continually measure and manage digital performance. Further explained are rapid-response mechanisms, how to leverage big data, and how to foster a mindset of rapid-testing and learning.

This article outlines five rules that help link measurements to real business outcomes. Measurements should only include things of value, and it is best to have a team involved that covers all your interests. There should be a framework that outlines which marketing decisions should be made when. Building the right team, the right culture, and the right set of metrics and tools used are critically important for success.

Smart Insights and Technology for Marketing (TFM) surveyed over 1,000 companies to produce insightful data regarding digital marketing strategies. One of the key things most businesses are not doing is fully integrating their digital marketing plans. Overall, businesses are a long way from the optimized customer view marketing that many have discussed for a long time.

Companies are falling short in important skills related to mobile, video, testing, partner management, and organizational enablers. The scale and nature of such gaps reveal that more than recruitment and training revisions are needed. Marketers that cannot attract, develop, and retain staff with advanced digital skills risk falling behind, and this has led to a demand for higher level professionals instead of grads with marketing degrees.

Today’s marketers do not have all the skills they need to operate in a digital world. To navigate this lack of skill, many marketers rely on old-fashioned outsourcing, but digital campaigns require active involvement. By aggressively adopting agile practices, marketers can transform their organizations into fast-moving teams that continually drive growth for the business.

In the digital age, shopping around has become the norm for consumers with mobile apps and other technology so readily providing price comparisons and peer reviews. Now, converting consumers early is the strongest path to growth, and as brand loyalty shrinks it becomes more important for marketers to place emphasis on when consumers are initially considering which products and services to buy.

Companies bring in CDOs for two reasons: they need to fix a root cause impeding their digital progress or the CEO realizes the organization can’t integrate with the current construct. What might not be expected is that the true measure of a CDO͛’s success is when the role becomes unnecessary. By its nature, a high-functioning digital company does not need a CDO. However, a successful CDO will make digital integral to the strategy, obsess over the customer, build agility, speed, and data, extend networks, and enforce the strategy.

The key for innovators is having the RIGHT data, not the MOST data. The author of this article expands on three important questions to ask when drilling down to the right data. What decisions drive waste in your business? Which decisions could you automate to reduce waste? What data would you need to do so?

Latest Tools and Technology for Marketing Organizations

Harvard Business Review considers analytics, conversion optimization, email, search engine marketing, remarketing, mobile, and marketing automation technologies to be key for today’s marketer. Their research shows that the adoption rate of marketing technology is very low, which is a wasted opportunity considering the reported rapid and significant ROI from adopting such tools.

With about 3,500 marketing tools available today, deciding what to make use of can be confusing and scary due to the potential expense and challenges associated with integrating these systems. However, marketing leaders should remember that technology creates an opportunity to create more relevant engaging customer experiences than your rivals. Technology is a significant investment, so it should follow a structured, not piecemeal investment approach.

The senior hybrid Chief Marketing Technologist role is growing in popularity, and this role helps make sense of the huge influx of marketing technology for your business. Every aspect of marketing is affected by technology, and companies with a Chief Marketing Technologist typically spend almost twice as much on marketing innovations. This role is important for filling in gaps related to strategy, creativity, and technology.

This article defines a marketing technology stack as a group of technology-based tools that marketers use to efficiently and effectively execute marketing activities across a number of channels. This helps marketers get the right message in front of the right customers at the right time. When building out a marketing technology stack, there are a set of foundational technologies marketers should always consider, and companies need a team in place to handle the different tools involved.

Customers provide digital signals to companies regarding what they want out of their customer experience, but companies often spend too much time focusing on isolated data. Instead, they should develop a Customer Data Platform (CDP). This allows marketers to scale data-driven customer interactions in real-time. This concept is becoming the industry standard, with small but growing platforms that will shape the category. Today’s customer expects this kind of one-to-one marketing.

When increasing growth and marketing return on investment (MROI), there are a lot of options that should all be considered and drawn from as they fit for your business. Although there’s no need to stick to a single style, a strategy anchor should be at the core of this plan based on strategic return, economic value, and payback window. Organizations should evaluate the pros and cons of the primary tools available and integrate them together for the highest return.

Machine learning techniques can be used to solve many diverse problems. For the marketer, machine learning can find pieces of predictive knowledge in masses of structured and unstructured data. The author believes that four major areas of the marketing and big data ecosystem will be impacted by machine learning in 2017: automated data visualization, content analysis, incremental machine learning techniques, and an acceleration of growth and skills.

Conversions are still relatively low compared to the ever-increasing ad spending. Account-based intelligence (ABI) is a growing approach that helps to bridge the sales and marketing teams by aligning them towards common goals. ABI goes beyond improving conversion rates by highlighting the contextual nature of data.

Marketers need a new approach to tracking what is working and what is not for each step of the customer’s journey, with customer expectations getting more and more demanding. There are more devices and channels than ever to appeal to the best customer experience, but this means more work for marketers. It’s crucial when measuring this data to keep track of what, how, and why.

Black Ink ROI surveyed a range of organizations headquartered in the United States, in December 2015. From this study, it was shown that most companies were sales-driven or customer-driven, but marketing-driven ranked last. Many marketing barriers include using the right tools, how to invest, and what the budget’s focus should be.

How Marketing Organizations are Changing

McKinsey highlights the prerequisites for a marketing organization to work: clear sense of goals, sponsorship of senior marketing leaders, and bringing together an efficient team. Guidelines for the structure of the war-room team and its responsibilities are laid out and should be established by every organization, but it’s most important for the entire marketing organization to run smoothly together.

This research reveals that CMOs believe their greatest struggles involve organizational silos, ownership issues, lack of technology, and the impact of increased digital efforts. Greater agility from marketers when dealing with the whole organization is in demand. Technology, analytics, innovation, and brand safety are at your fingertips but require more dedication to be used effectively.

Technology is of the utmost importance for marketers to meet consumer expectations, and these expectations are increasingly demanding near-real-time interactions. To be used effectively, technology requires a new Marketing Operating Model. The author outlines that an effective Marketing Operating Model is made up of integrated consumer data, decision making, and distribution platforms.

There are five key elements in today’s marketing world that are essential to success in this role: firsthand insights, integrated brand experiences, breakthrough content, experiments for ROI, and building trust. Likewise, the media has to interact with marketers in new ways as well. To avoid getting caught in the middle, agencies will have to redefine their roles.

New marketing tools require updated marketing structures and approaches, and this is signaled by a shift from push to pull marketing. New platforms like web, mobile, and digital require new departments, which can slow down already established processes. However, there are changes that can be made to assure high-functionality for your organization in the digital age.

Marketing is no longer just an art but also a science, and today’s marketer must be proficient in a range of analytical skills. There are four specific new roles that have developed and are essential for a successful organization: digital marketing, content marketing, marketing science, and customer experience.

Data is essential for creating the best customer experience, but this requires the data to be shared and understood across the whole organization. It is not useful if it is not actionable. The three steps of turning these insights into actions are organizing, visualizing, and sharing. Simplified, real-time data is the most important for making relevant decisions.

The time of marketing being a final step of merely pushing products is over. With the internet came a revolution of touch point complexity, a growth of data, and a renewed importance of the customer experience. All of this changed behaviors, organization, and required skills that put marketing at the forefront of business strategies.

McKinsey outlines six critical, parallel shifts that combine to make digitization more manageable and predictable in a world that requires this integration. Consistency is key, and it starts with establishing your story. Furthermore, you have to sequence your tech transformation, build talent, create a plan to guide the organization, and track all of your efforts to see what is working and what is not.

Nine successful companies share the practices that have generated their success and helped them keep customers. For instance, Dollar Shave Club believes in a “know thy customer” approach while StumbleUpon follows a “unite internally to improve externally” foundation. Most of these companies keep a customer-centric ideology.

With the number of mediums and instant-gratification on the rise, it often feels like marketing has left a golden age and plummeted into a dark age where material has to fight to be seen. However, it is possible that we are entering a Marketing Renaissance thanks to the same technology that initiated this decline. Personalization is becoming more possible, which drives a renewed focus on humans. Marketers can make up for lost power through personalization.

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